For cooks who love a good weekend project, smoking and slow-cooking big hunks of meat like beef brisket, spare ribs and pork shoulder can be an ideal summertime diversion.

But for those who’ve never dipped their toes into cooking real barbecue, understand that it takes more time, finesse and know-how than you might imagine. Area barbecue experts, like Pliny Reynolds, co-owner of Terlingua, attest that low-and-slow Southern-style barbecue – as opposed to quickly grilling smaller cuts of meat – is not for the half-hearted.

“One of the reasons we thought this business could be successful is because barbecue is difficult and it’s a long process, and we feel like we do a really good job at it,” Reynolds said. “We’re kind of psycho about it. But it really does take a lot of care and attention. Barbecue is trial and error and repetition. There’s no substitute – no book, YouTube video or recipe – that can replace that kind of experience.”

Reynolds learned his craft during the nine years he and his wife and Terlingua co-owner Melanie Kratovil lived in Austin, Texas. His own learning curve was full of trial, error and crushing setbacks – like the time he’d finished his first really good brisket that he was about to take to a friend’s party.

“I had this thing wrapped and finished on my counter, and it was finger tender,” Reynolds recalled. “I knew this was the best one I’d ever made. I went to take a shower and came back, and my dog had ripped through half of it. It was heartbreaking.”

Good home-cooked barbecue may come from experience, but you have to start somewhere. And you don’t need special equipment like a smoker. If you have a charcoal grill, an oven thermometer and a digital meat thermometer, you can make it work following the steps we give below.

It’s time-consuming, but a highly rewarding process. Reynolds and Noble Barbecue managers Matt King and Kelsey O’Connor recently shared their collective barbecue knowledge with us to help steer novice home barbecue cooks toward success.

“Don’t be afraid to experiment,” O’Connor said. “Try something, and maybe it’s not going to be great, but then you can go back and adjust it. The more you do it, the easier it will become, and the whole process will become a little quicker because you’ll know what to look for.”

Choose your meat: Ribs, pork shoulder for pulled pork and beef brisket are among the most traditional barbecued proteins, as they’re all tough cuts that need low heat for hours to reach peak tenderness. Brisket is the top seller at both Terlingua and Noble. Reynolds was cooking almost 200 pounds of brisket on the Wednesday we met with him.

But whole brisket (weighing anywhere from 8 to 16 pounds) may not be the ideal meat for barbecue beginners. Whole brisket comprises a thicker, fattier point cut and a leaner, thinner flat cut, overlapping muscles that cook at different rates, making it a little tricky. But the real issue is time: It can take 12 hours or longer to barbecue a brisket to fork-tender succulence.

For novices looking to start with less of a time commitment, Reynolds, King and O’Connor agree that a rack of ribs or a bone-in pork shoulder (sometimes called a pork butt) are the way to go. Reynolds notes that St. Louis-style spare ribs – which cook in four to five hours at Terlingua – are preferable to baby back ribs because they’re a little fattier and the meat is more evenly dispersed on the bones.

If you decide to give brisket a whirl, Reynolds strongly recommends buying prime brisket, the most marbled grade of beef, which they use at Terlingua exclusively.

“You’ll have much more success with prime,” he said. “If you’re going to spend the time and effort to make something delicious, you should step up and pay for the good stuff. That’s where you’re going to get your fat and flavor. It’s a far superior product.”

Trim and season: You’ll need to trim the fat cap off a brisket down to about a 1/4-inch layer of fat, which will adequately insulate and self-baste the meat as it cooks. Trim away any thin or pointed edges that will dry out and possibly burn during the long cook.

Store-bought spare ribs may sometimes have the membrane on the back of the rack already removed. But if not, you’ll want to take it off yourself, because it can prevent flavorings from penetrating the meat and can also become rubbery after cooking.

Reynolds advises using a knife to cut lengthwise along the membrane, down the middle of the rack. Then use a dull knife or an oyster knife to pry up underneath the cut area of the membrane so that it starts to loosen from the bone. Use a towel to grip the loosened membrane, pull it off as cleanly as possible, and discard.

For pork shoulder, King suggested scoring the meat’s fat cap so that it renders more readily and allows seasonings to reach down into the meat.

Once you’ve trimmed your meat, season it up to a day before cooking so the salt and spices work as a dry brine and penetrate the interior. For briskets, Reynolds and King recommend keeping it simple, just kosher salt, coarsely ground pepper and maybe a little granulated garlic.

Take care not to use a lot of sugar in whatever meat rub you choose, because it could burn during the long cook time. Likewise, if you plan to use thick, sweet barbecue sauces, apply them only during the last hour or so of cooking.

Build a fire: The choice of fire fuel is as important as the choice of meat. Barbecue experts insist on using either lump hardwood charcoal or actual hardwood logs for the fire – chemical additive-laden charcoal briquettes are out of the question, as is lighter fluid, both of which can give the food nasty off-flavors.

But in addition to the base fire, you’ll need wood chips or chunks – these supply the bulk of the smoky flavor – to add to the fire throughout the process. Find bags of them at hardware stores and supermarkets. The kind you choose depends on your taste and desired outcome, though hardwoods like oak, hickory and mesquite work well with both beef and pork.

Terlingua uses a local oak, while Noble uses a blend of local hardwoods, including oak, maple, birch and cherry. “The smoke gets really floral with the mix,” O’Connor said. “It smells like a Maine campfire.”

To make the cooking process truly low and slow, you’ll need to set up your charcoal grill for indirect heat. (Gas grills won’t produce the heat convection or smoke needed for authentic barbecue.) This means to pile your coals on one side of the grill so that the food can rest on the grill rack above on the opposite, relatively cooler side.

O’Connor and King aim for the fire to be no hotter than 225 degrees at Noble. “Lower temperature takes longer, but it gives you a more tender and juicy product,” King said. The target fire temp at Terlingua is slightly hotter, at 275 degrees, “because 225 degrees takes forever, and we don’t see a massive quality difference in the outcome,” Reynolds explained.

While temps from 225 to 275 degrees will produce the desired barbecue results, a fire that gets any hotter risks tightening and drying out the meat muscles. Big tough cuts need low, even temperatures so the connective tissues and collagen have time to adequately break down before the meat is fully cooked.

If your grill isn’t equipped with a thermometer in the lid, you’ll want an oven thermometer on hand so you can check the temperature through the lid vent. As far as the vents on the lid and bottom of the grill go, the wider open you leave them, the hotter and faster the fire burns, so keep them only slightly open to maintain consistently low heat, adjusting as needed during the process.

Cue the smoke: The Noble team recommends adding water-soaked wood chips or chunks to the coal bed because the wet wood produces more smoke. Have plenty on hand to add to the coals throughout the cook time.

Reynolds prefers using dry wood chunks because he feels there’s less chance of over-smoking the meat and giving it an acrid flavor. “The meat is going to get smoke, because you’re cooking with wood,” he said. “You just don’t want the smoke to be constantly billowing out of the vents.”

Get cooking: Set your meat, fatty side up, on the grill rack on the opposite side of the hot coals below. Cover the grill and let the meat cook undisturbed for a while so that the heat and smoke can build and work their magic on the meat.

King and O’Connor check their meat about once an hour; Reynolds may go four hours or more before opening his smoker.

“The old saying is, ‘If you’re looking, you’re not cooking,'” Reynolds said, noting that – much like opening an oven door – the grill temperature will drop as much as 50 degrees each time you open the lid. “Then it takes about another 15 minutes to get back up to temp. If you do that four times, you’ve added another hour to your day.”

King and O’Connor fill a spray bottle with a diluted mixture of cider vinegar and bourbon to spritz their meats now and then during the first few hours of cooking. Reynolds spritzes with a diluted blend of cider vinegar and agave. Apart from a flavor baste, the spritzing helps keep the surface of the meat moist in the early stages.

Develop the bark: As you check the progress of your meat in the first few hours, you’ll notice the exterior growing darker, edging from golden to brown to deep mahogany. This is the bark, what barbecue aficionados call the intensely flavorful exterior crust of barbecue.

Reynolds explained that as the meat cooks, tiny droplets of moisture cover its exterior. As the smoke flows over the surface of the meat, the moisture evaporates and complex chemical reactions between the heat, smoke, seasonings and meat cause the crust to form.

Ideally, the bark layer will look blackened but not be charred or burned tasting, with a crusty though still somewhat moist texture. The bark will form and set before the meat finishes cooking, usually when the internal temperature is somewhere between 155 and 170 degrees.

Around this point, a curious phenomenon known to pit masters as “The Stall” occurs.

Wrap to beat “The Stall”: In barbecue, “The Stall” refers to when the meat’s internal temperature, rising steadily for the first few hours of cooking, suddenly seems to plateau anywhere between 150 and 170 degrees. Reynolds said this is a result of the airflow in the smoker or grill continually evaporating the moisture from the surface of the meat, keeping its temperature in check. This inevitable phase can keep the meat’s internal temperature from rising significantly again for an hour or longer.

Luckily, the fix is easy. Assuming the bark has fully formed, remove the meat from the grill, wrap it in heavy-duty butcher paper or foil (or both, as they do at Noble) and return it to the rack. The covering seals in the meat’s moisture so it can’t evaporate, which soon causes its internal temperature to rise the rest of the way to doneness.

Some barbecue purists refer to the wrapping method as the “Texas crutch,” as though it’s an unfair shortcut. But as Reynolds and King point out, it’s simply a smart technique that not only accelerates the meat through the stall, but also helps ensure the finished ‘cue will be tender and juicy in the last hours of cooking. Meat that’s barbecued to doneness without being wrapped requires much more attention and finesse to keep it from drying out, and the additional spray basting it needs could make the bark soggy.

Pull and rest: Reynolds said barbecue newbies are likely to pull their meat from the heat too soon simply out of impatience. “Because they’ve been cooking for hours, they think it’s got to be ready by now,” he said.

Once wrapped, ribs and pork shoulder may take another couple of hours to finish cooking, maybe five or more additional hours for wrapped brisket. The first test for doneness is temperature. King and O’Connor take their briskets to between 195 and 200 degrees, and their pork shoulders to 190 degrees.

Rib meat is often too shallow on the bone to get a reliably accurate reading, so Reynolds suggests wiggling a bone in the center of the rack to test doneness. “You want your ribs to have a little bit of bite,” he said. “If you lift (a rib) up and the bone comes right out, it’s overdone. Give a middle bone a little twist, and if it feels like it’s starting to break away from the meat, it’s good to go. If it feels firm and lodged, it needs more time.”

Reynolds relies on tactile cues for meats like brisket, too, pressing the outside of the beef to judge its readiness. “There are target temperature numbers, but every brisket is different,” he said. “It might be done at 195 degrees, or it might be done at 205 degrees. But it’s really about the feel of it, how tight or loose the meat is. It’s a muscle. You can really tell if it’s not ready and the collagen hasn’t broken down. If it’s not touch-tender, it’s not done. Put the lid down and back away.”

Reynolds also said with larger cuts like brisket, it’s important to think “glacially” in terms of cook time. “Leaving it on for another 15 minutes isn’t going to do it. If it’s not done, check it in 45 minutes or an hour,” he said.

Once you’ve pulled your meat from the smoker or grill, let it rest at room temperature. Ribs should rest at least 20 minutes, while large pork butts and briskets can rest for an hour or more. Slicing unrested barbecue causes the juices to pour out, leaving the meat dry. The rest time allows the hot juices to cool slightly and settle into the meat.

Brown Sugar-Ancho BBQ Rub

Terlingua co-owner Pliny Reynolds recommends this spice rub for barbecued pork dishes like spare ribs or pulled pork shoulder. Ancho powder is a relatively mild chile powder made from dried poblano chiles.

Yield: About 1½ cups

1/2 cup ancho chile powder

1/4 cup brown sugar

1/4 cup ground cumin

1/4 cup coarsely ground pepper

2 tablespoons kosher salt

1 ½ tablespoons garlic powder

Combine all the ingredients in a medium bowl. Store any unused portion in an airtight jar or sealed plastic bag for up to six months.

SPG Rub

Terlingua’s all-purpose salt-pepper-garlic rub (hence the name) is the mix they apply to their briskets. Granulated garlic is coarser than garlic powder, so use half as much powder if you plan to use it as a substitute for granulated.

Yield: About 2 cups

1 ¾ cups coarsely ground black pepper

1 cup kosher salt

5 tablespoons granulated garlic

Combine all the ingredients in a medium bowl. Store any unused portion in an airtight jar or sealed plastic bag for up to six months.

BBQ Rub

Terlingua uses Cafe Caribe ground espresso, but other ground espressos will work in this rub. Be sure to use Mexican oregano, which has citrus and anise notes, rather than Italian oregano.

Yield: About 4 2/3 cups

1½ cups Cafe Caribe ground espresso

1 cup brown sugar

3/4 cup coarsely ground black pepper

2/3 cup kosher salt

2 tablespoons ground coriander

2 tablespoons paprika

2 tablespoons garlic powder

2 tablespoons onion powder

2 tablespoons Mexican oregano

1 tablespoon ground cumin

3/4 teaspoon cayenne

Combine all the ingredients in a medium bowl. Store any unused portion in an airtight jar or sealed plastic bag for up to six months.

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