Heat

There are plenty of heated discussions about what type of fuel you should use when you create BBQ. Authentic BBQ of any type requires wood and lots of smoke. Some people scoff at folks that use charcoal. Some people are ok with charcoal as long as it is lump. Others will say briquettes are ok, but they sure as hell better be 100% natural hardwood bruiquettes because I don't want to taste any petroleum binders on my vittles! Some are fine with any ol' bag of charcoal and still others use gas or some other heat source! Let's talk about fuel some other time. Right now let's talk a little more about heat. I have a reasonably nice grill with lots of room compared to the kettle grill I used to have. I almost always start the fire in the middle and it has two levels of racks. I tend to think of the grill as having heat zones as in the picture below.



I think of having 6 zones of heat with this setup. Zone 5, right over the heat, is generally where you want to cook steaks, chops, burgers, etc. Hot dogs, sausages, etc. I usually put in Zone 2, which is on the top grate right above the coals. Zones 1, 3, 4 and 6 are where I put the meat that is to be slow cooked. So pork shoulders, whole roast or jerked chicken, chuck roasts, etc. go in those zones.

If I am slow cooking, I don't ever need the area right over the heat source, so I take that grate out to make adding fuel to the fire easier. When it's time to add more wood or coals, I can pop the top open, add more fuel and close it quickly without losing too much heat. The more you have to fiddle around with stuff, the more heat is escaping, the more you'll need to wait because it will take that much longer to get back up to temperature. That's one of the reasons why most BBQ smokers have a separate box to add fuel to. You can manage the fuel without letting valuable heat escape. No matter what your setup you want to make it as easy as possible to add fuel during cooking to minimize heat loss.

Besides minimizing heat loss, another oft overlooked element of heat to cook with for BBQ by neophytes is thermal mass. You can find all kinds of fancy definitions of this online if you wish. The parts that matter for us are how much food you have to cook and how your smoker or grill is at holding heat. Something that has more thermal mass, say a brick oven, will hold a steadier heat for a longer time and at a more constant rate than a thin piece of aluminum. Also, if you put in one pork shoulder put on the smoker will soak up a lot less initial energy than if you put 10 on at the same time. This is one of the reason cheaply made grills end up being lousy for bbq. they are flimsy and made of materials that end up not holding a lot of heat. Thin walls, a lid that doesn't close well and flimsy grates will be less effective than thicker walls, a snug fitting lid and thick cast iron grates. Adding various things like firebricks, baking stones or hunks of metal depending on your desire and budget are also options to consider if you start taking this stuff seriously.

Incidentally this is another reason a firebox makes sense. With a separate firebox that is loaded up with fuel and good air control, you can load the box up with fuel and have a good chance of having a big pile of fuel vs. the small pile of fuel I have in my set up. If you have the meat a couple of feet or more from the heat source vs. 6 to 18 inches, you can make the fire hotter and larger, because the heat will dissipate a bit before it gets up to the food. The larger mass will, if you control the air flow properly, burn more slowly, thereby requiring you to add fuel less often.

Whenever people talk about cooking BBQ they talk about low and slow, cooking over low heat for a long period of time. Whatever your setup, take few minutes to think about how you can minimize heat loss and increase thermal mass. While you may not have the money, time, room or desire to build your own double barrel smoker, taking some time to consider what makes them good at their job and applying those principles as best you can to your current rig can have a tremendous effect on the BBQ you produce.

Fair Day, Part 2

Yes, it's Tuesday already. Oooops. Too busy having a good time with friends and family. So here is what is left of the two pork shoulders!



Both were a hit. So if you are looking for something different to do with pork shoulder, marinate it in a 50/50 mix of soy sauce and ginger ale. The flavor is different and it was really juicy. Good, good stuff.

The parade day really is one of my favorite days of the year. The weather has always been good and the company is fantastic. As much as people seem to be amazed at the amount of work to get these gatherings together (you got up and start cooking at what time? and holy crap, the house is actually clean!), few things in life bring me greater joy than being able to share a good meal with my family and friends. Anybody that crafts anything, whether it is a piece of software, a novel, a cabinet, or a hunk of meat, knows that a little part of your heart and soul goes into whatever it is you are making. To be able to share that with the people close to you is truly a blessing.

Fair Day, Part 1

Today is Saturday and the day of the annual Chealsea Summer Fair Parade. As usual, we are going to have some friends over. Grill is wheeled around to the front of the house and at 6:35 am the fire was going and the meat was on!



Two pork shoulders are on the grill. One is rubbed down as usual. The other was marinating in a mix of equal parts ginger ale and soy sauce. They were seasoned and put in the fridge Thursday night, so they had plenty of time to soak up some flavor. Updates on how that tastes later.

Pork Shoulder

My favorite hunk of BBQ goodness is pork shoulder. They are cheap and easy, as long as you got the time to do it right. I usually figure about an hour per pound and my grill bounces between 200 and 300 degrees. Most recommendations are for 1 hour and 15 minutes or even an hour and a half per pound, but that is at a lower average temperature between 225 and 250.

To do a decent pork shoulder you'll need the meat, your favorite rub and a good 8 to 12 hours. I like to finish mine with sauce in the last hour or two, but that step is optional and, while tasty, hard core bbq folk will say the sauce shouldn't be applied until after cooking.

So first things first and that is seasoning the meat. Generously apply the rub to all sides of the meat. You can do this the night before, but in a pinch I've seasoned the meat before getting the fire going. This gives the seasoning 30 - 60 minutes to work in. Overnight, up to 24 hours, is better.

Then get your fire going. I use a combination of charcoal and usually maple for smoking a pork shoulder. The charcoal provides a steady heat that requires less tending and I like the flavor of maple.

After the fire is in a good state (usually 20 - 30 minutes) and the coals are starting to ash over, I'll pull off the chimney and get the meat on. When you put the meat on, put the fattiest side up. I have a fairly wide grill with 3 grates. I will usually put the fire in the middle and the shoulder on the side under the chimney. If I do 2 shoulders, I'll put one on each side of the fire. I usually put more wood and coals on every 2 1/2 to 3 hours. I periodically check the temperature and when it drops to 225 or lower I'll open it up and add more fuel.

About an hour or two before I finish, I'll put some sauce in a dish and bring out a brush and cover the entire hunk o' meat in sauce. I'll usually get my tongs (sometimes I need two if the shoulder is large), turn it over, sauce the bottom and sides, then turn it back fatty side up and sauce the top and sides. One generous slathering of sauce is all it should need. This is also the only time I poke, prod or otherwise touch the meat while it is cooking. If you don't sauce it you shouldn't need to touch it at all.

After your allotted cooking time has expired, get a platter, remove the beautifully cooked hunk of delicousness to the platter and let it sit. A good 20 minutes or so should be fine. It will still be plenty hot. Now comes the fun part and that is ripping the meat apart. You can use your hands if you'd like, and that is the time honored method. I usually use tongs. You should NOT have to use a knife to remove any of the meat and large chunks should come right off the bone. I usually end up with 3 or 4 large hunks of meat and a perfectly clean bone. If you want to show your friends your nice clean bone and have them ooooo and aaaaah at it, go ahead.

Now shread the hunks of meat into whatever size you'd like. I like a mix of large and small chunks, some people like big ol' nuggets of porky goodness and others yet like theirs shredded and even chopped up fine. It's all good and do it however you like. The only recommendation I'll make is to make sure you get a good mix of soft, crusty, light and dark meat. A good size pork shoulder will have generous portions of meat that has a variety of subtle differences in taste and texture.

At this point, I'll mix it up in a bowl and let people put a pile of meat on a bun, sauce it however they want and enjoy.

A note about pork shoulders

There are different parts of the pork shoulder you can get. Most butchers and supermarkets will have Boston butts (sometimes referred to as blade shoulder) and/or picnics, which are different parts of the shoulder. Picnics are generally cheaper but have more bone and more fat. To some this also means more flavor. If you are going to make sandwiches out of it, I'd simply get whichever you like. I think both are delicious. If I were going to do a dinner plate I'd stick with the butt.

I cook pork shoulders often enough that I often buy a few when they are on sale and put them in the chest freezer. When pork shoulder is on sale it is absolutely impossible to get more delicousness per dollar.

Wings

One of my favorite foods to cook on the grill is chicken wings. They are easy, don't take 12 hours and they are friggin' delicious. I keep it pretty simple. I get enough wings to cover all the empty space on my grill (somewhere between 5 and 10 pounds), cover them with a sauce that is composed of about 2/3 bbq sauce and 1/3 hot sauce, then let them smoke at around 250 degrees F for about 3 hours.

A very nice alternative to deep frying.

Rub me the right way!

Dry rubs seem to be one of those things that us folks that cook in our backyards don't seem to find out about until after having cooked on a grill for quite a while. Maybe it's just us New Englanders that have this issue? This is a terrible state of affairs. I think this is a function of the weird double life that BBQ leads in being both ubiquitous and obscure. I do not know a single person that grew up and did not have dad cooking food outside during the summer on the grill. Most people refer to that as BBQ. Yay, we all BBQ! But then you go to a good BBQ joint and you get these weird foods and these awesome flavors and you wonder why the hell didn't Dad ever cook THIS on the grill!?!

Well, there are a lot of reasons for this. One of those is the generous use of dry rubs. I know my Dad didn't spend a lot of time reading cookbooks and there was no food TV back in the day. I know, crazy, right? If you are over 35 chances are good that your Dad didn't spend a lot of time on this sort of thing, either. In this case ignorance is not bliss! There are rare exceptions to the rule, but in the vast majority of BBQ preparations the target meat is coated with a generous portion of some sort of spice concoction. Debates abound about whether to sauce or not to sauce, but I've not ever seen anybody get into an argument about sprinkling your hunk of meat with some sort of tasty dust before cooking. It's just the way things are usually done.

You can, of course, buy rubs. There are a wide variety of them and many of them are very, very good. Try a few and see what you think. The only thing I would recommend is to steer clear of those that have salt as the first ingredient. I usually make my own. The base of every rub I make is roughly:

4 parts paprika
2 parts onion powder
2 parts garlic powder
1 part salt.

After that it is a crap shoot, depending on what I'm going to cook. The following are not hard and fast rules, but generally speaking...

pork: 1 part brown sugar, 1/2 part chili powder, 1/2 part cumin

chicken: 1 part thyme, 1 part oregano

beef: 1/2 part chili powder, grind black pepper to taste

Other things that work in rubs: rosemary, celery salt, your favorite ground chili pepper, ground mustard

You can mix and match things. If it's dry and you think it might be good and it's not mentioned above, try it. Whatever concoction you come up with, take your hunk of meat out and generously coat it with the rub. Massage it into the meat. Yeah, work it baby... mmmmm.... where was I??

Oh yeah, liberally cover the meat with your rub and then put it back in the fridge for between 1 and 24 hours. If I'm in a hurry and I didn't get things prepared I'll prepare the meat then go light the fire, giving the rub at least 20 - 30 minutes to sit on the meat before cooking. In this case longer is usually better, as the seasoning gets a chance to work into the meat and some of the juices get drawn out of the meat due to the salt. Not giving the meat enough time to rest after rubbing can sometimes result in a powdery exterior, which some people don't like so much.

Tonight's dinner

Tonight's dinner is chicken 3 different ways. BBQ chicken with a dry rub, some with sauce and some without and some boneless skinless chicken breast that was simply brined for a couple of hours before putting it on the grill.



And here we go :-)

Tools of the trade

There are many things you can buy in your quest to become an award winning BBQ chef, but there are actually very few things you need in order to cook a delicious pile of meat in your back yard. Some of these items will get a future entry of their own.

Long handled tongs: You'll need these for moving things around your grill, pit or smoker. Don't use a fork. Poking your food is somewhere between bad and disastrous. And short handled tongs could result in lightly seared fingers.

Heat source: There is much debate to be had over what you use for heat and I may write about that at a later time. You want long slow heat. I've cooked over gas (some super hardcore BBQ enthusiast just died as I typed that), wood and various types of charcoal. While judges at competitions might be able to tell the difference, chances are pretty good your family and friends will have nothing to say about your heat source, because they will be too busy stuffing another pile of delicious food into their eager mouths.

Smoke: Where there's smoke there's fire, but it's not necessarily the other way around. To get good BBQ flavor you need some smoke. After seeing how liquid smoke is made, I'm not morally opposed to it the way I used to be, but I still like wood. I usually use maple, apple or ash because it is what is available in my backyard. I figure that's how people started (Somebody roasting a pig in 1775 in Virginia would not have roasted it over mesquite, because they couldn't get any), so that's good enough for me. Different woods do impart different flavors, so experiment. Different woods even work will with different sauces. I was never a fan of Sweet Baby Ray's until I used it to mop a pork shoulder that was cooking over a bed of maple. Maple smoke and Sweet Baby Ray's is a delicious combo :-P

Cooking vessel: Whatever you use to cook in or on, you'll want something that offers you a large cooking surface and room so you can have indirect heat. BBQ can't be sitting right on top of the heat source. I have a Kingsford barrel grill. For me it was a great value for the price. Next I'd love to get myself a nice drum smoker, either built myself or from a vendor. I've also done alright on a Weber kettle grill, but that took some creative work which I'll detail at some point in the future. There are plenty of high end pits you can buy and if you poke around online you can find plans for smokers, pits and grills you can build yourself. But for around 100 bucks you can get yourself a nice barrel style grill. You don't even need the external firebox. Not that it would be bad to have that, but you don't NEED it.

Other than food and spices, that's it. People go nuts over the particulars (lump charcoal vs. briquettes, lighter fluid vs. chimney, My wood's better than your wood, etc.) but at its core barbecue is simple and requires little in the way of gear, glitz and glamor.

Drumsticks

This is the first food I ever made that got requests for seconds, and at one point a marriage proposal. It's not really BBQ as it is done in the oven with no smoke. It's really braised drumsticks, but it's braised in BBQ sauce. It's been a superbowl sunday favorite with my friends for many years now, so here's the recipe. Please don't be underwhelmed!

What you will need:

Deep baking dish or roasting pan
Aluminum foil
About 3 bottles of your favorite cheap bbq sauce
garlic powder
Approximately 5 lbs of drumsticks

cooking:

Heat over to 275

Put chicken in a single layer into your roasting pan or baking dish. Squeeze as many as you can in. Cover liberally with garlic powder. Then pour sauce over chicken. Get some on every piece. I add sauce until it comes up between 1/3 and 1/2 way up the height of the drumsticks. Cover pan with foil. Put in oven. About 2 1/2 hours later remove the foil and let bake for another hour.

If you have to move them to another vessel to transport to your buddy's house to watch a football game, I would suggest a large spoon for removing them from the pan. Scoop them up from underneath. Using your tongs or fingers will likely result in the bone sliding out and leaving delicious hunks of saucy meat in the roasting pan.

That's it. For as popular as this recipe is amongst my friends, I'm kind of sad to say that it isn't more involved.

A note about recipes on this site

From time to time I will be posting recipes for various sauces, rubs, meats, sides, etc. All recipes are, at best, approximations. Especially the rubs. I'm terrible at measuring these things. For example, for the bbq sauce recipe, I put 3 cups of ketchup because it came in a 24 oz bottle and I guessed a cup and a half of cider vinegar because I used about that much to clean the rest of the ketchup out of the bottle. But a recipe reading, dump a bottle of ketchup into a sauce pan, fill the bottle half way with vinegar to rinse the bottle out and then dump that in the sauce pan. Add some onion powder, garlic powder, sugar and black pepper and simmer for a while just isn't a very useful recipe.

For recipes on this site, and in my opinion for ANY recipe, follow it at first. If you like it, great, keep using it. If you think it is missing a little something, add it. If it's got too much of something, reduce it. Cooking in general and BBQ in particular should be delicious experimentation. In my experience few methods of cooking are as forgiving and easily allow the cook to add his own flourish as BBQ. Don't be afraid to tinker. At the end of the day you have to eat your food. You should enjoy it!

Good for everything BBQ Sauce

This is a basic Kansas City style sauce with some extra vinegar thrown in. It's easy to make and tasty on just about everything.

3 cups of ketchup
1 1/2 cups cider vinegar
3 tbsp brown sugar
4 tbsp onion powder
4 tbsp garlic powder
grind of black pepper to taste

Mix everything in a sauce pan and simmer 1-2 hours. I especially like this on pulled pork sandwiches, but I can't think of too many things I wouldn't put it on.