Page 17 - Barbecue News Magazine September 2021

Meathead, AmazingRibs.com
The Stall. The Zone. The Plateau. It has many names and has freaked out many a would-be pitmaster. You get a big hunk of meat, like a pork shoulder or a beef brisket (two of the best meats for low-
and-slow smoke roasting)
and put it on the smoker
with dreams of succu-
lence and glory dancing
in your head. You insert a
digital thermometer
probe in the meat and an-
other in the smoker next
to the meat, stabilize the
smoker at about 225°F,
and go cut the lawn. Then
you take a nap. The meat
temperature rises steadily
for a couple of hours but
then, to your chagrin, it
stops. It stalls for four or
more hours, barely rising
a notch. Sometimes it
even drops a few degrees. You tap on the thermometer. You check the batteries. Meanwhile, the guests are arriving, and the meat is nowhere near the 203°F mark at which it is most tender and luscious. Your mate is tapping a foot sternly, and you’re pulling your hair out.
What The Heck Is Happening?
Pitmasters long believed that the stall is caused by colla- gen in the meat converting to gelatin. Others speculated that the stall is caused by fat rendering. Still others think it is caused by protein denaturing. In 2010, the Amazin- gRibs.com science advisor, Professor Greg Blonder of Boston University, set out to determine the cause of the stall. First he did some calculations that proved there isn’t enough connective tissue to suck up all the energy neces- sary to prevent a large hunk of meat from increasing in temperature. He then cooked a large lump of pure fat. No stall. Next he cooked a sponge saturated with water. It
climbed at about the same rate as the fat for the first hour to about 140°F, and then it put on the brakes. In fact, it even went down in temperature! When it dried out after
more than 4 hours, it took off again.
He repeated his tests, tried some others, did more calculations, and the conclusion was in- escapable: The barbecue stall is caused by evapo- rative cooling. The meat, which is about 75% water, is sweating, and as the moisture evaporates it cools the meat just like sweat cools you while you are cutting the lawn on a hot day.
In 2011, Nathan Myhrvold, author of the revolutionary cookbook Modernist Cuisine, published the results of an experiment. He put two
halves of a brisket in a convection oven at about 190°F with
SEPTEMBER 2021
BarbecueNews.com - 17
THE BARBECUE STALL EXPLAINED AND WAYS TO
B E AT I T