Tag Archives: southern cuisine

Cheater’s BBQ

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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

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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

I like to have cornmeal around

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cornbread sqares on a plate

Try to keep corn meal on hand.  If you have corn meal and a few other staples you’ll be able to make corn bread, which means you can fix up a quick meal.  For example, corn bread with an over-easy egg and sliced ripe tomato.  If you have nothing but canned tuna and mayo, just serve the corn bread with tuna salad.  Use the recipe on the side of the container of corn meal you buy, but remember that recipes for corn muffins are sugar-heavy, so use them only if you want sweet corn bread.  Albers is what I use, and there is a solid Southern-style cornbread recipe on the bag.  Whichever recipe you use, get yourself a seasoned cast iron skillet to bake the bread in.  Lodge Logic (the “Logic” line = preseasoned) is very good, and you’ll be buying one of the last decent American-made products.  After you grease the pan put it in the oven and let it get hot.  Then pour the batter in quickly and bake.  This maneuver makes a difference, trust me.

Boulud’s Braise

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Two braises served with rice

I made two recipes from Daniel Boulud’s Braise (2006) today, the tripe with spicy yellow peppers and watercress (pg. 100) and Southern-style black-eyed peas with bacon (pg. 181).  Let’s talk tripe.  I love it, and this dish sounded so damned good I thought I’d go through all the prep and the zillion ingredients to prepare it.  I used what he said and did what he said and it turned out good.  It was complex – a bit spicy with a sweetish backdrop – but I think I’d like a little more peanut butter and a higher PTT (potato-to-tripe) ratio.  The extra PB would make it a bit more comforting and provide more body to the sauce, and the potatoes make the dish a meal while serving as a foil for the flavor parade that is the sauce, so more of them would be a plus.  I’d also reduce the stock slightly.  I can’t see myself making this dish all that often, not so much because it is quite a bit of work, but for the same reason I only order Singapore chow fun one time for every thirty orders of “regular” chow fun:  it has a very distinctive flavor and, as a matter of personal taste, it’s not something I want more than a few times a year. 

Briased tripe dish from boulud's book Braise

I took a couple of liberties with the black-eyed peas and bacon dish:  I used canned black-eyed peas and substituted 2/3 of the slab bacon with pork belly, which is basically slab bacon that has not had anything done to it.  If you like a pronounced smokey flavor, then you should use all slab bacon, but I like it in small doses.  I also used slightly over a pound of meat, which is way more than the recipe calls for, but I had a piece of pork belly in a “use it or lose it” situation.  Finally, I substituted plain old yellow onion for the red.  This was excellent – so savory and rib-sticking.  Next time I make this pork and beans super deluxe I’ll serve it with some crusty rolls and a green salad.  I cooked it so long it was like a confit – and a little goes a long way.

pork belly braise inspired by Boulud's book Braise

The Cracker Barrel in Binghamton

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This evening we ate at a chain restaurant called The Cracker Barrel on (where else?) Front Street.  We had planned on going there one of the other days but my dad claimed it was too “cutesy” for me and that it would drive me crazy.  Since we were once again dying of the heat, we didn’t much care where we ate so long as it had a cooling system.  I did not know it was a Southern chain with a number of outposts outside the South.  I never heard of it, period.  Yes, it was cutesy, and it had a large gift shop that you were routed through to get to the restaurant, but there was enough there I was actually interested in to make it fun.  Once you get past all the chickie dishes and overblown cookie jars and homespun-looking tschotchkes, there are a few things worth your time.  First, Lodge makes things for The Cracker Barrel — basically their usual cast iron ware but with a Cracker Barrel logo cast into the bottom.  While you can find this stuff cheaper on Amazon.com and discount stores, it is still nice to look at and handle while you are waiting to be seated.  Then there is a large Southern candy section, and a really cool toy section, with some nice kid-sized cookware sets.  Ah, time to eat!  We were brought corn muffins, biscuits and butter to munch on while we looked at the huge comfort food menu.  Meat loaf, beef stew, chicken and dumplings.  You get the idea.  Matt had the chicken fried chicken and I had chicken and dumplings.  You get three sides with your entree, chosen from a huge variety of sides, and we came up with six to share:  cole slaw, fried okra, cornbread stuffing, fries, corn and mashed potatoes.  The sides were fine but the fried okra could have been better.  Once I received my dinner and spent an hour watching lots of other entrees come out of the kitchen, I realized that their stock in trade was boneless chicken breast.  Almost all of the chicken dishes (and maybe it is all, I’m not sure) use this boneless chicken breast meat.  While this is healthier and easier on the kitchen, I was very disappointed not to receive chicken on the bone with my dumplings.  You just can’t get the same flavor in certain dishes without chicken on the bone.  And, come on!, what kind of Southern place has no real fried chicken?!  I have to admit, though, it was quite tasty and gave us our comfort food fix in a cool environment.