FRANKLIN, TN — Local accountant Brett Pemberton pulled a 14-pound brisket off his $1,400 Traeger Timberline at 2:47 p.m. Monday afternoon, presented it to fourteen members of his extended family, and watched in real time as everyone over the age of nine adopted the calm, hostage-coded smile of people who have been instructed not to make any sudden movements.
Pemberton, who purchased the smoker in early March and has since posted 31 times in r/smoking under the username BrisketDaddy_TN, had been ‘dialing in his rub’ for eleven consecutive weekends. Sources at the cookout confirm the rub was, in the final analysis, mostly cumin.
‘It’s a textbook case of what we call Smoker Acquisition Syndrome,’ said Dr. Lenora Whitcomb, a culinary anthropologist at Belmont University. ‘A man buys a four-figure piece of equipment, watches one Aaron Franklin video, develops a personality, and within ninety days his wife is making a lot of eye contact with the dog.’
The brisket itself, witnesses said, had a bark ‘the color and structural integrity of a Civil War button’ and an internal texture that one cousin described, off the record, as ‘Memorial Day jerky.’ Pemberton’s eight-year-old nephew Cooper reportedly attempted to cut his slice with a butter knife for nearly a minute before quietly relocating it to a napkin and handing the napkin to a Labrador named Biscuit.
By Pemberton’s own accounting, the brisket cost approximately $187 per pound once factoring in the smoker, the pellets, the wireless thermometer, the apron that reads ‘Low and Slow Daddy-O,’ and a Bluetooth-enabled meat probe he keeps unprompted-ly referring to as ‘the Tesla of meat probes.’
‘It’s smoked,’ explained Pemberton’s wife Marissa, gripping a Truly with both hands. ‘He smoked it. He smoked it for fourteen hours. He woke up at 4 a.m. He took Friday off. There’s a spreadsheet, you guys. He made a spreadsheet.’
Pemberton, undeterred by the silence at the table, announced ambitious plans for the Fourth of July, including a whole hog he has already named ‘Gerald’ and a custom-welded rotisserie his HOA has not yet been formally notified about. He also confirmed he is ‘thinking about starting a podcast,’ a sentence that reportedly caused his father-in-law to rise and walk directly into the lake.
As of press time, Pemberton was standing on the back porch with three uncles, all of them nodding at the smoker the way men nod at a casket.