The Stall

At some point during the long, slow cooking of a bbq brisket in our soul food kitchen, the brisket stalls. It’s a known phenomenon. The internal temperature just stops increasing. Right about 179 F or 82 C. If you’re not expecting this, or even if you are but have this whole elaborate schedule of cooking planned out, panic ensues. It’s OK. You breathe deeply, pull the brisket out of the oven, wrap it in pink butcher paper, and place it back in the oven. Eventually, the meat continues its trajectory upward. The stall, as it is called, is simply owing to the side of brisket “sweating,” with the natural condensation keeping the meat cooler than you want it. The stall, however, eventually passes.

Like most things involved in our slow-cook kitchen, I see deeper significances here. A metaphor, if you will. So, for instance, I know that no matter how busy I am with orders over the course of the month, at some point, orders slack off. It usually happens about 2/3 of the way through each month, which is a bit weird, since the brisket stall also occurs about 2/3 of the way through a cook. And yes, a bit of panic ensues. What the fuck am I going to do?

Well, for starters, not panic. Then there’s the inevitable work that begs to be done during lull times, keeping one’s hands busy. About this time, I usually have fresh sauces to make or new sauces to try out or both. This last time, I played with both an adobo sauce, a recipe from a dear friend, that I parlayed into a baked tofu dish with vegan cheese. And I also made a kick-ass chipotle sauce for the first time, slow-coking the dried peppers for a few hours in a ketchup and vinegar mix. The result: Super spicy. So spicy, I am not sure what I will use it for.

So I always have in the back of my mind this thought: What if some topnotch chef I admire, someone like Thomas Keller, were to pop into my kitchen suddenly? What would he/she say? And so part of my strategy during a stall is to make sure the kitchen is pristine. Idle hands and all of that. Basically, if the truth be told, these downtimes are really not so much downtimes, as a moment to wrap my small, insignificant world up in a piece of pink butcher paper and move forward.