On steak

Last weekend, I popped into the Whole Foods in Cambridge. They're my go-to source for dry-aged steak. The guy in front of me at the butcher counter was also buying himself some beautiful dry-aged meat. He was having a particularly interesting conversation with the butcher:

"So, how long do I have to cook this on a grill for it to be done?"
"Well, that depends on kind of a lot of things..."
"But, how long? Say, 8 minutes a side?"
"Well, it depends on the thickness of the steak, the temperature of the grill, how well you want it cooked..."
"I use propane. How long you think that takes?"
"I really don't feel comfortable giving people times to cook..."

It was pretty painful to watch. This poor (young) butcher didn't want to tell a customer he was asking the wrong question, and the customer wouldn't take no for an answer.

Steak really made me nervous when I first started grilling it. The difference between an overcooked and undercooked steak is a matter of a few moments on the grill, unlike a brisket, which gives you hours to make your decisions. And steak is expensive. You ruin a couple of dry-aged steaks, you've just wasted $30 worth of meat.

In general, you need to develop steak-sense. You need to practice. You need to recognize how a steak feels when it is medium. How it feels when it is medium-rare. Make a fist. Poke the muscle between your thumb and your hand on that fist. That's medium-rare. Softer is rare. Firmer is medium.

Mrs. Dude likes her steaks medium to medium-well. I put a lot of steaks back on the grill for her to firm them up, before I learned to recognize a medium-well steak without cutting into it.

Practice. Poke. Get a feel for how firm they need to be. This is a good steak recipe to start with. But no one can give you precise times or temperatures. You just need to practice. So go ahead, eat steak more often.

It's not all bad...

Dry-aged steak in Cambridge:

Whole Foods Market
340 River Street, Cambridge, MA 02139
(617) 876-6990 ‎
Mon-Sun 8 a.m. - 10 p.m.


View Larger Map

By Bbq Dude

Weeknight lamb kebabs

So it turns out that if you walk into your local butcher, and ask for 2 lbs of boneless leg of lamb, they say, "Sorry, the smallest cut of leg of lamb that we sell is half a leg. That's 4 lb." So after making lamb steaks, we still had some lamb left over. So we have some lamb to eat. On a weeknight.

What's a quick way to prepare some lamb? How about this for 5 minutes of Tuesday morning prep cooking?

1 lb boneless leg of lamb
½ cup fresh-squeezed lemon juice
¼ cup sugar
¼ cup water
2 tbsp chopped rosemary
2 tbsp chopped thyme
1 tbsp red pepper flakes
1 tsp cayenne
olive oil

Trim the lamb of extraneous fat and gristle. Chop the lamb into nice bite-size chunks.

Combine the lemon juice, sugar, water, rosemary and thyme (conveniently removed from the garden moments before), red pepper flakes and cayenne in a ziploc bag. Toss in the lamb chunks. Marinate in the fridge, and go to work.

When you get home, fire up the grill. Soak some wood skewers in water while the grill heats up. Meanwhile, make a salad. Steam some rice. Whatever.

Shortly before the grill is ready, skewer the lamb, leaving space between each chunk.



Don't do that wacky thing from the 1980s, where people skewered chunks of bell peppers in between chunks of meat. That's retarded. (Confession, I used to do this. Alot.) The bell pepper/onion/mushroom/whatever will cook faster than the meat. Only skewer similar stuff on a skewer together so it will all cook at the same speed.



Brush the skewered lamb with olive oil. Cook over crazy high heat. Turn every couple of minutes.



Lamb is best when cooked medium-rare, so don't over-cook it. Just a couple minutes per side. This is a fast, weeknight dinner.



Remove from the heat. And serve immediately (such small chunks don't need to rest).



You'll know it was properly cooked if it's still pink inside.

Serve with a lovely Mafalda (from Fratelli Perata if you can).



How's that for a weeknight dinner. Not. Bad. At all.

By Bbq Dude

Blackberry thyme crisp

What a wonderful world we live in. This is the best of times for home cooks. (Due to the awesome power of the internets, it's possible that it's also the best time ever to be a model train hobbyist, but I digress).

I recently discovered the absolutely fantastic bbq/foodie blog Livefire. His interests are basically the same as mine, cooking good food using fire, or whatever else is available. (It seems to me that most serious bbq bloggers do pretty purist bbq). Anyway, I was taken with his newest post, blackberry thyme crisp, and knew I had to try it as soon as I read it. So here we go:

Mix:

1 quart fresh blackberries

3 tbsp all-purpose flour

3 tbsp turbinado sugar

6 sprigs lemon thyme

juice from ½ lemon

I have several varieties of thyme (primarily to play with in my favourite martini). I thought lemon thyme would go best in this dessert, though I think Curt at livefire used English thyme.

Now make a topping of:

½ cup rolled oats

³⁄₈ cup all-purpose flour

¼ cup brown sugar

4 tbsp melted unsalted butter

Yum. Put the fruit in a small baking pan (I used a small breadpan). Sprinkle the topping on the fruit, and place on a *screaming* hot grill (mine got to 400°F) smoking with a tiny bit of wet hickory, for about 20 minutes, or until the crust is browned, and the fruit is bubbling.

Does that not look crazy good? Scoop up and serve, most deliciously with vanilla ice cream.

This was savory, sweet and delicious. My wife would have preferred it with a bit more sugar. I thought it was perfect as is.

Pulled pork sandwiches

We spent the weekend dining in upscale places in Los Angeles last weekend (to be blogged about soon, I think). On the drive back, I had a craving. A greasy, acidic craving. Pulled-pork sandwiches.

Lots of bbq makes good leftovers, but these sandwiches are the only thing I make that is as good as a leftover at work as it is the night I make it. This recipe uses "The Renowned Mr. Brown" pork butt recipe combined with the "Memphis Mustard Pork Sandwich" recipe from Smoke & Spice, one of my two favourite bbq books, slightly modified. We start with a 6 lb pork butt (actually the shoulder cut of pork) and a rub. Rub this mixture onto the pork butt the night before you cook:

¼ cup fresh ground pepper

¼ cup paprika

¼ cup turbinado sugar

2 tbsp salt

2 tsp dry mustard

1 tsp cayenne

Let the pork butt sit in the fridge overnight. The next day, rub the remaining rub into the pork butt. Let the pork butt warm up for 45 minutes while you warm up your smoker. Once you get the smoker to 200°F, start smoking over indirect heat.

I stoked the fire with hickory and charcoal, to give a nice milk smokey flavour, and I smoked for 9 hours. Nine hours gives you plenty of time to relax, and make the remaining parts of these sandwiches. First, make the sop that you'll be mopping on the pork every time you open it:

rest of rub

2 cups cider vinegar

3 tbsp fresh ground pepper

2 tbsp salt

1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce

1 tbsp paprika

1 tbsp cayenne

Now make the sauce.

3 tbsp butter

¼ cup minced onion

1 cup tomato sauce

1 cup white wine vinegar

3 tbsp Worcestershire sauce

1 tsp coarse salt

1 tsp sugar

¼ tsp fresh ground pepper

¹⁄₈ tsp cayenne flakes

dash of Sriracha sauce

Sauté the onions in butter until soft. Add everything else, and boil lightly for half an hour, until thickened. Cool the sauce and set aside. It'll be vinegary and delicious.

And finally, an hour or two before serving, make the slaw. Chop the cabbage in a food processor, or by hand to a medium-fine consistency. Then mix:

2 cups chopped cabbage

½ cup minced onion

2 ½ tbsp Dijon mustard

1 ½ tbsp white wine vinegar

¾ tsp sugar

¼ tsp salt

This slaw is sweet, bright and delicious. It'll mix well with the grease of the the pork.

Now, we continue to smoke the meat. And perhaps you find some way to relax, while smoking. I find the real challenge in smoking meat is being patient enough. Nine hours is a long time, and the last few hours, it starts look pretty delicious.

But be patient. Be patient. And you'll be rewarded.

When you pull the meat off the grill, you'll need to continue with your patience. Let it sit 20 more minutes somewhere your cat can't get to it (I tend to put it in a cold oven). As it cools, the juices congeal a bit, so they won't run out when you cut it.

Now, a native Carolinian will tell you that the proper way to pull pork is to use a couple of meat forks to tear it apart, and that cutting it is shameful. I'm not much of a purist, so I cut and pull. The pork shoulder should be soft enough that tearing it is relatively easy, so pulling is possible, but I confess, I prefer the larger slices of it on the sandwich. Again, my goal is bbq that is good, not bbq that is done traditionally. But this is clearly a preference issue.

Look at that!!! I tend to taste it a bit while chopping. It's hard to wait much longer.

Now assemble your sandwich. We use soft rolls. Layer the coleslaw, the pork and the sauce.

Delicious. Acidic. Spicy. A tiny bit greasy. And tasty.

I love these sandwiches, and I'll be the envy of everyone at work for the next week while I eat them at work.

Fajitas!

I'm going to continue the Serious Barbecue lovefest here on the blog. I've been having a lot of fun with the book, and only major successes. No failures so far. Today's installment of the Adam Perry Lang lovefest will focus on making super delicious fajitas. I've included links to several of the sides from this blog, and also a link down below to making tortillas in the style of the Homesick Texan.

Ok then, we start with a couple flank steaks. At Costco, you can get a huge packs of the stuff for about $4.50 a pound. And what delicious looking meat.

So make yourself a marinade:

1 tbsp crushed hot red pepper flakes

2 tbsp boiling water

1 cup water

1/2 cup apple cider vinegar

1/4 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice

2 tbsp worchestershire sauce

2 tbsp tabasco or hot sauce

1 tbsp soy sauce

1/2 cup grated sweet white onion

10 garlic cloves

1/2 cup dark brown sugar

1/4 cup prepared yellow mustard

1 tbsp kosher salt

2 tsp fresh thyme

Extract the heat of the red pepper flakes in the boiling water a few minutes. It looks quite beautiful.

While it's extracting, mix the other ingredients.

Now add the peppers and run the ingredients through the blender.

The colors in this marinade are incredible. Clearly I got carried away and took a few photos.

Now pour it over the flank steaks a few hours before you plan to cook 'em. There's a lot of seasoning going into this one, so you don't need to marinate for long.

Ok. Now you wait. And make some of the sides. Like guacamole, beans, and onions. And salsa. And hell, make your own tortillas. You can make them an hour in advance, and they keep beautifully. And they're easy! We also grill poblanos. You just toss them on the grill next to the meat for a few minutes, until the skin turns black. Toss them in a paper bag to steam in their own heat for a few minutes, and peel off the skins. Yum! And mix the seasoning blend.

1/4 cup mild chile powder (like ancho)

1 1/2 tsp coarsely ground fresh black pepper

1 1/2 tsp kosher salt

After you've marinated for a few hours, light the grill by whatever your favourite means are. You're going to need a screaming hot grill. Pull the meat out, pat it dry, and sprinkle the seasoning blend all over the meat, rub with a bit of canola oil, and put the flank steak on the grill. It's already going to be looking crazy delicious. While the grill's heating up, make the resting butter, a mixture of:

8 tbsp melted unsalted butter

1/4 cup finely chopped cilantro

1 tbsp fresh lemon juice

4 garlic cloves, zested

1 tbsp oregano

1 tbsp crushed red pepper flakes

Put a bit of canola oil on the outside of the steaks, then sear them 2 minutes on a side.

Pull them off the grill, and brush them with the resting butter. Put back on the grill, close the grill and cook for 2-5 minutes for rare to medium.

Let rest for a few minutes on your cutting board, then slice thinly for fajitas. Serve with all the guacamole, onions, poblanos, beans, salsa and fresh tortillas from above.

It's a bit tricky to get everything made at once, so I made the guacamole, beans and salsa several hours earlier, made the tortillas an hour in advance, and did the onions while I made the steaks.

These are the tastiest fajitas I've ever made.

Enjoy them with some friends soon.

Sweet Sauteed Onions

How many recipes do you have to cook from a book before you declare the book a *raging* success? I'm just about there with Adam Perry Lang's new book Serious Barbecue. I've already made a modification of his brisket. It was freaking fantastic. And now I've done his fajitas, which I will post on shortly. As an accompaniment to fajitas, I've made his sweet onions. They go great on fajitas, on burgers, and most recently on grilled bratwurst. I think you'll agree they're pretty outrageous. All right, let's go!

1-2 sweet white onions

3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

1 tbsp fresh thyme leaves

1 tbsp granulated sugar

1 tsp kosher salt

1 tsp finely ground fresh black pepper

2 tbsp unsalted butter

6 garlic cloves, zested

2 tbsp red wine vinegar

Peel and slice the onions to make rings. Sautée the onions in oil. As they soften, add the thyme and sugar. Continue as the sugar melts, browns, and covers the onions. This is yumminess here. Add garlic, salt and pepper. And butter on one side of the pan (until it melts). Mix all of this delicious ridiculous mess. When the onions are soft and browned, deglaze the pan with the vinegar. Set aside and keep warm for the fajitas/burgers/bratwurst.

I think you'll agree these look and taste crazy good.

Guacamole

Ho-Lee Crap! Well, I just made the kick-assiest batch of fajitas. And fajitas need a great batch of guacamole to go with. So here's a quick post. I found the best ever recipe for guacamole. (Though the Homesick Texan doesn't call it a recipe, it's her recipe).

Make this. It's great.

2 ripe avocados, peeled and cut in half

2 cloves of garlic, crushed

1 Serrano pepper, diced

1/2 cup of chopped cilantro

Juice from 1/2 a lime

Salt to taste

Chop. Crush. And mix. Let sit in the fridge for a couple hours to allow the flavours to meld.

Serve as a chip dip, or with fajitas. It'll be a hit, I promise. Several folks who claimed they "don't generally like guacamole" loved it.

Champagne mango sorbet

Champagne mangoes are popular in southern California. They're smaller, smoother and sweeter than regular mangoes and bright yellow in colour. They're available in Asian grocery stores and in Costco of all places.

I've started bringing the extra ice cream and sorbet that I've been making in to work. It's largely a way to prevent me from gaining thirty pounds in the next six months. Most recently, one of my co-workers requested that I make a champagne mango sorbet. She even offered to peel the mangoes for me. How could I say no?

So she brought me this bucket o' mangoes:

And I went to work on it. Straight into the food processor, to make a nice purée o' mangoes. So here's the recipe for two quarts of ice cream (modified from Perfect Scoop).

4 champagne mangoes

2/3 cup sugar

2/3 cup water

4 tsp freshly squeezed lime juice (really, use freshly squeezed - bottled lime juice is the suck)

2 tbsp dark rum

pinch o' salt

I made double this recipe, so I had to pour out the mango purée into a bowl to work with it. Mix it with everything else. Let it sit in the fridge overnight to chill it before running it through your ice cream maker.

Run it through the ice cream maker, as per your ice cream maker's instructions (for the KitchenAid ice cream maker attachment, mix it for about 25 minutes in an ice cream maker that's been in the freezer for the last 24 hours). Then toss it in your freezer to fully harden.

What a refreshing dessert. Sweet. Velvety in your mouth (really!). And fresh. This is great for a July 4th weekend bbq. Enjoy.

The Power of the Googles

Blogging really is, at least on some level, an ego trip. I admit it. Hell, I revel in it.

I use the nifty tools that Google Analytics makes available for bloggers to look and see where people are who are reading my blog. What fun! I've got a returning reader in Pakistan! I've had readers in Belgium and Germany who looked at more than one page! Ah, the power of the internets. But most interestingly, I can see which Google search terms resulted in people clicking through here. And I find that fascinating. So in the same style as Jenni Field at Pastry Methods and Techniques, I bring you the search terms folks have used to find me, interpreted into a question (if I can) and my answer.

1) Do you have a lazy margarita recipe?

I think you're asking for an easy margarita recipe. Ask, and ye shall receive. A classic margarita recipe that takes very little time to prepare.

2) Do you have a habanero pineapple recipe?

Why yes. Yes I do.

3) If you're using frozen rhubarb to make a pie, should you thaw it?

No. No, don't ever thaw rhubarb for pie. Like most frozen fruit, it'll turn into soup when it thaws. Use the frozen rhubarb, but bake it longer when you're making the rhubarb pie.

4) How do you bbq pizza using indirect heat?

As it happens, I have a recipe!

5) Is limp rhubarb okay?

Yes. It makes me sad to see limp rhubarb, but you can still use it to make quite lovely pie. Just cut off any brown parts.

6) How do you slow cook wild boar over indirect heat?

Well, I guess you would use normal indirect heat techniques. I've never cooked wild boar, but basically, any meat you're cooking... Start the fire on one side of the grill, put the wild boar (dead, preferably) on the other side of the grill, and cook until done. In all seriousness, it depends on the cut. But drop me a line if you have a source for wild boar.

This has been the first installment of the power of the Googles. See you next time!

Indirect Heat's Home Smoked Brisket

When I first moved to Texas from Canada twelve years ago, I had a Canadian's conception of barbecue.  Bbq is burgers.  Hot dogs.  On a day you're feeling fancy, bbq is steak.

In Texas, barbecue is only when you're using indirect heat, low and slow, over hours and hours to break down the meat.  In Texas, brisket is the king of barbecue.

Brisket is a rather nasty cut of meat.  It's tough.  It's fatty.  And it takes a damn long time to break down the fat.  

Brisket is very high in collagen, a connective tissue that holds meat together.  It takes a long time to break down collagen so that the meat is a nice consistency.  If you do this at a normal meat-cooking temperature, by the time the collagen has broken down you'll have a brisket biscuit.  Yuck.  So instead, we cook the meat low and slow, to allow the collagen to break down.  The real trick is to do this without drying out the meat too much.  A good brisket harnesses indirect heat in the best possible way.  As far as I'm concerned, brisket is quintessential barbecue.  Cook it low (low temperature) and slow (long, loooong time on the bbq) and it will fall apart beautifully, and better than even the highest quality cuts of beef.

I have an old-standard brisket that I make pretty regularly.  I will not be writing about that today.  Rather, I recently cooked a modification of a new recipe for brisket, from Adam Perry Lang's new book, Serious Barbecue. Get yourself a decent sized brisket.  Outside of Texas, you'll need to go to a butcher, and explain what you want.  In Maryland I had to special order brisket.  In San Diego, there is one place that cuts the briskets the way I want, Iowa Meat Farm.  I like to do them big, up to 16 lbs.  The bigger it is, the longer you can smoke it before it dries out.  Certainly anything smaller than 10 lbs is too small to properly smoke.  Get up early.  If you're serving brisket for dinner, you'll need to be lighting the fire around 11 hours before you serve it (for us, around 7 a.m.).  So get up, pull the brisket out of the fridge and then light the charcoal on your grill.  While you wait for your grill to heat up, make the paste:

5 tbsp ancho chile powder

3 tbsp dijon mustard

3 tbsp beef bouillon

Mix the ingredients into a nice, goopy paste (add a tiny bit of water to make it easier to rub if necessary).  Now massage this into the brisket.  I've read about massaging meat before, this is the first paste that I really felt like I really needed to work it in.  Indeed, my wife asked me if I needed time alone with the brisket...

Tell me that doesn't look incredible!

Now, the next step is to make the seasoning:

1/4 cup garlic salt

3 tbsp coarsely ground black pepper

2 tbsp chili powder

1 tbsp lemon pepper

2 tsp kosher salt

3/4 tsp cayenne pepper

Sprinkle that lovely stuff all over the meat.  The paste will help it stick.  Now take a breather, and leave the meat to warm up for an hour or so.  Gives you enough time to make breakfast for your family.  Try waffles.  

Towards the end of the hour, move the charcoal over to one side of your grill.  You don't want your brisket anywhere near that heat.  You're going to have a pile of screaming hot coals on one side of the grill, and a brisket on the other.  The real trick to bbq is judging how your grill holds the heat.  How much charcoal you need to warm it up, how often you need to feed the fire.

Close your grill, and warm it up to 225 F.  You want to hold it around 225 the entire cook.  In the beginning and the end is the hardest.  In the beginning, because you have a 16 lb heat sink that's absorbing heat, in the end because the fire is smothering itself in 12 hours of ashes.  Now gently brush the brisket with canola oil, and place it on the grill, fat side up, away from the heat.  You want indirect heat for your brisket.  This is the magic of indirect heat.

Keep the grill closed as much as possible.  When you open it, feed the fire as quickly as possible, and even don't open the lid fully to add charcoal.  Each time you open it, you're letting precious heat out, and giving another 15 minutes to heat up the grill.  Soak mesquite wood chips (really, you want mesquite for brisket) and add them every time you open it to add the mesquite flavor.  And wait.  And wait.  And wait.  You're gonna have that brisket on there basically all day.  You've got time to read a book.  Play video games.  Play bocce with your kids.  And prepare other dishes for dinner.

While you're waiting, you might as well make barbecue sauce:

1/2 cup canola oil

5 garlic cloves, chopped

1 onion, chopped

1 green bell pepper, chopped

2 tsp salt

1/4 cup bourbon

3 tbsp chili powder

1 tbsp coarsely ground black pepper

1/4 tsp allspice

1/4 tsp cloves

1 cup dark brown sugar

2 cups water

2 cups ketchup

1/2 cup molasses

1/2 cup dijon mustard

1/2 cup apple cider vinegar

2 tsp hot sauce (I used sriracha)

1/2 cup apricot preserves

1 jalapeno chile, grated

1/2 Granny Smith apple, grated

Sautée the onions, garlic, pepper and salt in the oil until lightly browned and the onions are translucent.  Pour in the bourbon.  This is the best part, cause the whole kitchen will smell like bourbon while you reduce the sauce.  After most of the bourbon has boiled off, add the spices, and sautée for a few more minutes.  The whole kitchen will now smell absolutely ridiculously amazing.  

And it'll start looking pretty ridiculously yummy, also.  Cook for a few minutes, but this stage must come to an end.  Add everything else.  Boil for an hour or so to reduce the sauce, and adjust seasoning to your taste (if it were just for me, I'd dial up the heat a bit, but most of our guests don't like heat the way I do, so I left it as is).

When it cools a bit, run it through a blender, or work it a bit with your immersion blender.

Okay, back to the brisket.  Over the 11-12 hours you cook it, it should darken.  Even blacken.

Don't freak out.  The blackening doesn't indicate burning of your brisket, just darkening of the spices on the outside of the brisket.

The magic of indirect heat will transmogrify your meat into a beautiful brisket.

The way you can tell it's done is that when you poke a bbq fork in it, you won't be able to properly pick it up.  It'll start to fall apart, rather than pick up.

Take it off the grill, bring it in the kitchen, and let it rest for 20 minutes to half an hour.  Otherwise, when you cut into it, you'll be cleaning juices off the floor.  You need the juices to congeal a bit.

Slice it against the grain.  Serve with the bbq sauce on the side (really, Texans will thank you for this).

But the one tradition that you have my permission to break?  Crappy Wonder Bread.  In traditional bbq in Texas, it's served with a slice of the nastiest white bread on earth.  They say it's necessary.  I say it's nasty.

Serve it with whatever you need to, but leave out the Wonder Bread.

Father's Day gifts.

In our house this year, Father's Day is about Father.  i.e., me.  So I'm going to smoke a brisket.  There's nothing more relaxing to me than tending a fire, and checking in on a giant slab of meat over the course of a day.  It will leave me time to have a beer (or two), to read a book (or two) and to play hockey with my 3-year old in the den.

I don't think I'm the only guy that looks forward to Father's Day as a day of meat and grilling.  So, if you don't mind, I'm going to make a few suggestions for Father's Day gifts for the meat-lover in your life that are really great resources, but that don't get the publicity of some of the more famous chefs and bbq enthusiasts.

First, up.  Pork and Sons.

This beautiful little book suggests all the fun French ways you can cook pork.  It has a particularly magical recipe for what to do with pig's feet.  I'll write about this some day, but suffice it to say, you boil the crap out of them, shred the meat, pack it into sausages with fried shallots, and pack them into sausage shapes to harden.  Broil slices of the resulting sausage, and serve slices on crackers.  And watch the faces of your loved ones (who will no doubt claim that they're not that into pig's feet) go from cautious to rapture.

Second up is my go-to bbq book.  This one has everything, and the worst recipes in here are merely good.  

I bring you Smoke & Spice.

I've already written about the beef tenderloin in here, and plan to do posts on some pulled pork and whole chicken preparations in the future.  This book is all yummy all the time.

My final meat book for you is my cured meat bible, Charcuterie.

I confess, I have experimented less with this book than with the other two.  But this book is worth it for the bacon recipe alone.  As everyone knows, bacon is pure yummy.  Home-made bacon is to grocery store bacon as a Porsche is to a Honda.  It's the stuff, and if you have a smoker, it's really very little time investment.  

All 3 of these books are fantastic references, and guaranteed to keep you in delicious meat.

Good luck with your last minute Father's Day shopping.

Familiar Food

When it comes to food, I'm not a traditionalist.  I don't buy into the idea that you have to drink beer with barbecue.  Sometimes I drink wine.  I also don't buy into the idea that barbecue needs to be served with a crappy slice of Wonder bread (though many great bbq restaurants do, indeed, serve crappy Wonder bread with their beautiful, tender, slow-smoked meat).  

I'm quite convinced that the majority of people (foodie and otherwise) aren't as interested in having food that tastes good as they are in having food that tastes familiar.  This is why people will argue long and hard about the "proper" way to smoke a brisket, and about whether Tennessee or North Carolina-style pork is "better".  The traditional barbecue community is afflicted with this love-of-the-familiar as much as foodies are.  That's why I was delighted to find this new book by a barbecue aficionado who clearly loves barbecue, but doesn't feel constrained by tradition.

Adam Perry Lang trained in world-class restaurants, before deciding to focus on barbecue, and as such brings a fresh perspective to barbecue.  His recipes are exciting, and look like good fun, including everything from leg of lamb to whole pig roasting, and everything in between.  The instructions included are sufficient for the beginner, so this could be a good introduction to barbecue (though many of the recipes do call for chile peppers that may be challenging to source locally).

I'm looking forward to cooking from this book, and will report back after I've made his beef brisket.  Stay tuned.

Pineapple-habañero salsa

I love hot food.  And habaneros are hot.  Hot hot hot!  The first time I read a recipe with habañeros, it warned "Wear gloves when handling habañeros".  Bah.  I figured, just don't touch my eyes or lick my fingers until after I've washed my hands.  How hot could they be?  So I chopped and seeded the habañeros, and vigorously washed my hands.  I did some more work in the kitchen, washed my hands.  Cleaned the dishes, washed my hands.  And then I wiped my nose.  HOLY SWEET FRACKING BURNING BLAZE OF NOSTRIL DEATH!!!  It took over an hour for the burn to subside.  Due to the magnitude of the burn, and its oil-solubility means that it hangs around for a while, and it is quite unpleasant.  If you don't have gloves, keep your hands off of your eyes, nose, children, small pets...  Just use gloves.  Really.

This salsa is very tasty.  Sweet.  Bright.  A tiny bit of a burn.  I dialed up the heat from the original version, from Gourmet (back when they liked food).

1/2 pineapple, peeled and coarsely chopped (2 cups)

2 tbsp fresh pineapple juice

2 tbsp fresh lime juice

1 tbsp mild molasses

3 scallions, finely chopped

1 minced seeded habañero

1 tsp chopped fresh thyme

3/4 tsp salt

1/4 tsp ground allspice

Chop, mix, and let sit for at least an hour to let the flavours blend.  Enjoy with chips while cooking.

Smokin' pizza.

I'm one of those foreigners your mother warned you about.  Stealing your jobs, and stealing your women.  (No seriously, I work in America, and married an American - I guess I'm a bad one).  So I confess, most American holidays don't mean much to me.  So I tend to celebrate Memorial Day as a bbq weekend. Not that different from most Americans, but I have an excuse.

This year, the Memorial Day weekend is a low key event here.  Our first night is a grilled pizza night, which takes advantage of the direct and indirect heat of a large grill.  Smoked pizza is the shiz-nit.  Really.  Everyone loves it (cause who doesn't love pizza??), but at the same time, if done properly, it adds the exotic flavour of smoke and all the fun cheeses you can get your hands on, which makes me very happy. 

This makes 4 largish, individual pizzas:

2 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil

1 C water, room temperature

2 C bread flour, plus more for work surface

1 tbsp whole wheat flour

2 tsp sugar

1¼ tsp salt

1 tsp instant yeast

Mix the yeast, sugar and water, and let the yeast bloom a moment.  I just like to watch the yeast hydrate and get all fired up (I'm a microbiologist - sue me).  Add oil, flours and salt (in that order) and mix (or knead) until the dough starts to feel a tiny bit dry.  As with all bread doughs, you may need to add a little more flour to get the right consistency.

Put into an oiled bowl, cover and let rise for 1-2 hours.  

While it's rising, prep the toppings.  First you'll want an oil.  This pizza isn't tomato-sauce based.  It's not easy to do a tomato-based pizza on the grill.  Too heavy, and too wet.  So we do an oil based pizza (who doesn't love oil?).  Heat:

4 medium garlic cloves, minced

½ tsp red pepper flakes

⅓ C extra-virgin olive oil

until they start to bubble.  Pull them off the stove and pour into a bowl to cool.  You're gonna use this yummy stuff later (and any leftovers goes great on sandwiches).

Also, prep the toppings.  We like tomato on our pizza, so we get the moisture out of some tomatoes by chopping them up, pulling out the seedy, messy gunk, and salting the remaining flesh liberally.  Leave it in a colander over the sink, and shake it every once in a while to get the water out.  You'll be left with a nice, drier, salty tomato chunks.  

For this batch of pizza, we also prepped some pepperoni, shredded fresh basil leaves, fresh pineapple, shallots, leftover smoked brisket chunks and orange peppers.

For cheese?  You can use the standard pizza cheeses, of course, but I prefer a mixture of mozzarella (of course), parmesan and fontina.  Fontina gives that nice odour of dirty feet - but in a good way.  Nice and sweet and fragrant.  It mixes with the flavour of the smoke beautifully.  But of course, it's pizza.  So how can you go wrong?

After rising, cut the dough into four parts, roll into small balls (with a bit of flour, to keep your fingers and the surfaces dry), and cover.  Let rise 15ish minutes.  Roll out with a rolling pin.  This dough is NOT like a regular pizza dough.  You want it to be thinner, so you really need a rolling pin to get the thinness required.  Roll out gently once, let rest 15 minutes, then roll again to get a nice pizza size.  While the dough is resting, get the grill started, get the charcoal to be nice and white hot.  Ultimately you'll want a nice hot fire on only half of your grill surface.

Here's where the trickiness starts - when the fire gets to the right level - transfer the rolled-out dough to the grill.  If you haven't properly floured the surface of the dough, this part will be a TOTAL disaster.  Sticky dough, flames, death.  You listening to me?  So make sure the dough is properly floured.  And make sure the fire isn't too hot.  You want it hot, but no open flame, or you'll singe the dough rather than cook it.

So set the dough on the fire, and let it cook.  Not too long.  DO NOT WALK AWAY FROM THE FIRE.  This part is done really, really fast.  I have entirely too many scorched pizza doughs waiting for me in pizza hell, and we don't need to send any more there.  So really, keep an eye on that dough.  It takes only 45-90 seconds to properly cook the dough.  It'll bubble up on the top - go ahead and pop those bubbles, and pull that pizza dough off when the underside is nicely browned.  It'll look pretty yummy at this point.

Flip it over.  You're going to dress the browned side.  Brush on garlic pepper oil.  Then dress the pizza with the ingredients listed above (when we serve these at a party, we'll let our guests dress their own pizzas).  Just make sure it's not too heavy, otherwise it becomes unwieldy on the grill.  Slide the pizza back onto the grill, away from the fire.  Close up the grill, and smoke it long enough to melt the cheese, generally 5-10 minutes.  When the cheese is melted to your satisfaction, move back over the fire and brown the underside of the dough.  You'll see the cheeze bubble, and it'll be done in less than a minute.  Remove from heat, chop, serve, and bask in smoked pizza glory.

Truly, this is a crowd-pleaser.  You'll never make people happier than serving them something they already love, but in a way they never expected.

Happy long weekend.