Pulled pork fishsticks

We first visited Joe Beef in Montréal a few months ago. It's a fun, meat-centric restaurants, with over-the-top, creative dishes and cocktails. I purchased their book, The Art of Living According to Joe Beef: A Cookbook of Sorts as soon as it was available, and have been salivating over their dish, pulled pork fishsticks, ever since. But I needed a proper occasion to cook this over-the-top dish.

Here's how it works. You make pulled pork. You smoke a pork butt for 8 hours and then pull it. Then you mix it with bbq sauce and dissolved gelatin. You form them into a tray and allow them to gelatinize. Then you cut them into sticks, bread them and deep fry them.

Well, our occasion arrived, in the form of Foodapalooza 2012. I'm going to present a slightly modified version from what I made, as I wasn't thrilled with Joe Beef's bbq sauce, but this is inspired by their recipe, and is guaranteed to delight meatlover's everywhere:

½ of a pulled pork butt
¾ cup pulled pork bbq sauce
3 tbsp finely chopped shallots
3 sheets gelatin
salt and pepper
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 tbsp Old Bay seasoning
2 eggs
2 cups panko bread crumbs
canola oil for deep frying

Soak the gelatin sheets in icewater while warming the bbq sauce in a small saucepan. When the sauce starts to boil, remove from heat. Squeeze the icewater out of the gelatin, and add the gelatin to the sauce. Stir until the gelatin dissolves.



Mix the sauce, pulled pork and finely chopped shallots. Mix very well, and check the seasoning. Adjust with salt and pepper. Line a small sheet pan with plastic wrap. Press the meat into the pan, making it about ½" thick all throughout the pan. Push the meat together tightly. Chill overnight.

In the morning, remove the plastic wrap from the pan, and remove the meat from the plastic wrap. Slice into fishstick-sized pieces (I cut these into 21 pieces). Set up a breading station. First bowl has the flour and Old Bay seasoning. Second has the eggs, beaten until foamy. Third has the panko bread crumbs. While you're heating the oil in a pan, bread the sticks. Coat them with flour, then coat them with egg, then coat them with panko bread crumbs.

When the oil hits 350°F, fry the sticks in small batches until the bread crumbs are a nice brown colour. Fish out of the hot oil, and set on paper towels to drain for a few moments. Serve.

Deep-fried, smoky, acidic goodness. This is a decadent little meat-bomb, and it's guaranteed to please.



By Bbq Dude

Chicken fingers

Why is the kid's menu [in restaurants] the same as the bar menu? Have you noticed that? Bbq Jr's favourite restaurant item is the chicken finger. Processed, mealy chicken, breaded in some pasty, gooey mess. Salt. Protein. Fat. But no flavour. Bbq Jr has excellent taste for a five-year old, but he is just five. We're working on expanding that.

For his birthday, we gave him his favourite meal. But with a twist. I whipped up some homemade chicken fingers, but with chicken tenders (the meat next to the breast). And seasoned. And breaded nicely.

chicken tenders (boneless chicken cut adjacent to the breast)
milk
flour
salt
chipotle chile powder
paprika
eggs
panko bread crumbs
giant pot o' peanut oil

Make 4 separate bowls. One contains milk.  Second contains flour, seasoned heavily with salt, chipotle, and paprika. Third, beaten eggs. Fourth, panko bread crumbs.



Soak the chicken tenders in the milk while you start heating the oil. You're gonna want the oil at around 375°F. When the oil is close to hot enough, dredge the chicken tenders in the seasoned flour. Shake off excess flour, then dredge in the beaten egg. Shake off excess egg, then dredge gently through the panko. One of the nice things about panko is the texture. Don't damage the texture.



Repeat with as many tenders as you plan to make (2-3/person is tons).

The trick with deep-frying is to not be afraid of the oil. Lower the chicken tender into the oil so that you don't splash the hot oil on yourself. Your fingers will end up pretty close to the oil surface. Be careful, but *do not be afraid*.



Cook until the chicken tenders are a nice dark brown, and cooked all the way through (I test 1 tender/batch by cutting into them). About four to seven minutes.

Use a slotted spoon to remove the tenders from the oil.



Further season with grey sea salt. Serve with plum sauce and homemade ketchup.



This was a hit with Bbq Jr. "Best chicken fingers, Daddy!" Goes to show, even bar food can be brought up a notch.

Rack of venison with turkey-venison jus

Mrs. Dude and I have a deal. Over the Christmas holidays, she gets a traditional smoked turkey dinner (I'd rather have a goose or duck or squab than turkey). We make all the fixings. In exchange, I get to cook whatever I want for the rest of the holidays. I confess, I do end up going a little hog-wild. This year, I walked past the meat counter at Whole Foods, and the rack of venison spoke to me. I had to have it. As an impulse buy, I brought home that rack of venison.

I modified the rack of venison with jus recipe from Meat: A Kitchen Education. The basic recipe for the jus requires some meat schmutz (That is, the brown stains on the pan you get from browning meat). James Peterson supplies the extra schmutz by browning some veal stew meat. I provided it using some turkey schmutz I had from browning some turkey necks. Substitute whatever meat schmutz you have on hand.

1 rack of venison (1 ½ lb)
2 cups turkey stock
turkey (or other meat) schmutz from browning the meat
1 tbsp salt (sel gris)
pepper
1 shallot 

Start with a beautiful rack o' venison. Look at that beautiful slab o' meat. Pull it out of the fridge an hour in advance to come up to room temperature.



After reading Salted: A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, I've been experimenting with more different finishing salts. In this particular case, I used a sel gris I got from Penzey's. It's a large crystal salt.



It makes a nice crust when you pat it on the outside of the rack of venison.



Dust the venison with fresh cracked pepper. Preheat the oven to 450°F. Slice the shallot, and place in the pan under the venison. Place the rack into the oven, bake for 25ish minutes, or until it registers 130°F when you insert a thermometer into the side, avoiding the bone. That'll give you a nice medium-rare venison.

Meanwhile, deglaze your schmutz with turkey stock. I heated the pan I had used to brown turkey necks for a few minutes with the turkey stock in there, scraping periodically.





When you pull the rack of venison out of the oven, transfer the rack to a cutting board and cover with foil to rest for ten-fifteen minutes.



Transfer the deglazed schmutz to your venison pan. Deglaze that schmutz over medium-high heat. Add turkey stock as necessary to keep the pan from drying out.



Look at that delicious stuff. Finally, pour through a fine sieve shortly before serving.



Once you've rested your venison, carve into individual ribs.



Bask in the wonder of venison.



Love that salt crust.



Serve with a little jus dribbled on top.



Delicioso. Two out of three members of the Dude family *loved* it. Mrs. Dude found the venison to be a bit gamy for her taste. I found different parts of the rack to have different amounts of gaminess, but I loved them all. And the turkey-venison jus complimented everything perfectly.

Served with:

Novel steak cuts

Everyone who eats meat should see this.

No, this isn't some alarming PeTA video.  This is the tale of "honestly raised honorably killed pork". Go read more at Hounds in the Kitchen.  Fantastic:

What follows is a factual account of how we humanely harvested this meat animal. It was hard manual labor that we attended to with reverence for the life we took.

I have included pictures to illustrate exactly what happened. Some readers may find this subject and the photographs graphic. If that’s the case for you, you might want to wait to read a reflective and less intense post I will publish next week. Intrepid readers, keep on.

I eat critters.

At the beginning of the year, I made a New Year's resolution to eat as many different cuts and critters as possible this year.  I made an admirable start, but have at least partly fallen off the wagon and resorted back to cuts of beef and pork.  I'll try harder!!!

I do have one limitation to my resolution, and to all of my critter consumption activities - I try very hard not to eat anything endangered.  It doesn't seem friendly to eat the last dodo bird.  Then no one else gets to eat any.  I like to share my meat.

For fish, in particular, this is tricky.  In your average sushi place, there are easily 20 different types of seafood.  How do you remember which ones are fished unsustainably, or farmed in rude fashion.  Greenpeace?  Nope, they're nuts.  PeTA?  Even nuttier.  Here's a nice, reality-based resource, run by the Monterey Bay Aquarium, that will keep you educated about what you can eat without worrying that you're contributing to the end of a species.  They've got all kinds of organized lists, and give you as much or as little information as you want.  Check 'em out, and print out their list.  Bring it with you when you're out shopping or eating.

I was particularly happy to see that scallops were on the good fish list.