The New Yorker:

A lazy person’s guide to tackling smoked meats, veggies, and pretty much everything else.

By Helen Rosner

When I was growing up in Chicago, my father and I had a semi-annual ritual: pick up a slab and a half of sticky baby-back ribs from our favorite South Side barbecue spot, sneak their drippy Styrofoam containers into our ostensibly kosher-keeping home, then devour them while watching James Bond movies on basic cable. Those particular ribs, sugar-sweet and overcooked, were not the type of thing that might win awards or send a food critic into raptures, but they awakened something primal in me. I wanted to eat barbecue, and later, when I learned to cook, I wanted to make it, too.

To make proper barbecue, of course, you need to smoke the meat, and buying a smoker always seemed too intimidating, too single-purpose, too much of a commitment. Instead, I experimented over the years with various faddish methods of at-home rib-making: low-and-slow in the oven, boiled then broiled, or tucked next to a foil packet of wood chips on a mini Weber grill. The methods were maddeningly vague, the results never quite right. Ideal barbecued ribs—somehow both melting and flaky, not so much kissed by smoke as lovingly made out with—demand the sort of airflow a standard kitchen oven can never offer, and a level of smoke control that the chips-on-a-grill method doesn’t readily allow. I operated under the belief that real smoking was not a matter for hobbyists and dilettantes. It was for the obsessives, the semi-pros. Then, in the early months of the pandemic, I spent a few weeks at my uncle’s house in the Hudson Valley. He mentioned that a friend had recently given him a smoker as a gift, and that I was welcome to play around with it. Maybe it was beginner’s luck, but on my very first try I produced two glorious full slabs of ribs, sweet and meaty and so tender they hardly needed cutting, with all the flavor I’d been looking for. It was, dare I say it, actually sort of easy.

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