Tag Archives: meat

Cheater’s BBQ

Slow-cooked pork butt looking good on kitchen counter

If you’ll be spending time outside anyway, then you might as well multitask and get some BBQ going.  You can make some “cheater’s” BBQ, which means you’ll slow-cook a hunk of meat using a Weber grill for as many hours as you are able to baby-sit the process, and then finish it off in a low oven in the house.  For this you’ll need a drip pan (buy yourself a supply of medium-sized disposable catering pans — you can ask for “half-pans”), a goodly supply of charcoal, aluminum foil, a hinged grate for your Weber grill (makes the job easier, trust me) a dry rub, a about two quarts or so of hot water in a kettle and a 4 – 5 pound piece of meat, like beef brisket or pork shoulder.  Having an active garden hose handy would be a good thing, in case you have embers drift away and catch something on fire.  It happens.  You’ll also need a plain old meat thermometer and long tongs.  Massage the meat with some kind of dry rub, which need be no more than salt, pepper, paprika and a little sugar, and set aside.  On your Weber’s bottom grate, set in the drip pan,  Next to that, mound about 20 coals on a triple layer of foil and light them.  Place your top grate such that one hinged opening is over the coals and one is over the drip pan.  Make sure the bottom vents are about half open.  When your coals are ready, meaning when there no more flames and they smolder to the ashed-over point, spread them out a bit with tongs and then fill the drip pan to the half-full point with hot water.  Make sure you have about a quart of water in the kettle so you can add more to the drip pan later, if you need to.  Place the meat over the drip pan, fat side up.  Set the cover on the grill with vents over the meat so that you are pulling hot air through the cavity of the grill.  Create three long, crunched-up, 1/2-inch sausages out of sheets of foil.  You’ll use these to open and close two cover vents manually and to seat the meat thermometer in the third.  Open the vents on the cover completely.  Take two foil “plugs” and close off two of the cover vents.  Take the third and run the tip of the thermometer through its length so you create a hole.  Take this foil scrunchy and use it to plug up the third lid vent.  Slide the thermometer back in so the dial is now sticking out of the vent with the probe serving as an internal temperature gauge when the lid is closed.  Close the vents slightly to jam the foil in so it stays put.  Be sure the probe of the thermometer is not touching anything in the grill – like the meat.  Here’s the dance, for as long as you can endure it:  keep the unit at about 200 deg. F., as best you can, by opening and closing upper vents with the foil and the lower vent with the handle.  Close vents to lower heat, open them to raise it.  Your problem will most likely be keeping the heat down, but don’t worry about it too much as these cuts of meat are very forgiving.  Add a couple coals every half hour or so by placing them with tongs over active coals.  If you want a little smoke flavor, you can soak some wood chips in water an hour before you start and then add a couple to the coals every now and again, but I generally don’t do this as I’m not crazy about smoke flavor.  BBQ this way for at least three hours.  If you keep this going all day, meaning 8 hours or so, you most likely won’t need to move the meat to your inside oven.  When the internal temperature of the pork is about 200 deg. F. you are good to go in terms of meat that will pull apart.  For beef brisket this will be around 185 deg. F. — but people have fist fights about the correct temperature for slow-cooked meats.  If you complete the cooking process inside, simply pop the meat into a pan and a preheated 250 deg. F.  If you do the whole thing on the Weber, be sure to keep your eye on the drip pan, which will fill up with fat as it melts off the meat.  Be sure to keep the water level up so your operation is not a grease fire waiting to happen.  If, God forbid, you ever have to deal with a grease fire, use a Class B fire extinguisher or a large quantity of baking soda.  Never, ever use water, as water will make a grease fire spread.  If it is very small and in a frying pan, try to smother it with a lid.  When the meat is done, let it rest for a few minutes and slice or pull apart.  Serve with Louisiana hot sauce or a vinegar-based sauce instead of those scary ketchup-based sauces that hide the flavor of the meat.

Comfort food for Jon

biscuits in a sheet pan ready to eat

Jon is moving to Santa Barbara tomorrow, so I thought I’d make a fancy breakfast for him this weekend.  I had gotten a hold of a small organic ham last week, which I roasted next to some oven home fries, made by dicing taters, tossing on a sheet pan with plenty of olive oil and some S&P, rubbing them all around, and then roasting in a very hot convection oven. 

Oven hash browns in blue dish

Oven hash browns/home fries

 I perpetrated buttermilk biscuits and sausage gravy, too.  Making sausage gravy is easy and provides great comfort.  You need:  some kind of sausage – any kind without anise, so don’t use Italian.  Cooked is OK, raw is OK.  I use about a pound.  If raw and with fat, i.e., breakfast sausage, brown in a heavy gauge saucepan and, when done, add butter so you have about a half a cup of fat.  If you use raw sausage meat with no fat, like that horrible turkey sausage, brown in a 1/2 cup of canola oil or butter — but butter is better.  If you have cooked sausage, cut into little cubes and fry in said quantity of butter.  Add 1 tablespoon of some combination of ground thyme, rosemary and sage.  Continue to fry for a moment to open up the dried spices.  Toss in a bay leaf or two.  Add some Kosher salt and pepper – quantities depending upon  how salty the sausage is.  Add 1/2 cup or so of AP flour – stirring it in so you have a soft roux, adding more fat if the mixture is too dry.  Don’t brown the roux – keep the flame very low but be sure to cook out the raw flour.  Warm 5 – 6 cups of milk (fat free is fine, but if you use fat free everything you will strangle all the comfort out of the dish) in the microwave.  Add the milk to the roux slowly while stirring with a wooden spoon.  I find that adding it in increments that are blended in completely cuts down on lumps.  Cook to just bubbling over lowest flame, stirring frequently.  Note that this will keep getting thicker, so if you plan on heating it up again to serve later, make sure you under-thicken it ever so slightly the first time around.  Serve this hot mass over toast or split biscuits.  At the last minute I made eggs to order for the group in my new GreenPan.  Yes, it does not stick at all when you use a little oil, but it does stick a bit if you don’t.  Eggs are the ultimate test of a pan in this regard. 

Jon and Matthew diving into a comforting breakfast at the dining table

4th of July 2008

grilled ribeye steaks on a plate

HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY!  We grilled ribeyes today.  Ribeyes be fatty and flavorful and good.  Since it’s a holiday, we went for the gusto.  I purchased a prime rib and cut the steaks myself.  Stupidly, I waited too long and was not able to find a bone-in cut, which I prefer for steaks.  Coarse salt and pepper and the Weber. 

roast caulifower in a blue speckled dish

We wanted something kind of light for the side dish, so I consulted The Best of America’s Test Kitchen 2008, which arrived the other day, and latched onto the roasted cauliflower recipe (p. 12).  One piece of advice:  if you have convection, use if for the last two legs of the roasting process.  The cauliflower turned out great – nice and brown and not bitter.  The yogurt sauce accompaniment was a hit, and would work for many other things – even scrambled eggs, I think.  Just so you know, Cook’s Illustrated is a great bimonthly publication.  It’s part of the America’s Test Kitchen megalopoly, and focuses on perfecting and reinventing classics and popular current dishes.  This is the one food magazine I pay for. 

dip for roast cauliflower

At the end of the year they send you said “best of,” which keeps you from having to clip so many recipes.  I have never been steered wrong by these people.  Matter of fact, yesterday I made the fudge (p. 59) for a party Matt was going to today, since I had on hand several cans of sweetened condensed milk, a couple of pounds of chocolate from my 2007 Christmas candy making, as well as many, many walnuts.  I never much liked fudge, finding it grainy and unpleasant, but I trusted ATK enough to give it a go.  Honestly, this was the best fudge I ever ate.  It was like a lighter ganache – and not so sweet.  The fact that I used a fancy Valrhona varietal helped.  I will be making this again.

the best of america's test kitchen 2008 cover

Meatballs

Meatballs that were convection roasted first are now in italian sauce

Here’s my tip for meatballs – and, yes, it is my tip because I have been doing this for years even if others, like America’s Test Kitchen, only figured it out recently:  Don’t fry them before they go into the sauce.  Roast them in a hot (400-425 deg. F.) convection oven on a sheet pan lined with parchment paper.  They will brown and firm up this way and you won’t have a big mess in your kitchen.  My meatball recipe is simple in that you combine, but do not overwork, good ground meat that is no leaner than 90%, a little bread that has been softened in water, an egg or two, a bit of grated parmesan, a little Best Foods/Hellmann’s mayonnaise, a smidgen each of Dijon mustard and Worcestershire, and salt and pepper.  Form big meatballs and brown in oven as described above.  Just keep an eye on them and take them out when they have browned to your liking.  Allow to cool a bit and carefully transfer to hot sauce and simmer for an hour.  Your sauce need be nothing more than a #10 can of crushed tomatoes (buy at Costco) with whatever you have on hand to liven it up, but certainly some Italian spice mix, fresh garlic, a little olive oil, a dash of red wine and a bit of sugar to cut the acidity.  Simmer all this together for 45 minutes before you add the meatballs.

I cooked an Asian meal today

lion’s head meatballs 3-16-08

Chinese dinner tonight for friends.  I guess I’m just crazy enough to make Chinese food for Chinese guests, but I figure they’d appreciate the gesture as I do when someone serves me up some Eisbein that is less than echt.  I made a couple of my favorite Shanghai-style dishes:  lion’s head meatballs, which are first fried and then braised in cabbage leaves, and pork belly braised in wine, soy sauce, ginger and rock sugar.  For some reason I also served up kare-kare, a Filipino dish of tripe and oxtails laced with annatto oil and peanut butter, just for some contrast.  It’s generally a bad idea to cook something you never made before when company calls, but I saw this in Jeff Smith’s The Frugal Gourmet on our Immigrant Ancestors (1990), and wanted to give it a go.  I love kare-kare, but you can’t eat too much in one sitting or you’ll feel like killing yourself.

kare kare 3-16-08

Yes, I know this meal was too heavy in sum total, and I should have had a veggie or fish dish to round it all out, but we wanted to go for broke.  I didn’t even mention the potato Kugel with blood pudding dip – which sent this nothing-really-goes-together meal into depraved territory.  Yes, yes, I know Jeff Smith has been accused of terrible things and I should never use his cookbooks because that would go against the wishes of the powers that be – essentially to wipe his memory off the face of the earth, but I have no intention of stopping.  His cookbooks are pretty good.  Rip off my arms and legs if you want to.

braised pork belly