Food

New York BBQ Festival

This past weekend was the New York BBQ Festival. I went and stuffed my face. This is one of those things that my group always talks about going to but then never does. This year I’m happy to say we made it, though I do have to recommend arriving at around 11:00.

I go there five minutes before everyone else and managed to eat a fried blackberry pie while waiting. Then I wept openly on the sidewalk. God that pie was good.

Sadly I ate it too fast to photograph, but here are some other shots. Most of them are fuzzy due to smoke…which is awesome.

Here we have the world’s greatest traffic sign:

Here is a proud member of the BBQ family alongside his tools:

Here we have delicious, delicious sausage being grilled:

Here’s an old pro serving up some pulled pork sandwiches (these were the most delicious things I tasted all day by the way):

And the following are various signs on various smokers. Apparently BBQ enthusiasts also love word play:

Fantastic day, was home napping and full of meats by one.

And, again, I have to recommend showing up early. This was taken at maybe 12:30:

Not a seat to be found.

Man those sandwiches were good…

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Last Sunday’s Cooking

The pots were rallied and the pans were rounded up again this past weekend for some more adventures in cooking.

If you ever cook anything anywhere for anyone, always start with one of these:

No matter how badly you mess up the rest of your meal, people will remember the delicious cheese and olives.

The rest of the menu was very simple. Normally I like to cook 80,000 dishes and take over my friends’ apartments for hours on end, but this time there were only three dishes. Although they did take lots of time and space so that was good.

The simplest was a zucchini pancake:

Shredded zucchini was salted heavily and allowed to sit in a colander for twenty minutes to purge out moisture. Then it was wrapped in cloth and squeeeeeeeeezed to get more water out. Then some beaten egg whites (soft peaks) were folded in with some seasonings, flour and sugar. Finally it was pan fried in oil. Very nice. And no I don’t have a picture of the final product. That would make too much sense.

The second dish was osso buco. This sounds crazy fancy but it’s just veal shanks seasoned, dredged in some flour and seared off in oil:

These then get transferred to a dutch oven. Actually you can brown the shanks in the dutch oven to start with but there was some pan confusion so that didn’t quite happen. Anyway, deglaze what you can with chicken stock and some wine, throw in your normal trinity and some fresh herbs (rosemary makes things happy) and put into a 350 degree oven for about two hours making sure the liquid in the pan covers the shanks. Pull when fork tender.

The final dish was insane and wasn’t actually my department. My friend made raviolis. Home made raviolis. Like the pasta was from scratch.

Isn’t that pretty? Flour and eggs and a pasta roller and you get these nice sheets of pasta. They then get cut:

This basically amounts to slave labor, constant kneading and rolling and sheeting and cutting. But it’s fun. There’s a lesson there about the nature of work and your attitude towards it but never mind that because here’s the crazy part: the raviolis were BEET raviolis.

Baked beets were shredded. And yes I know this looks terrifying:

Then they were mixed with ricotta and seasonings. And yes I know this looks trippy:

Then the ravs were stuffed creating an army of scalloped pasta to do one’s bidding:

Pretty weird looking, rather labor intensive, very delicious.

A poppy butter sauce makes a nice finish.

Also you should drink wine.

Like a  lot of it.

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Pork and Earl

Normally after I cook things I try and get some pictures of the dish and provide some semblance of a recipe to share with you all. At least, that’s what I decided I would do after my last cooking excursion. I shall be known as that cook guy who also writes books.

As I mentioned last week, my big Labor Day attempt was going to be the making of pulled pork.  However, I didn’t get a whole lot of  pictures of the food that was made. I did get a lot of pictures of the sorts of waves a hurricane stirs up when it’s passing by miles away, as that is precisely what Hurricane Earl was doing. So we’ll do a sort of hodge podge here of pictures of waves and descriptions of pork and it will make perfect sense.

First, here is what I drank:

I love that picture and I think Maker’s Mark or Canada Dry should buy it off me.

As for cooking, and as I just said, the main dish was pulled pork. I had to go with cooking in a normal oven as my smoker has been banned from my family’s house. But it turned out marvelously. Not that I have any real recipes to come away with, but I learned a lot about the various techniques. First I brined the pork:

I basically kept putting salt into water until it tasted brackish to me. This measurement means a lot more than cups and gallons as I can never remember that, but I will remember how salty the water tasted. Then I dumped in sugar until it wasn’t horrible to taste. Then I soaked the pork shoulder for about fifteen hours. I think I could go ahead and soak for much longer as well as add some spices to the brine. The finished product, while delicious, could have used some added seasoning and brining supposedly lets the flavors in the soaking liquid fill up the inside of the meat. I’m told that purists don’t like to brine pork shoulder as they prefer a milder flavor and brining tends to make things taste “too much like ham.” But it’s my damned pork and I wanted more saltiness so a longer soak next time I think.

Then I made up a spice rub and applied it:

No idea what was in it. I smelled the spices I had until I had a pungent, spicy mess of powders which I then coated the meat with once I had removed it from the brine.  I let this sit for awhile in an attempt to brine the meat and dry rub it…no idea if that’s legal but it’s what I did. I’m not entirely sure how much this added as I had to use a semi-wet cooking method so all the spices might have simply dripped off in the oven. I would probably pay more attention to my brine next time and less to my rub. But I wouldn’t cook my meat naked, either.

Then I put the pork into a disposable roasting pan and threw in some quartered onions and some celery. Then I added some Maker’s Mark and water. Not a lot, maybe enough until the liquid came half an inch up the sides of the pan:

Next I set the oven for 250 degrees, covered the pan in foil and let her sit in there for about nine hours. The resulting meat was utterly wonderful. It was so tender that I didn’t really pull or shred it so much as tap it with a spoon and watch it dissolve into moist pieces of pork:

And that’s really it. A simple easy recipe. Once shredded, the meat was wonderful by itself or spread on a potato roll with a slice of swiss cheese to top it.

Bon appetit!

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Hog Wild

This coming Labor Day weekend I shall be heading out to New Jersey to spend some time drinking beer, dodging possible hurricanes and cooking. This happens a few weekends over the course of any given summer (minus the possible hurricane) but it is usually only once a summer that I do battle against my most ancient of foe, the pork butt.

And, no, that doesn’t mean…you know…pork butt. It’s what they call a pork shoulder, which is what pulled pork is made out of, and it was my great honor and great mistake a few years ago to say, “You know what? I think I’ll try making some of that pulled pork.”

This resulted in hours of research on rubs:

Way too many trips to the hardware store:

The building of a homemade smoker:

And a lot of very tasty, but not quite perfect, cooked pig:

For someone who’s a bit of a neurotic perfectionist, pulled pork represents the ideal cooking project. You can tinker with near unlimited elements from your rub to your smoke to your technique, it takes tons of time so you really feel like you’ve got your teeth into a project, there’s heat management and multiple phases to fret over and at the end everyone is so drunk and starving because it always takes four hours longer than you told them that all you get are compliments on how good it tastes.

This weekend I go into battle one more time. The homemade smoker, sadly, has been scrapped and I am left with only a standard oven for this year’s try.

Unconventional? Yes.

Lacking the utter craziness of past attempts? Yes.

Downright sacrilegious to barbecue enthusiasts? Yes.

A quest I refuse to give up on despite all of this?

Hells yes.

On Saturday it’s time to get my pork on, come hell or hurricane.

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Things That Were Made (Smoked) Last Weekend

Last summer, some of you might recall, I made a foray in the art of cooking with smoke and decided to make the homemade smoker from Alton Brown’s show, Good Eats.  You take an earthenware flower pot, put a hot plate at the bottom, a tin full of chips on top of that, a grill grate down inside of it, you put your meat on the grill grate, top it off with another pot, then plug it in and walk away:

It works frightiningly well.  I’ve heard people talk about how finicky smokers are and how using them outside can be tough because the weather can affect your temperature, but the earthenware is so thick and so good at holding onto heat that it never wavered. It always held at a nice 200-210 degrees through pretty strong wind and even some sprinkles.

The first day I made pulled pork.  Pulled pork takes a loooooong time.  I was up early:

Then the pork went on:

Twelve hours later the pork came off:

Awesome bark, great flavor, extremely tender.  The only thing I would change is that I’d like to try giving it a longer brine.  I was only able to soak it over night which, considering I got it in late and was up early, wasn’t that long a time.  I’d like to give it like a four day soak and see how that effects things.

But otherwise I’m so very happy with my smoker.  If anything, actually, the thing is too easy to use.  The next day we decided to smoke some more stuff.  I did some sausages that I stuffed with jalapenos and cheese:

Those turned out pretty well:

There were some ribs that were smoked as well but I didn’t get a shot of them. They turned out awesome.  There was talk of smoking some chicken wings but that never materialized.  For that matter there was talk of smoking a pizza and a hot dog bun and possibly some Cheetos and, had we not been incredibly stuffed full of food, we probably would have tried it.

Also, you’ll notice that there isn’t a damned vegetable in sight. I was so fixated on getting the pork right that I didn’t exactly round out the meal.  Yes, we had coleslaw, but that was really just part of the pork delivery system.  Then again had there been any vegetables lying around I most likely would have tried to smoke them (I’m sitting here wondering how many stoners are going to wander onto this blog post).

So this, the second outing with my crazy-ass homemade smoker, was such a success that I think I had my fill of smoked meats for about six  months.  Which is good and bad.

Oh, and you’ll notice in the top picture how I use a seashell to block the hole on the top of the smoker.  This is what the shell looked like at the end of the weekend:

Which I think is beautiful.

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Things That Were Cooked Last Weekend

I had a cooking outing on Saturday.  I will attempt to walk you through this visually, although being busy cooking means not being free to take photos.  Some of the more interesting stuff went undocumented and some of the better looking stuff was cooked not by me but by my happy cooking friend.

So be it.

Everything started at Whole Foods in Columbus Circle:

This is the only picture I was able to take inside before being told I wasn’t allowed to take pictures:

I don’t know why they don’t allow photos.  I’ve never run a store so I’d imagine there are plenty of reasons, the first that springs to mind is that they don’t want a bunch of idiots like myself rearranging their fruit to take photos while paying customers are trying to shop.  But it’s a shame.  That place is beautiful and I’d like to photograph its pants off.

On to cooking.

I was in charge of the protein and we settled on baby back ribs. I went with Alton Brown’s recipe which involves putting a dry rub on the ribs, letting them sit for at least an hour, then wrapping each rack in a separate aluminum foil pouch (I have no before pics of the ribs or the rub sadly):

Here’s an artsy picture of them…aluminum foil is shiny:

You then make a braising liquid, pour some into each pouch, seal the pouches and park them in a low oven for a few hours.  It’s an interesting cooking method, one I’ve never used before, and something went a little wrong.  The ribs tasted great and all but they weren’t BBQ Baby Back Ribs.  They were…I don’t know what they were.  They didn’t have the sticky mahogany coat I was aiming for.  And after they’ve cooked you’re supposed to drain out the remaining liquid from each foil pouch and reduce it to make a glaze. Only it never really reduced into anything except brown water.  I’m thinking I put too much liquid into each pouch.  Braising requires the barest minimum of cooking liquid, otherwise you’re stewing.  So I guess I made stewed ribs.  Which still tasted awesome.

That photo is making me hungry.

We also had Okra…

…which you toss in corn meal.  No egg or flour or any washes are required as Okra is slimy.  I know saying that a food is slimy doesn’t sound that awesome but it allows your dredge to stick to it au natural which makes it fry up surprisingly light and crisp:

We had biscuits.

I didn’t make these.  I hate baking.  My happy cooking friend also claims to hate baking which started to sound a little silly by the end of the night as, among other things, she managed to turn this:

Into this:

Into this:

We also had grits.  I’ve never made grits before.  We used quick grits.  There are grits, which require full cooking time, quick grits, which are specially ground regular grits that require very little cooking time, and then there are instant grits, which are precooked grits which only require hot water to rehydrate.

Here’s a fun experiment.  Try cooking grits in a group and counting how many times My Cousin Vinny comes up in conversation:

It’s a lot. I can’t find the actual clip.  You either know what I’m talking about or you don’t, and if you don’t then you were living in a cave for all of 1992.

Anyway, grits are crazy-stupid-easy.  You boil them for five minutes.  Then you dump cheese and butter into them. We also threw in some chopped jalapenos:

What else…collared greens and fried green (yellow) tomatoes:

No after shots of those.  Both very simple.  Greens get simmered in some salted and sugared water for about 30 minutes or until tooth tender.  Adding cooked bacon and caramelized onions, shockingly, adds some nice flavors.

Tomatoes get floured, egged and dredged then pan fried in some oil.

And here is a shot of some tomato and dill which has nothing to do with anything nor do these two ingredients have anything to do with each other but they looked nice:

There was also key-lime pie and pecan tarts but no pictures were taken of those.

Oh.

Wine and beer:

Can’t forget that.

Joe out.

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