My name is Tony Mann. I am not an expert chef. I’m not a chef at all. Right now, I own and operate a small remodeling business. I’ve never been passionate about construction. I’ve done everything from being a laborer on fire and flood renovations, and worked my way up to managing 14 million dollar commercial jobsites. I’ve just never found a spot where I truly belong. Nothing like what I feel when I’m cooking.
I learned to cook the way that most kids growing up in the 90s did, by helping mom prepare the classic American cuisine….Hamburger Helper. Obviously, she cooked more than this, but it’s the one that stands out most in my memories. Learning how to measure ingredients and how to make adjustments for doubling recipes as my brother and I began to eat our bodyweight in food. I always enjoyed cooking, but it really didn’t hit me just how much I enjoyed it, until I got my hands on my first barbecue smoker.
It’s really an odd story. Miraculous, you might say. One Christmas, probably when I was 14 or 15 years old, my uncle bought a smoker for my dad. It was a vertical, barrel style, charcoal smoker with the dome-shaped lid. When I say that this was “miraculous”, I mean it. I don’t remember my uncle EVER buying gifts for my parents (maybe he did, but this is the only one that I remember), let alone a COOKING gift for my dad. My dad was NOT the cooking type. Most of my memories of him cooking, were of his burnt toast, as he would scrape away the black exterior into the sink before slathering on some kind of topping. Like, why he would never simply adjust the time setting on the toaster, I will never know. Anyway, this gift from my uncle was SO unusual and, as expected, it never left the box. Well, one day, I got interested and decided that this neglected gift was going to be mine. So, I set it up and began experimenting.
Over the next couple of years, I cooked many chewy and undercooked pieces of meat, tried many different dry rub recipes, and nearly set my friends deck on fire. I remember soaking chunks of wood in water so that I could get that really visible white, billowing smoke! Many lessons were learned during this time. That smoker eventually started to rust away, so I “upgraded” to a vertical cabinet style propane smoker. My skills began to improve. Eventually, I decided to build my own barbecue pit. After one failed attempt, I finally built one that was very good at cooking. It was an offset horizontal smoker, meaning that there was a firebox on one end, a cooking chamber in the middle, and a smokestack on the opposite end. I built it out of an old fuel oil tank that was laying in the weeds on my family’s farm and I put it on a little trailer that my brother-in-law salvaged from the company that he worked for at the time. All of my experiments were starting to pay off. Then I discovered Aaron Franklin.
Up until this point, all of my barbecue resembled some KCBS competition science experiment…..lots of sugary dry rubs, sweet sauces, apple juice injections, and all sorts of other attempts at infusing flavor. Once I started watching Aaron Franklin videos on YouTube, I discovered that you don’t need all of these crazy ingredients to make great food that people actually enjoy eating. Kosher salt and coarse ground black pepper were making the most famous briskets in the world! So, I started cooking my barbecue the same way and fell in love with it.
I began cooking and selling barbecue at local farmers markets, catering some small events and a wedding or two, and participated in a couple small competitions (bringing home some trophies from all of them). I began buying every cookbook that I could find, which led me to discovering Francis Mallmann. This was my next big discovery….cooking over live fire. There is absolutely no better way to cook in my opinion. Even a simple hamburger patty is so much better of the smoking embers of a fire.
After some time of getting really serious about cooking, work finally got in the way. I eventually found myself in a position where I was required to travel a lot for my job as a construction superintendent. This consumed most of my summers and didn’t allow me much time to cook at home. However, I did find ways to explore food while I was on the road. Every area that I worked, I would spend hours researching the area and the route that I would travel on Google Maps and Yelp, to find any good restaurant, barbecue joint, or gourmet grocery. So, while I was not actively cooking, I was still discovering new flavors and techniques.
Like I said in the beginning, I’m not a chef. I’m just a guy who likes to cook and to learn. So, this blog is not so much me being an “expert”, as much as it is a journal of my learning process. I want to hone my skills, learn new ways of cooking, meet new people, continue to travel and discover new ingredients, and just enjoy life a little more. So, follow along while I learn and grow, and I will try to share the lessons that I learn along the way.
