Clean It Up

Fifty percent of cooking is cleaning.  You made a mess, clean it up...  This is especially true when you are making smoked meats.  A Smoker makes an amazing mess.  First you are burning wood, which has all sorts of compounds within it, and some are oils.  Then, you are cooking meat, another source of oil, fat.  This stuff gets all over everything you have, and you have to clean it off when you are done.  Well, OK, I can do that, but the space that I have to do that is not adequate.  My sink is about half the size that I need to clean the grates from the smoker.  So, whatzit I do?  You need a portable sink...  A Bus Tub...

A Bus Tub is something you can find in any restaurant.  Usually there is a "Busboy" that cleans off the tables after customers leave, and he uses a Bus Tub, on a Bus Cart to stow the dishes, leftover food, and any other mess that is left before leaving the table ready for the next customer.  These "Bus Tubs" are literally a portable sink.  It's a large, plastic bucket that can hold water for some sort of culinary duty.  For me it is a sink that is larger than my kitchen sink.  I got the biggest one I could find, in the color black for Grill Service, and it fits the grates from my Smoker perfectly, both the food grates, and the fire grates.  Amazing luck, LOL!

With my kitchen sink the grates only fit diagonally in the sink, and I can only soak them one half at a time.  I wanted to submerge all the grates simultaneously, and let them sit for an extended period of time to dissolve all of the grungy stuff that builds up on them during the smoking process.  With the Bus Tub, all of the grates can be submerged simultaneously, and this helps to get them really, really clean for the next cooking process.

No one wants the crud from a week ago on their barbeque this week, LOL!  With my previous smoker I would literally burn off the old crud by bathing the cooking grates in fire to immoliate the crud, and then scrap off the residue with a wire brush.  Well, OK, that works, but it literally destroys the grates over time.

With my new Oklahoma Joe's Smoker there are nicely enameled cooking grates that they recommend washing, rather than the purification by fire process.  So, OK, I agree, and being in the Food Service Business makes a lot of sense to me.  We want a nice clean place to put the fresh meat when we go to smoke it...

So, it's a process...  Make some food, clean the kitchen.  Make some more food, clean the kitchen again.  Any process in the kitchen requires the "Clean the Kitchen again" subroutine.  Sometimes we do the "Clean the Kitchen again" subroutine just as maintenance, even though we didn't make anything.  LOL!  Clean up that Mess!