Bbq

Earlier this fall I made some delicious tandoori-style chicken for an Indian-themed dinner party. This may be the best-tasting chicken I’ve cooked in a long time. I figured, I have a kamado-style ceramic-walled charcoal grill / smoker that can easily get up to 700 degrees F (which I’ve used to make pizza in the past)– there must be some way to use this as an approximation of a tandoor. I did some reading, and as often seems to be the case, there was an article by Kenji on Serious Eats on this very idea. ...

(quick notes, mostly jotted down to remember what worked well) My third try in three years, and the most successful (I got the grill up to 700 degrees, which I’m sure helped): Grill setup: plenty of charcoal below, all air passages cleared of ash, and a pizza stone (porous side up for my glazed/porous stone) raised on two bricks to bring the pizza close to the hot lid of the ceramic grill. I let the charcoal burn for 90 minutes with the lid closed to get the entire grill up to 650-700 degrees (when I tried making a pizza earlier, it burned on the bottom before it fully cooked on the top– I think because the ceramic grill lid wasn’t hot enough– I could also try further raising the stone next time). ...

Still working on getting a pizza stone hot enough and where exactly in the grill it and the fire should go, but these were good… Using my father’s some-whole-wheat-flour high-moisture-content long-rising dough recipe: Butternut squash, red onion, buffalo mozzarella, gremolata: Tomato sauce, anchovies, bitter greens, salted olives, chili flakes: Pesto, ricotta, asparagus:

The best part of having leftover pulled pork and salsa from New Year’s Eve dinner? New Year’s Day carnitas chilaquiles (tortilla chips soaked in tomatillo salsa, topped with fatty pulled pork that’s been crisped under the broiler and mixed with a little orange juice, and a fried egg):

For a small New Year’s Eve party, a meal cooked primarily in the smoker (tacos with pulled pork, homemade tortillas, and salsas made from smoked tomatillos and pineapples): 23-hour slow-smoked pork shoulder: A roughly 7lb chunk of pork shoulder (a.k.a. pork butt) from Niman Ranch Dry rubbed with copious amounts of salt and mustard, smoked paprika, and black pepper and let rest in the fridge for 4-5 hours Smoked very low-and-slow at 215-225F for 23 hours over lump charcoal with some fist-sized chunks of apple and pecan wood for smoke, until the internal temperature was in the 195-200 range (for overnight smokes I have a ‘baby monitor’-style wireless temperature probe I rest on the bedside so an alarm will ring and wake me up if the pit temperature gets too high or low and I can adjust the airflow or add fuel) No intermediate basting, mopping, foiling, etc– just keeping it simple Wrapped in foil and let rest for 45 minutes It was so tender I could pull off strands by hand, and with a nice ‘bark’ and smoke ring… It didn’t even need any sauce– I just squeezed a few limes over it. ...

After years of successfully cooking steak in a traditional way (salted a few hours ahead of time, then high heat on a grill or a skillet on the stovetop followed by a 5-10 minute rest), I gave the “reverse sear” technique a try. The general idea is to bake / roast the steak at lower temperature until it’s almost done, then sear each side on a hot grill. The slower, lower-temperature approach should gradually and uniformly cook the meat, while the sear browns the outer layer for flavor which maintaining the juicy center (especially on a thick steak). ...

I threw a little brunch for friends, with homemade bagels, salmon and trout I smoked over alder wood, gravlax cured by H, dry farmed early girl tomatoes (so good…), salted cucumbers, and other accoutrements. For the bagels, I mostly used the tried and true recipe, though I tried retarding the dough (letting it rise slowly in a cold place overnight) in both a typical 40°F fridge and a special 55°F fridge I had set up with a temperature controller for fermenting experiments. The 40° dough rose less, but then swelled up when baked (see left bagels below– perhaps I didn’t boil them long enough this time?) They still tasted good, like bagels– but the dough retarded at 55° had an especially nice crackling crust around a chewy bagel. I’ll keep playing around with rising times and temperatures… ...

Two Hour Tacos? Why not Ten Hour Tacos, with a slow-smoked brisket, hand made tortillas, pickles, and a creamy BBQ sauce? We threw a dinner party inspired by a weekend trip to Far West Texas, and this is the story of the brisket. I’d never actually smoked meat before, though I knew the general principle of indirect heat / “slow and low”. It became clear it wouldn’t just be a “set and forget it for 8 hours” process, and that there was a whole range of intuition, tweaking of the fire, and experience needed to get a good smoke. Well, there’s no real way to learn but by doing… so after browsing various online forums and getting pointed at this Saveur article, I had a general plan. ...

BBQ preferences can be a touchy subject, like pizza, with a lot of regional style preferences that make it hard for people to agree on what’s good. When I lived in New England, I far preferred Blue Ribbon BBQ in Arlington to Redbone s in Somerville, which I know shocks some people. And in the Bay Area I loved Doug’s in Emeryville (now closed, sadly), like Everett & Jones in Oakland and Gorilla BBQ in Pacifica a fair amount, but don’t like Memphis Minnie’s or Brother-in-Law’s (and the succession of replacements in the same space) in SF. ...