Wordless Wednesday: Ruby

Lemon confit

One of my favourite bbq books, Adam Perry Lang's Serious Barbecue, has a very particular way for finishing meat. In many cases, he suggests zesting a lemon or lime onto a cutting board. You then drizzle a little juice on the board, with a bit of olive oil, and you have a delightful finisher for the meat. The bright flavour of the citrus oils really brightens the meat.

Seven Fires offers a similar technique. They call it lemon confit. The flavour it offers is a subtler, more muted citrus oil flavour, but it's just as delightful. We start with:

4 lemons
2 bay leaves
8 black peppercorns
extra virgin olive oil
1/2 cup dry white wine
1 tsp kosher salt

Juice the lemons. Save the juice for another application (lemonade, anyone?). Place the squeeze lemon halves into a pan with all of the other ingredients, and 2 tsp of the extra virgin olive oil.



Cover with water, and simmer over low heat about 35 minutes.



What you want is for the white pith of the lemon to loosen from the peel. Cool the liquid.



Remove the lemons from the liquid and scrape the white parts out of the peel.



Chop the peel finely.



Drizzle olive oil over top of the confit lemon. Cover. This will store in the fridge for a least a week. Use this lemon confit to dress up meat, and add a milder zest flavour to your meat.

Argentine onion sammich

Meat figures pretty largely here at Indirect Heat. But how about you're at the end of a meat extravaganza weekend, and you'd like something lighter. But with all the delightfulness of smoked food. A nice Sunday evening dinner that takes little effort. That's where these sammiches come in, from Seven Fires: Grilling the Argentine Way.  Argentine onion sammiches.  Most of the effort here comes in the waiting form of effort.  Waiting for the grill to warm up.  Waiting for the dough to rise.  Waiting with a glass of wine in hand.  Not bad work, if you can get it.


First, start a batch of chapa bread - about 2 hours before dinner time.  Use the instructions at the link.

Half an hour before dinner, fire up your charcoal grill, and prepare:

2 large purple onions, sliced
⅛ cup extra virgin olive oil
2 tbsp fresh rosemary leaves
kosher salt and fresh ground pepper to taste

Mix all the ingredients. Heat a cast-iron pan over your fire for 5 minutes, until it's good and hot. Add the onions.



You can grill the chapa bread at the same time.

Grill the onions for 10 to 15 minutes, stirring occasionally.  You don't want completely caramelized onions.



You want some crispness in there.

Slice the chapa breads in half, and make yourself an Argentine onion sammich, onions in between two slabs of chapa bread.



The smokiness of the bread and the onions, with that hint of crispness keeping a tiny bit of the bright purple onion flavour, makes these sandwiches a really nice dinner. Delcieux.

Served with the embarrassingly tasty:

Wordless Wednesday: Grilled poblano