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Gautama Siddharta said,

Let yourself be open and life will be easier. A spoon of salt in a glass of water makes the water undrinkable. A spoon of salt in a lake is almost unnoticed.

Salt. Salt is the key to good smoking, and Siddharta could have just as easily framed his analogy in terms of the salt bath for smoked meats (though it probably wouldn’t have read as well).

We added what we thought was enough salt. We did a taste-test of the water, and it seemed to be about as briny as the first time, when Dziadek, the smoking expert, was still here.

Apparently we got it wrong, for while the second batch looks good,

the taste just wasn’t there.

Can that which is unsavory be eaten without salt?
or is there any taste in the white of an egg?

Apparently not.

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We bought an entire pork loin for Saturday smoking. When you buy it in this quantity, the price is almost absurd.

Twenty-five pounds of meat for less than $60. “If I broke this apart for you,” the butcher said, “It would cost you three times as much.”

An hour of cutting gave us two whole deboned loins (I don’t know what you’d call that), two baby back ribs, and six ZipLock bags of soup bones and left-overs (only five shown below).

Saturday morning, I’m hoping to have a more successful smoking session than our first. While the end product was good, the smoke was too hot, producing less-than-perfect meat. Since I only have oak for smoking, and it burns really hot, I’ll be soaking some planks in water to add some smoke and to cool it down a bit.

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