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.
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
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.
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.
Saturday, July 9, 2011
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 :-)
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
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.
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.
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