We discovered the preparation of kālua while in Hawaii back in November 2008. Kālua is an in ground slow cooking technique. Mexico has a similar technique called barbacoa. Basically:

• Dig a pit about three feet deep
• Start a hardwood fire in it
• Fill the pit with rocks so that the rocks get good and hot
• Take an animal
• Wrap it tightly in leaves, like banana or palm leaves
• Throw it in the pit
• Cover the pit with damp earth
• Wait overnight while the beast very slowly cooks
• Stuff yourself silly

While there are variations, this appears to be the basic approach taken by some large families for Thanksgiving. Obviously, digging a pit in an urban setting isn't usually workable, particularly if you live in a high-rise condo. What I'm going to try to do with this page is to work out the basic changes that occur in the food throughout the cooking process and make it so that the food not only has the same taste as kālua, but also the texture. So far there are some pretty obvious things going on:

• The food has an initial higher temperature cook. While this isn't a sear, the meat probably browns in the first hour.
• The food cooks for a long time, so lots of gelatin should form. It will need to be pretty fatty, because the seal from the leaves isn't going to perfect, and shouldn't be.
• The islands have clay in the soil, which can lend flavour. Some salts even have clay mixed in to add complexity.
• Obviously, smoke is involved here. The leaves, the wood, the length of the cooking. Something is going to be tasty.
• Unlike good old down home bar-b-que, which otherwise is similar to most of the above, The meat is underground. That means three other things are going on:
  • There's less oxygen during cooking, so the chemical changes during heating are different than a regular smoking process;
  • The meat is being squeezed (under physical pressure) while it's also being heated; and
  • The meat is released from the constant pressure before it's served (resting).

So far so good. And it's really good if you've had it. What I'm trying to figure out is exactly what those extra steps are doing to the meat. More to come as experiments proceed.

Experiment 1

Here's what I decided as a first experiment:

1. I picked up a beef brisket, around 2 Kg (4.4 lbs), and a new 10" cast iron frying pan the same size as my existing one.
2. 1/2 teaspoon of kosher salt was sprinkled on both sides of the brisket.
3. I let the brisket come up to room temperature.
4. I then hot smoked the brisket for 10 minutes in Alderwood using a stove-top smoker.
5. While that was going on, I did a coarse grind of 1/2 teaspoon of whole juniper berries and 1 teaspoon of whole black pepper, and 1/2 teaspoon of whole mustard seed. Once ground, I added 1 teaspoon of clay salt from Brittany. This was rubbed all over the brisket. I'm not sure of the amounts, but that's what experiments are for.
6. The meat was then set in the fridge with the rub for 3 hours.
7. Making sure both cast iron pans were well seasoned, I preheated the oven to 350 degrees.
8. I wrapped the meat in two layers of large collard green leaves and then two tight outside layers of parchment paper.  No, I'm not kidding about the collard greens. That's all I could find today locally that would wrap the meat.
9. Now we're at the fun part. I put the package between the two frying pans, and put it in the oven for 15 minutes, followed by an hour at 300. So far, I can't smell anything from the package, which either means I've got a decent seal on the meat, or the oven isn't working. More to come tomorrow, after another 8 hours of roasting at 225. If it works, there will be pictures.

At 1.5 hours into the bake, my mouth is watering. The scent of the cooking meat is so incredible that I can hardly wait for tomorrow.

There's now 6:45 left and the brisket is soft as butter. Did I mention that the fat needs to be on the top? I hope I remembered to do that. In any event, I'm really having a hard time not attacking the brisket right now. It smells absolutely amazing.

I couldn't wait. It's now 6:30 left, and I poked my nose (figuratively) into the bake. Here's what I found. The meat is consistently 200 degrees right through. The juices have been pressed out of the meat and are caught inside the paper, but outside the leaves. The flavour is pretty darn close to the target already, but the meat is dry. This is completely expected and a good thing at present. I'm hoping that it will all get absorbed when the meat is resting. There's almost a cup of liquid already. It's off to bed with me now.

It's now 2 in the morning, and while I'm jet-lagged, I feel like tomorrow is Christmas morning, and I have a present of roast meat waiting to be opened. I can't sleep. This must be a labour of love.

Good morning. I missed the timer by an hour, so it was in at 225 for 9 hours. I unwrapped the meat, discarded the collard greens - not going to be used next time. They're pretty bitter right now. I expected that, but finding taro or banana leaves on short notice is not easy. Some of the liquid obviously evaporated, but the meat is now resting in it. I removed the top pan, paper, and leaves. The meat is now in the bottom pan, in about 1/4" inch of the liquid, with a sheet of aluminum foil and a cover on top to keep it air tight while resting. Remarkably, there's virtually no fat in the liquid. It seems to already have been absorbed. I'm going to let it rest for an hour. Tasting the meat is a different story and I'm not that happy with where it is right now. The smokiness has virtually disappeared as has the flavour I told you about at the 6:45 point. The collard greens are definitely dominant - yuck. I'm going back to bed while this thing rests.

After an hour of resting, something is not quite right. The meat absorbed a bit of the liquid but nowhere near enough, so it's a bit on the dry side. I think the beef brisket is just too lean to be used for this recipe. The collard greens added a bit to much bitterness and overpowered the smoke and seasoning. It's definitely edible (there's a euphemism) and tasty, but not what I was going for. I'm going to rethink this one and try again with a different cut and different leaves. I'm also thinking of keeping the cooking at 300 but changing the time from 10 hours to 3 hours. The compression did make a difference on the behaviour of the meat, but the beef fibres weren't able to recover after such a long baking. I did find it interesting that there wasn't as much gelatin formation as I was expecting. What is definitely a good thing for the recipe is that there wasn't any external fat after resting. This is a good sign that the meat did pull it all back in, it just didn't pull in the liquid from the leaves.

I think I tasted a little early. After removing it from the pan, I let it chill in the fridge for about 4 hours in the remaining liquid. The bitterness from the collards mellowed substantially and the other flavours came out again. There wasn't quite enough smokiness to the meat, and on the next try I'll either go with 15 minutes of smoking or add some liquid smoke during the bake. Everyone here seemed to like it a whole lot, including Kira. I have just a tiny bit of leftovers for later. I can't wait for experiment 2. Aloha!

Confession time: Remember when I took the meat out and let it rest? Well, I just dumped the paper and collard greens in the sink. Here's an interesting discovery: The collard greens appear to have absorbed virtually all of the fat that came off the meat. While it wasn't good for this recipe there are interesting possibilities for other ones. If collards can suck unwanted fat away, and add anti-oxidants the way some dark green vegetables do, they may be really important. We just don't want them sucking wanted and in this case needed fat away.

Conclusion

The smokiness wasn't intense enough, and the meat was a little on the dry side. On the up-side, everyone like it a lot (plate cleaning liked it), and the seasoning balance was pretty good. Obviously beef is not going to taste like pork, but we can try. For the next experiment, I'm planning on:

• Increasing the smoke.
• Trying a fattier cut of meat.
• Using a more neutral leaf, like banana.
• Tying the pans together to increase the pressure using butchers cord.
• Use a little more clay salt instead of (or in addition to) kosher salt.
• Possibly toss in some chicken or turkey bacon.

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