That reminds me of when “blackened” fish became all the craze and some restaurants thought every fish should be prepared that way.
It was a terrible thing to do to salmon, swordfish, starfish…
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I see similar things all the time. Like duck. It became all the rage to cook duck breast as you would a steak. To temp, often with medium rare being the “proper” temperature. And that’s great. But people rapidly forgot that was for duck breast off the bone. And that there were other valid ways to cook duck. Roast a whole duck to medium rare and your thighs are a bloody, stringy mess, and all that un-broken down connective tissue around the bones makes it difficult and messy to carve or eat. And I hadn’t seen a slow roasted duck for years until very recently. Same deal lamb. Suddenly rare or medium rare lamb chops are all the rage, and mid rare for leg/shoulder. But lamb fat is hard and waxy, it doesn’t render well until medium temperatures. The right cut can be great at medium rare, but most lamb is better at medium. And there’s nothing wrong with taking those large roasts, especially the tougher ones. And roasting them slow till they’re tender and falling apart. Like barbecue.
The wacky thing is that these are things that are well understood in your technical cooking literature, cooking schools, high end kitchens, a lot of traditional cooking styles etc. It just seems everyone gets caught up in the trend to the point where they’re actively cooking foods badly (and wrongly) to fit the impression that x needs to be cooked less.
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I might also add, if you are doing cedar anything use white cedar. About 25% of people have negative reactions to red cedar.
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Wallaby. But be well advised to tie them down (sport)…or they’ll kick the shit out of your Weber… until they succumb to the smoke.
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