Alfred Bought a Smoker
Chef Alfred McClendon smokes everything from proteins to desserts at Biggerstaff Brewing Company.
Illustration: Bashel Lubarsky
Alfred bought a smoker. But before he bought a smoker, he was an avid backyard barbecuer in culinary school. Upon executing a tea-brined smoked duck in class one day, Chef Alfred McClendon noticed the distinct difference between smoking and grilling. “You get a better product with the slow and low cooking of indirect heat.” And since then, he's been smoking everything.
After culinary school, McClendon wanted to see what the experts were doing. He came across the book Project Smoke by Steven Raichlen. “I was flipping through it, and I saw this smoked cheesecake, and I was like damn, you can smoke a cheesecake? I was so intrigued, and throughout the book, I saw more and more and just wanted to try it all.” With some trial and error, he began teaching himself all he could about the smoking process. As for his least successful endeavor early on? Smoked deviled eggs. “There was just no wow factor from my audience, so I took it as a loss. But I doubled back and did a double cooked smoked potato, and that was it.”
Of the good, the bad, and the inedibly charred, the most challenging, but rewarding, part for McClendon was the learning process and figuring out the necessary methods for temperature control. “You need to find your sweet spot by watching your smoke stack, adding wood at proper times. When you first put the wood in, you get this dirty smoke that you have to burn off. I didn’t know that in the early days. I did a chicken breast once, and within 10 minutes it was black and still raw.”
Chef ALFRED McClendon of Biggerstaff Brewing
Smoked Jerk Chicken Egg Rolls with Scotch Bonnet Aïoli
Smoked Cheesecake with Salted Caramel
In 2022, McClendon accepted the position of executive chef at Biggerstaff Brewing, a brewpub in Atlanta's Old Fourth Ward. The former executive chef, according to McClendon, was a force in the kitchen, and had a Green Egg out back to play around with, even though smoking wasn’t his thing. But for McClendon, getting the smoker up and running was a no brainer. “Every barbecue has beer. Beer and smoke: to me, they just make sense.” McClendon’s main interest is in offset smoking, but the Green Egg is not built for indirect heat. He built a smoke stack on one side of the Green Egg, but quickly found that its small size made it hard to work with. Once the owners tasted the innovative products he was smoking up, however, they decided to invest in a real, 250-gallon offset smoker for McClendon to continue experimenting.
“I want to smoke stuff that people wouldn't traditionally smoke; more vegetables, tofu, things like that. Coming up on my summer menu, I want to do smoked crab cakes and smoked peach cobbler. Smoke is my favorite thing about the culinary world, it just grasped me and I never lost interest. There's no end in sight with smoking. At a point in my career, people would ask what my specialty was, and I never used to have an answer, but now I can say: smoke.”
