Aussie Pie

Years ago, during my software engineering 'apprenticeship', as it were, in California's Silicon Valley, I was introduced to Aussie Pie.  Aussie Pie is a savory meat (beef, usually), onion, and gravy filling stuffed into a pie crust.  The typical Aussie pie is small enough to be picked up in one hand and eaten without ceremony or fanfare.  In Australia, they're sold as fast food and eaten like we eat hamburgers here in the U.S.

My acquaintance with Aussie Pie dates back to the late 1980s.  Being an inveterate foodie - always have been, always will be - I knew what Aussie Pie was, and based on the ingredients, I knew that I'd probably like it.  Therefore, when I read that an Australian firm was introducing Aussie Pie on a test-marketing basis on the West Coast, my interest was piqued.  When Aussie Pie finally arrived on the scene, I was not disappointed.  I was a bit surprised, however, because the advanced publicity had not proclaimed "coming to a 'ptomaine trunk' near you!"

That's right.  The first Aussie Pie I ever ate I purchased from a cold-serve vending machine.  I had to 'nuke' it to warm it up, but the flavor, texture, and mouth-feel were to die for.  In short, it was the complete package, and I've been a fan ever since.

Now you may ask - and with good reason - just what in the world does the abovegoing 'war story' have to do with Southern home cooking?  Well, the answer is absolutely nothing.  But I've been thinking and remembering about Aussie Pie now for the last couple of days, and I'm thinking I'll take a crack at making Aussie Pie myself.  I'll let you know how it turns out, and over the course of the next few days, I'll describe my labors (and recipe) in detail, which will lead (hopefully - keep your fingers crossed!) to my ultimate triumph.

Happy cooking!

Zucchini, Onions, and Tomatoes

Here's the very first zucchini dish I ever sampled.  It's simple and unpretentious, but it's tasty.

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Zucchini with Onions and Tomatoes

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1 large zucchini squash.
1 small Vidalia onion.
1 small can whole tomatoes.
Vegetable oil.
Salt.
Black pepper.

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Cut zucchini into quarters lengthwise, then cut each quarter crosswise into 1/2-inch slices.

Rough-chop (3/4-inch dice) the onion.

Drain the tomatoes, reserving the liquid, and chop into bite-size pieces.

Into a heavy skillet, pour enough oil to coat the bottom fully.  Place over MEDIUM heat and bring up to cooking temperature.

Cook the zucchini slices, stirring frequently, for 5 minutes.

Add the chopped onion and continue cooking for another 5 minutes.

Reduce heat.  Add the chopped tomatoes and the reserved liquid.

Simmer until most of the liquid has evaporated.

Season to taste with the salt and pepper.  Serve immediately.

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Depending on how large your "large zucchini" is, and on whether you like your vegetables crisp or on the softish side, and upon how much you like onions and tomatoes with your zucchini, you may want to lengthen or shorten the recommended cooking times as well as increase or reduce the recommended amounts of onion and/or tomato.  Recipes are only guidlines anyway, so feel free to experiment.  Hell, I experiment with recipes all the time, so I can't very well feel put out if you do, too.  What's good for the goose, you know.

Happy cooking!

And You Can Stuff Them, Too!

In Friday's post, I mentioned that I've been known to stuff zucchini.  This is not really traditional Southern fare, but it's really good.  Here's how I do it.

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Stuffed Zucchini:

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2 medium Zucchini squash.
1 recipe Meat Stuffing.
Mozzarella or Provolone cheese slices.
Aluminum foil.

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Slice each squash in half lengthwise.

Using a spoon, scrape the seeds out of each half, in order to provide room for the stuffing.

Optional step: For more tender zucchini, wrap individual zucchini slices loosely in foil and bake in a 300 degree oven for 30 minutes.

Spoon stuffing loosely into zucchini halves.

Cover stuffing in each zucchine half with cheese slices.

Wrap each of the individual stuffed zucchini halves in foil, loosely, in order that the cheese doesn't come into contact with the foil (and come off in the foil when you unwrap them).

Bake in a 350 degree oven for 30 minutes. Remove and let stand for 10 minutes.

Carefully remove from foil and serve.

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Meat Stuffing for Zucchini:

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1/2 pound lean ground beef.
2 1/4 pound sweet Italian sausage links.
1 small can whole tomatoes.
1/4 C Italian-style breadcrumbs.
1/4 C Grated Parmesan or Romano cheese.
2 cloves garlic, minced.
1 Shallot, minced.
1/2 t dried oregano.
1/2 t dried sweet basil.
Salt.
Black pepper.

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Remove casing from sausage.  Split the casing with a sharp paring knife, then remove the sausage meat.  Pull the sausage meat apart into bite-size (preferably smaller than bite-size, actually) pieces.

In a heavy skillet over MEDIUM heat, cook the sausage pieces until about half done (still showing a good bit of pink).

Add the ground beef.  Crumble it as you put it into the skillet.  This is easier if the ground beef is referigator-cold.

Just before the ground beef is fully browned, remove from heat and drain through a collander.  Rinse the meat mixture in cold water, in order to rinse off excess fat.  Allow to drain, but not too much, after rinsing.

Return the meat to the skillet, which you have removed from the heat.  Stir in the garlic, shallots, oregano, and (optionally) basil.

Drain the tomatoes, retaining the liquid.  Chop the tomatoes into 1/2 inch pieces.  Add chopped tomatoes and retained tomato liquid to the meat/herb mixture in the skillet.

Cook mixture over LOW heat until half of the liquid has evaporated.  This step is necessary in order that the dry herbs get moistened and softened, and so the flavors of the dry herbs can permeate the mixture.

Allow to cool, then sprinkle breadcrumbs and grated cheese over mixture.  Stir well.

Makes enough stuffing for 2 medium-size zucchinis (4 pieces), and then some.

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Happy cooking!

And By the Way, Frying Works with Zucchini, Too.

It may seem strange that an Italian vegetable would be so popular in the Deep South, and yet this is so.  I don’t know how long this has been, but it must not be a very long time.  Nevertheless, I had my first experience of zucchini before I was ten years old.

Our next-door neighbor (and Nannie’s contemporary) came over one afternoon and asked if we wanted some free zucchini.  Her husband, she explained, kept a garden at their vacation home, and they were overrun with zucchini.  Now, Nannie had never heard of zucchini, so the neighbor-lady had to explain that zucchini is a squash, that it’s very good to eat, and that you could either bread it and fry it, or fry it unbreaded and then cook it with onions and tomatoes (I have since prepared zucchini many other ways, including stuffing it with an Italian sausage/ground beef mixture, but I suppose the neighbor-lady was not really that experienced with zucchini)  At any rate, Nannie graciously accepted the gift, and fixed us zucchini with onion and tomatoes the next day for dinner (the noon meal at our house, remember).  I’ve been enjoying zucchini ever since.

Anyway, here’s a recipe for breaded fried zucchini,

Breaded and Fried Zucchini

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1 medium- to large-sized zucchini squash, cut crosswise into 1/4- to 1/2-inch slices.
Egg wash.
All-purpose flour.
Salt.
Black pepper.
Dried and crushed sweet basil (optional).
Vegetable oil.

Prepare the egg wash by breaking an egg into a shallow bowl and then stirring the egg rapidly with a fork until the yolk and white are completely mixed.

Prepare each slice of squash as follows:

1. Dip in the egg wash and coat the slice completely.  Then allow any excess egg wash to drain back into the container.
2. Season to taste with salt, pepper, and optionally, basil.
3. Dredge lightly in the flour.

If you’d like crunchier fried zucchini, try repeating steps (1) through (3), above.  If you do this, go easy on the seasonings each time, because you’ll be seasoning twice.  Alternatively, you could omit step (2) on the first go-round, and season only on the second, or vice versa.

Pour just enough oil into a large, heavy skillet to coat the bottom completely.  Place over MEDIUM heat and allow to come up to cooking temperature.

When the pan’s hot, place the breaded zucchini slices in the pan so that they don’t overlap.  You want to cook the slices evenly, and if they overlap in the pan, this won’t happen.

Cook both sides of the zucchini slices until they are a golden-brown, a little darker than you would summer squash.  Zucchini can be a bit more dense (i.e, weighs more per unit volume) than summer squash, and it takes longer to cook through.

Drain and serve immediately.

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Note: Please, please don’t think I’m such an idiot that I actually do steps (1) through (3) - egg-washing, seasoning, and dredging - for each and every individual slice of zucchini.  Steps (1) through (3) merely specify the order of operations.  You don’t have to do them exactly as specified, and I don’t.  What I do is, I egg-wash a batch of slices, then season the batch, then dredge the batch, and then repeat for the next batch, until I’ve done the lot.

Personally, I like the mouth-feel, the extra little something, that the zucchini skin gives to the finished dish, but this may not appeal to you.  If the notion of leaving the skin on the squash clashes with your sensibilities, then do not hesitate to pare the skin off your zucchini before you slice it.  You can remove all of the skin, or just part of it, as is often done with cucumbers.

Happy cooking!

While We're on the Subject of Squash . . .

. . . let's look at another way to fry it. 

I imagine that there are more squash recipes to be found in the Southeast than there are cooks in the region, and at least as many recipes for fried squash as there are cooks.  Squash just seems to be a popular food down here, except maybe among school-age kids.  Squash-hating may not be so prevalent among today's school children, but squash was almost universally disliked, and in some cases hated outright, by pupils in the Dougherty County, Georgia, public school system, of which I am a product.

Now personally, I do not remember a time when I didn't like squash.  When we had squash for lunch at school I was, as they say, in hog heaven.

Early on in my academic career, when the school cafeteria served squash, I'd have one or more schoolmates approach me with the intention of trading their squash for something on my tray that I didn't care for.  The problem with that was that there wasn't much I didn't like in the way of food, so there was usually nothing I was willing to swap for another helping of squash. I suppose I had inadvertently developed a reputation for liking squash, but since I liked everything else and usually declined to swap, this sort of propositioning became rather rare.  More often than not, though, I'd end up with an extra helping or two on days when squash was served.

There were always certain kids, you see, who couldn't stand the sight of the stuff, much less the idea of putting it in their mouths.  Such children called it names like squish in elementary school (and they waxed more and more descriptive, I'm here to tell you, as they advanced in grade level and their skills in the use of obscene and/or profane language improved).  Anyhow, I came to know who these people were, and on squash days, I'd stalk them.

My modus operandi was this:  I'd choose one particular squash-hater and schmooze them. Then, when it was time for lunch, I'd follow my intended victim to a table, sit down close to them, and start eating my lunch.  Then, just when lunch started to kick into high gear, I'd nonchalantly ask my victim, "Hey, you gonna eat your squish?"

I think it was probably the word squish, spoken with a tone and inflection intended to evoke unpleasant feelings in the listener, and timed for when the listener's mouth was full of food, that did the trick, but the why isn't important.  Regardless of the reason, it was the result that counted:  the squash-hater gladly parted with his or her portion of the abominable vegetable.  Yuk! take it and good riddance!  I believe they might have paid me to take their squash, if the thought had crossed their minds and they'd had the money.

Okay! okay!  Pardon my ruminations, but I couldn't help myself.  Remembering those days, so long ago now, always gives me a chuckle, and I do enjoy telling a story.  Now, to today's recipe.

Deep-Fried Squash

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4 C fresh yellow squash at room temperature, quartered lengthwise, individual quarters then cut crosswise into 1-inch slices.
1 C all-purpose flour.
1 large egg.
Table salt.
Black pepper.
Vegetable oil (for deep-frying).
Onion powder (optional).

Beat the egg lightly with a fork to mix the white and yolk.

For each piece of the squash, do the following:

• Dip into the egg. Coat thoroughly, then allow the excess egg to drain back into the egg container.
• Season to taste with salt, black pepper, and onion powder (if you're using it).
• Dredge lightly in the flour.

After confirming that there's suffficient oil in your deep fryer, and topping it up if there isn't, set the temperature to 350 degrees.

When the oil in the fryer reaches 350 degrees, carefully drop no more than a handful of the squash piece in the oil.  If it's more than a handful, the additional mass could reduce the temperature of the oil significantly.  This is not a good thing to have happen, because in order to cook in the lower-temperature oil, the food must remain in it for a longer time than normal.  The food can thus absorb more oil than usual, and it may become greasy.

Cook the squash until the flour breading is a light golden brown.  Cooking squash in a deep fryer doesn't take long, so be careful that you don't overcook it.

Remove food from deep fryer and drain.

Allow drained squash to cool, then serve immediately.

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Breaded squash can also be cooked in a skillet, but you'll need to use 1/4-inch slices rather than 1-inch, and you'll need to cook the squash slices in batches of no more slices than cover the bottom of the pan. You'll need only enough vegetable to cover the bottom of the pan. Keep an eye on your squash by turning frequently.  Your food is done when it takes on the light golden-brown color, as described above.

Either way you fry it - deep or pan - you may want to substitute a seasoned for the table salt.  That little extra flavor might be all it takes to convert a young squash-hater, should it be your misfortune to have one running around your house, into an enthusiastic squash fanatic.

Happy cooking!

South Georgia Country-Fried Squash

It’s just about the end of the summer squash season in Georgia, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t share this recipe.  I know I could have put it off until next Spring, but when I asked myself “why?,” I couldn’t come up with a good excuse.

If you’re from the South and you're partial to yellow squash, be it straight-neck, crook-neck, or ‘humungous’ - the sort I get free from a friend who’s an admitted “gardenin’ fool,” and can’t help growing too much for him to eat by himself - you’ll probably recognize this countrified concoction, if not by recipe, then by the flavor when you eat it.  Here’s how my Nannie made it.

Country-Fried Squash

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6 C fresh yellow squash, quartered lengthwise, quarters then cut crosswise into ¼-inch slices.
1 C (more or less, to taste) rough-chopped (½-inch or so pieces) yellow or Spanish onion.
1 T bacon grease.
Salt.
Black pepper.

In a large, heavy skillet (cast iron, preferably) over a LOW fire, sweat the onions in the bacon grease until the onions are translucent.  Then add the squash.

Stir the mixture thoroughly.  What you want is to coat the squash evenly with the onions and bacon grease.

Cover and simmer for 30 minutes.  What we’re doing here is softening the squash and getting the water in the squash to come out into the skillet.

Break the squash slices up.  A potato-masher comes in handy here.

Turn the fire up to MEDIUM and cook uncovered until the most of water boils off.  This concentrates the flavor of the squash and onion.  You’re done when water no longer pools in the skillet  You’ve reached this point when no water pools in the bottom of the skillet when you expose it by moving the contents aside.

Reduce heat to LOW and continue to cook, uncovered, until the squash begins to brown.  Be careful here, because things can get out of hand quickly if you’re not paying attention.  You can easily end up with burned squash.

Season to taste with salt and black pepper. Serve immediately.

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Happy cooking!

Pork Barbecue: Kettle Cooking Method, Epilogue

A few notes and cautions with regard to the topic of barbecuing are probably in order, especially for the novice barbecuer.

Firstly, there's the question of how the barbecue is supposed to look when it's done.  The answer is black.  That's right, black.  If your shoulder's not black, something's wrong.  It should look like you've burned it.

You haven't really burned it, though.  The black color is the result of 10 to 14 hours of constant exposure to hardwood smoke.  The fat-cap is now a shriveled, black and nameless thing.  The surface of the meat on the side opposite the fat-cap has a nice, attractive bark to it.  The meat has a deep, red or pink smoke ring around the outside that you could see if you cut into it.  And, most importantly, the meat is moist, succulent, fall-off-the-bone tender, and delicious.

Secondly, it's possible, on account of the imprecise nature of our heat-control method, that your meat will look like it's done, but won't quite be, after the prescribed amount of time because your fire was not quite hot enough.  On the other hand, the fire may have been too hot, and your meat looks like it's done, and is done, before the prescribed time has elapsed.  Never fear.  We have ways of dealing with these situations.

For cases where we suspect we have one of the abovegoing anomalous conditions in play, there is what is known in barbecuing circles as the shake 'n' bake test.  To perform the shake 'n' bake test, you just grab hold of the exposed shank bone, which should be clearly visible and identifiable as bone by now, of the shoulder and give it a good shake.  If the meat loosens from the bone and looks like it's ready to fall off, the 'cue's done.  Contrariwise, if it don't, it ain't.  It's that simple.

I think it's always a good idea to shake 'n' bake when the meat looks done, just in case.  Remember, though, that the bone will be hot.  Protect your hand - by using tongs or pliers, or by wearing an oven mitt - so you don't burn yourself.

Thirdly, in case you're inclined to try to eat what's left of the fat-cap, don't.  It's as hard and tough and unappetizing as it looks, and it tastes about as bad as it looks.  Toss it, along with the bones, and pull and/or chop what's left.

Pulling pork, incidentally, is merely the act of pulling the meat apart into sections along the grain.  If the meat's too hot to pull with your bare hands, try using a pair of dinner forks in place of your fingers.  Just pull the meat apart into not-so-thick portions.

After you've pulled the pork, you may want to chop the pieces into more convenient lengths if they're too long to be easily managed.  Or, if you don't want to pull the pork at all, you can skip the pulling and just chop your meat up.  In either case, use a chef's knife or cleaver, and chop down, rather than cut back and forth.

Then, again, if none of the above tickles your fancy, there's always the sliced-barbecue route.  Just slice the meat across the grain, like you would a ham (you can do this either with the bone in, or with the bone removed).  A knife with a serrated blade, such as a special-purpose ham-carving knife, works best.

Finally, I realize that, for the uninitiated, kettle-barbecuing a pork shoulder that weighs 10 to 14 pounds may seem a little daunting.  Well, don't let it be.  Barbecuing is actually much less intense than roasting hot dogs on sticks over a campfire, where conditions can change rapidly.  You have to be alert and you have to pay close attention when you're roasting a hot dog.  Otherwise, you just might burn your weenie.

Barbecuing, by way of contrast, happens at a slower pace.  You do have to pay attention, certainly, but barbecuing is still a very leisurely undertaking.  In fact, the only problem you're likely to run into in barbecuing has to do with the time it takes.  You're liable to get so bored during the long hours of cooking time that you fall asleep and let your fire go out.  That minor hazard notwithstanding, barbecuing is an ideal pastime for any lazy person.  This fact no doubt explains why I'm so fond of it.

Happy cooking, ...er..., barbecuing!

Pork Barbecue: Kettle Cooking Method, Part VII – Y’all Want Some Sauce With That ‘Cue?

Now that the ‘cue’s in the kettle, we’ve got some time - from 10 to 14 hours, depending - that we can use to make some sauce.  I like my sauce for barbecued pork shoulder to be a bit thinner than the sauce I make for ribs, and I like it to be less sweet and a bit more tangy, too.  The idea with pulled and/or chopped barbecued pork shoulder is to put the sauce in, rather than on, the meat, and I find that a thinner sauce penetrates the finished meat more readily than a thicker sauce.  You may (and you’re welcome to) differ, but to me, it just tastes better that way.  At any rate, here’s my recipe:

Sauce for Barbecued Pork Shoulder:

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2 recipes dry rub.
1 C distilled vinegar.
1 C water.
1 C tomato catsup.
1 T. prepared mustard.
1 lemon, sliced thin.
1/4 C fresh or cold-pack orange juice (optional)

Add prepared mustard to the vinegar and mix thoroughly.

Dissolve dry rub in vinegar/mustard mixture.

Add the water and the catsup.

Add the orange juice if you’re using it.

Pour mixture into sauce pan and float the lemon slices on top of the liquid.

Simmer for at least 1 hour, preferably longer.  Makes about 3 cups of sauce.

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Pour over meat after the meat has cooled and has been taken off the bone, and pulled and/or chopped.  Do not apply sauce to the meat while the meat’s cooking.  The sauce can,t penetrate the fat-cap anyway, and will probably just carbonize, adding nothing at all to the final result.

Happy cooking (and eating)!

Pork Barbecue: Kettle Cooking Method, Part VI – Cookin’ ‘Cue

Okay!  The meat’s on the fire and we get to relax a little.  All we have to do is check on the fire every hour or so, and re-fuel the fire if it needs it.

Re-fueling, or stoking, the fire is a fairly straightforward undertaking.  If your kettle’s like mine and the cooking surface, or grill, is hinged so that access to the grate can be had without removing the grill, then you can stoke with a minimum of bother.  Just make sure (before you put the meat on) that you've oriented the cooking surface so that the hinged pieces are above your two little fires on the grate.  Otherwise, your only option when stoking is to remove the cooking surface (and the meat) entirely each time you stoke.

The only real trick (and there always seems to be a trick, doesn’t there?) in stoking your fire is in knowing when it needs more fuel.  We determine this visually.

I stoke when, in my estimation, the amount of fuel remaining is between 1/3 and 1/4 of the amount that was there when I lit my fire.  If you let the fuel burn down to where there’s less than 1/4 of the original amount, then you could be pushing your luck; there may not be enough heat energy left to ignite the new fuel.  With this in mind, I’m inclined to stoke when the fuel remaining is closer to 1/3 than it is to 1/4 of the original amount.

Also, bear in mind that while I say fire, as if there was just one, there are actually two small fires to deal with, one on either side of the drip pan. and we need to treat them equally.  If one needs stoking and the other one doesn’t, stoke both anyway, even if you put just a single wood chunk on the fire that doesn’t need stoking.  A little extra fuel never hurts.

Now on occasion, you may find that one of your little fires doesn’t want to cooperate.  If one of your fires (which we’ll call the ‘ailing’ fire, in contrast to the other ‘healthy’ fire) won’t stay lit, the probable reason is that it’s not getting enough air.  This is usually because ash and/or other debris have accumulated in the bottom of the kettle on the side beneath the ailing fire, and is restricting ventilation on that side of the kettle.  Since hot air rises, and since hotter air rises faster, the air flow, or draft, created by the healthy fire is greater than the draft created by the ailing fire.

However, as the draft produced by the ailing fire slows down, the ailing fire burns cooler and draws even less air.  Things kind of snowball over time, the ailing fire drawing less and less air as it burns cooler and cooler, until the ailing fire goes out completely, due to oxygen starvation.  Meanwhile, the healthy fire burns along merrily, still receiving adequate because it now has all of the available air.  The healthy fire, in fact,  may get too much oxygen and may even burst into flame, because there’s now more oxygen available than the healthy fire needs in order to smolder.

The best remedy for fires that go out is prevention.  While you can (and should) clear the intake (bottom) ventilators,  by adjusting the intake damper from lock-to-lock and then putting the damper back in the position it was originally, from time to time while cooking, a little preventive maintenance helps, too.  You don’t have to clean your kettle thoroughly between uses, but you should at least get as much ash/debris as you can out of the bottom of the kettle.  If your kettle came with an enclosed ash catcher attached, just sweep the debris through the ventilator holes (bottom damper fully open for this) into the ash container. You should, incidentally, empty the catcher periodically, because if it’s filled to near the top, it can affect air flow.  If your kettle is not equipped with such a device, I’ve found it expedient to haul the kettle to an area of the property that’s not easily visible, close the bottom damper completely, loosen any debris in the kettle with a stiff brush, and then pick the kettle up bodily and dump the contents on the ground.

No, I do not jest.  Unless you barbecue every day, you won’t create enough ash to have a noticeable pile.  Moreover, kettle ash is not harmful to plants, including grass, nor to animals.  On the other hand, I know that some folks just aren’t comfortable with the idea of dumping ashes in their backyards.  For ash disposal, such individuals should keep a dedicated ash receptacle, i.e., can, plastic bag, etc., for the purpose.

Just one more thing before we close up shop for the day, and this is important.  As surely as I blog about cooking, you’ll have heard this admonition before (often, no doubt; possibly ad nauseum).  It may be trite, but I think it’s worth repeating:  NEVER, EVER, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES introduce hot ashes into the environment!  Either put them in a container that is approved as being suitable for hot embers, or allow them to cool to the point that they’re cool to the touch, or douse them thoroughly with water, before disposing of them.  The reason for this is so obvious that I won’t waste your time explaining.

That’s today’s installment.  Have a great weekend, and . . .

Happy cooking!

Pork Barbecue: Kettle Cooking Method, Part V – Time to Barbecue!

When we left off yesterday, we were ready to light a fire in the kettle.  Before we do that, though, we’ll need to prep the pork shoulder.  Actually, you can light the kettle and then prep the shoulder, because it takes a while for the hardwood chunks to catch fire and really blaze, and there’s really not much to prepping the meat.

Now, typically, when you’re merely grilling relatively small cuts, such as steaks, you’ll want the meat to be at room temperature.  Not so when we barbecue.  You can take a cold (not frozen, mind you) pork shoulder directly from the refrigerator and throw it in the kettle.  The reason you can do this is that you’ll be cooking the meat for hours, literally, at low temperature.  The meat (any food, in fact) never gets hotter than the temperature at which you cook it (in the neighborhood of 225º F to 250º F), and it will take it a while to get to that temperature, regardless of whether you start the meat at room temperature (68º F, officially) or refrigerator temperature (in the neighborhood of 35º F to 40º F).  This is because the difference between room and refrigerator temperature is not that great when compared to the 225/250-degree cooking temperature.

Incidentally, you may be thinking, ”hey, wait a minute here, there’s not that much difference in temperature between 35º and 32º, and 32º is freezing; so why couldn’t I cook a frozen, 32º shoulder and expect it to be done in the same amount of time?”.

That’s a reasonable enough question.  The answer is, because water can be ice or liquid water at 32º, that you probably can get away with it if the temperature of the shoulder really is 32º.  At temperatures even a little colder than 32º F, at which there's no liquid water, only solid ice, however, all bets are off.

The reason, while trying not to get too technical with it, is that meat is mainly water, and it’s the water that freezes when you freeze meat.  When water freezes, it loses energy in the form of heat.  In freezing, liquid water loses heat energy and drops to a temperature just below its freezing point and then spikes back up to its freezing point as ice crystals start to form.  During this time, its temperature does not change, but the water continues to lose heat energy.  This energy, lost during the formation of ice crystals, is called the enthalpy of fusion or heat of fusion of water.  Enthalpy of fusion is expressed in units of unit heat energy (e.g., calories, BTUs, etc.) per unit of mass (e.g., grams, pounds-mass, etc.), and is the amount of energy, in the form of heat, that has to be put back into the frozen water to get it to turn back into liquid water again.  For water, enthalpy/heat of fusion is significant, and has to come from somewhere if you want the ice to melt.  When you’re trying to cook frozen meat, your fire supplies this energy.

But wait.  It gets worse.

Not only must your fire supply the enthalpy-of-fusion energy in order to melt the ice during the shift of water from the solid phase to the liquid phase, but the amount of energy to do the shift depends on the amount of ice you’re trying to melt, and that depends on the weight of the meat you’re cooking - the heavier the meat, the more energy.

On top of that, your fire also must supply energy just to raise the temperature of the meat to the melting point of water before melting can even begin.  And, as you probably guessed, the amount of heat it takes to do this also depends on the weight of your meat.

Now remember, your fire is by design only a puny little smoky, low-temperature one, and it doesn’t have the clout to raise the temperature of 10 to 14 pounds of frozen meat to the melting point of water, and then supply even more heat to melt the ice. The only thing to do under the circumstances would be to increase the cooking time significantly.  But if you did that, you might still end up with barbecue that’s charred to cinders on the outside and uncooked and cold on the inside.  And even if you got lucky and it cooked all the way through, your barbecue would almost certainly wind up being unappetizingly charred on the outside.  Bottom line, if you’re tempted to try to barbecue frozen meat, don’t.  If you do it anyway, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Okay, okay.  I’m off my soapbox.  Back to the task at hand . . .

All right. We’ve taken the unfrozen pork shoulder out of the ‘fridge.  Now what?

We could just throw it in the kettle as is, but that probably wouldn’t be a good thing.  A better idea might be to wash it first.  The meat has been processed, remember, and there may be certain processing residues on the exposed surfaces of the meat.  Not that these may be harmful in any way, shape, or form, but they may flavor the barbecue in ways that are unappetizing when exposed to the heat of cooking.  It’s best not to take chances, so we rinse the shoulder under running cold tap-water, just to make sure.

Rinsing is sufficient to remove possible undesired substances.  The shoulder’s ready for the kettle now, but I like to go a step further.  I’m fairly sure that this doesn’t really do anything materially to affect the flavor of the outcome, but I still like to rub the fat-cap with sea-salt.  Home cooks (especially barbecuers), like baseball players and gamblers, are a suspertitious lot, and my salt-rubbing ritual seems to bring me good barbecuing luck.  You, on the other hand, need not be bound by my superstitions, so you can omit the salt.  Besides, I only claim that it brings me good luck.  It may (Heaven forbid!) have the opposite effect on your barbecuing.

We’re ready to start barbecuing - FINALLY! The pork shoulder has been prepped (with or without the inclusion of the salt-rubbing ritual), and the hardwood chunks in the kettle look like they mean business.  We cover the kettle with the lid and adjust the intake damper in the base of the kettle, all the while eye-balling the fire through the fully-open exhaust damper in the lid.  When there’s just enough air getting to the fire so that there’s no longer flame, we’re ready for the shoulder.

We remove the lid, place the shoulder on the cooking surface over the drip-pan, and replace the lid.  All we have to do now is stoke the fire periodically, and think about what sort of sauce we want to serve with our barbecue.  We’ll take up these rather important matters in future posts.

Happy cooking (or more specifically, barbecuing)!

Pork Barbecue: Kettle Cooking Method, Part IV - Let's Recap

We’ve finally arrived at a point where we have all the information we need to make pork barbecue.  However, there are an awful lot of details, so let’s recap to make sure we're all on the same page:

We’ll be barbecuing a 10- to 14-pound bone-in, uncured pork shoulder.  Our shoulder has had half its skin and external fat removed so that a fat-cap remains on one side.  We will not use a dry rub.

We’re cooking in a round kettle of relatively large diameter.  The kettle is equipped with adjustable ventilation dampers in both kettle body and lid.

We’ll be cooking slowly, at a low temperature.  Total cooking time is based on the rule of one hour per pound or fraction of a pound.  For example, if the shoulder weighs 10-1/4 pounds, then total cooking time is 11 hours.

We’re cooking with smoldering hardwood. and we’re using the indirect method with a drip-pan.  In order to do this:

• We first place an oblong metal-foil drip-pan - one that’s large enough to catch any drops of liquid fat that fall from the shoulder during cooking - in the center of the fire-grate.
• Then, alongside the drip-pan on either side (i.e., along the two opposite sides of the pan that are longest, where there’s enough space), we lay down splints of fat wood in a crossing, or ‘star-like’, pattern (or at least as near to such a pattern as space permits).
• Next, we build a stack of hardwood chunks on top of the fat wood on both sides of the drip-pan, in such a way that all of the chunks will be exposed to the flame of the fat wood when we light it.  We stack our hardwood chunks on the fat wood so that there’s enough fat wood exposed under both stacks to be able to light them.

At this point, we’re ready to fire up our kettle and actually start barbecuing, which is the topic of tomorrow’s post.

Happy cooking!

Pork Barbecue: Kettle Cooking Method, Part III – Selecting the Cut

Today’s post is about actually cooking traditional pork barbecue in a kettle.

For starters, let me explain why I prefer an uncured pork shoulder when I barbecue.  There are two reasons.

Firstly, My experimentally-determined cooking-time formula for bone-in pork is one hour per pound, or fraction thereof, of meat.  Weight of the piece is thus an important consideration.  Consequently, I like a pork shoulder because it’s big enough without being too big.

At one end of the spectrum are pieces that are too big, such as a so-called green, or uncured, ham.  While I’ve found specimens that are small enough to fit physically in the kettle, they tend to be too heavy to cook in a reasonable amount of time.  I regard a cooking time of more than 14 hours as being unreasonable; I had to give up pulling all-nighters barbecuing, because I need my beauty-sleep.  With that in mind, you can see why I’d consider the cooking time for an 18- or 20-pound ham to be unreasonable.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are pieces of meat that are too small to barbecue.  Years of experience barbecuing with indirect heat and a drip-pan, and slowly, at low temperature, have taught me that there’s sort of a point of diminishing returns when your going in the direction of descending weight.  Pieces of meat that weigh less than some minimum weight (the exact minimum weight depends on the meat, e.g., pork, beef, etc., and the cut) just do not turn out well using my method.  Pieces that are too small always seem to turn out being too dry, and they aren’t good eating.

The second reason I prefer pork shoulder for barbecuing is its fat-cap.  The fat-cap is a layer of fat on one side, usually, of the shoulder. which consists fat beneath a layer of skin.  I say usually because I have seen examples that were minimally processed, where no skin and fat at all were removed.  These are by no means the norm however.  At the other extreme, I’ve seen pork shoulders with all of the skin and most of the external fat removed; more on this later.  In any case, the fat under the fat-cap serves to baste the shoulder during cooking, resulting in a moist and succulent finished product.

Now, although pork shoulder is my cut of choice for barbecuing, I do like to experiment, and so I have fooled around with green hams and Boston butts - which incidentally, are actually shoulder cuts and not hindquarter cuts, as the name implies – from time to time.  I’ve already mentioned that most hams are so heavy that I don’t regard their cooking times as reasonable, but butts are another story.

The Boston butt, also known as Boston blade roast, is part of the pork shoulder, but is taken from higher up the shoulder than the ‘picnic ham’ type of pork shoulder that I prefer to barbecue.  Boston butts are well-marbled, this translates into too greasy a finished product, I think.  There’s just too much fat.  Now I realize that others will disagree, and that’s fine by me.  Boston butt is, after all, the cut of choice for many barbecue restraunts.  However, such establishments use commercial barbecue ovens, and these cook faster then my method.  It’s just possible, I think, that the faster cooking, and the consequentially higher temperatures, renders more of the fat in less time than my method, and this is why commercially-prepared Boston but barbecue isn’t overly greasy.

Although many barbecuers swear by it, I do not use a dry rub when I barbecue a pork shoulder.  A dry rub, or any other flavoring applied externally, would be wasted because the fat-cap would prevent the flavors from fully penetrating a pork shoulders.  On the other hand, if I removed the fat-cap so that the rub could penetrate the meat,  there’d be no fat to baste the meat during cooking.  I suppose I could apply the dry rub to the fat-cap the day before cooking, marinate the shoulder overnight in the ‘fridge, and hope that some of the flavor gets into the meat, but I have my doubts about how well that would work.  My thinking is that, bottom line, if you use dry rub, then do it to a shoulder that’s had all its skin and most of the exterior fat removed, and run the risk of a drier, less succulent result.  Otherwise, don’t use a dry rub.  The flavor will still be out of this world.

Happy cooking!

Pork Barbecue: Kettle Cooking Method, Part II - Fuel and Temperature Control

In Friday’s post, I talked about barbecue kettles and fuel.  In today’s post, I’ll pick up where we left off and discourse further upon the topic of hardwood fuels.   Then we’ll talk about the role temperature plays in barbecuing, and about temperature control.

It occurs to me that I left you hanging when I mentioned wood chunks, and didn’t say exactly what wood chunks are. Let’s remedy that right now.  Wood chunks are simply chunks of wood, as opposed to logs or cord wood (fireplace wood, which are logs cut crosswise,  or bucked, to a length of 12 to 18 inches, and then split).  Wood chunks are roughly cubical in shape, and are typically 2 to 4 inches on a side.  Wood chunks are available at most barbecue and outdoor living specialty stores, at most big-box home improvement stores, and on line.

Wood chunks, due to their size, are the ideal fuel for kettle barbecuing using the indirect heat method - in which the food is cooked/smoked indirectly by hot combustion gases, not by direct radiant heat - and a drip-pan to catch juics and fat as the food cooks.  This is because fire-grate space is already at a premium in a kettle, and available grate area is further reduced by a drip-pan.  You’ll be using a drip-pan large enough to catch all the drippings from the meat during cooking, so the drip-pan will occupy significant area.  All you’ll have left for the fire are narrow areas on either side of the drip-pan, but that’s plenty of room for 2- to 4-inch cubical chunks.  You really don’t need to stoke the kettle with that much fuel at a time, anyway.  After all, pork barbecue, cooked the traditional way – slowly, at a low temperature - is a time-consuming affair, but it’s worth every minute of it.  You want to cook barbecue over a low, smokey fire, and in order to get the smoke, your fire needs to smolder, rather than burn with a flame.  Hardwood smolders at a lower temperature than the temperature at which it burns.

The benefit of smoldering is that it produces more smoke than does burning with a flame.  This is because fuel smolders instead of burning due to oxygen starvation.  There is not enough oxygen for the fuel to burn completely, and the result is adequate heat with an abundance of smoke, which is the reason you’re going to all this trouble in the first place.  On the other hand,  it’s possible to starve a fire of oxygen to the point that your fuel can’t even smolder, much less burn.  If this happens, the fire will go out completely. Therefore, you must control the temperature carefully

Temperature inside the kettle depends, assuming there’s a fire of some sort in the kettle, upon the amount of air you allow into the kettle during cooking.  The fuel burns faster if it has more oxygen available, and burns more slowly if there’s less oxygen available.  The trick is allowing just enough air into the kettle so that your fuel smolders instead of flaming.

As to temperature control, I think it helps to have a basic understanding of the physics of gases, and of how gases at different temperatures interact.  It’s not very difficult, so please bear with me while I try to explain it.  Alternatively, if you’re really not all that interested in explanations, you can simply skip the next three paragraphs.  You won't miss anything important if you do.

Okay.  We all know that hot air rises, right?  Well, air is a mixture of different gases (collectively, gas), and our observation is true of all gas.  A gas, be it air or any other gas, that is hotter than a surrounding gas, be it air or any other gas, is displaced by the surrounding gas.  The reason this happens is because the hotter gas molecules have more kinetic energy than molecules of the cooler gas.  That is, while molecules of any gas are always in motion, molecules in the hotter gas fly around faster and collide with each other more often, and thus are farther apart, on average, than the molecules of the cooler gas.  The result is that the hotter gas is less dense (it weighs less, or has less mass, per unit volume) than the cooler gas in the vicinity of it, and is displaced by the cooler gas.  This displacement happens because the cooler gas, being more dense than the hotter gas, and therefore heavier per unit of volume than the hotter gas, is drawn under the hotter gas by the Earth’s gravity, and the less dense hotter gas is displaced upward.  (This is analogous to oil floating on water because water is heavier per unit volume than oil.)  The net effect is an upwardly-directed flow, or current, of gas.  Moreover, in general, the greater the difference in temperature between the hotter and the cooler, the greater the current,&bnsp;or rate of flow.  In a barbecue kettle, it is this gas current which drives the smoke, which is not a gas but is composed of particulate matter, up and out of the exhaust vent/damper in the lid, flavoring the meat along the way.

Incidentally, the above explanation is somewhat of an oversimplification.  Firstly, combustion is a chemical reaction, and gases of combustion have compositions that are different from those of atmospheric gases.  Thus individual molecules of combustion gases may (and do!) have masses that are different from those of individual molecules of the gases that make up the Earth’s atmosphere.  It would follow that equal volumes of the gases of combustion and atmospheric gases may have different masses at a given density.  Also, my explanation, strictly speaking, applies only to gases that are unconfined; that is, gases that are free to change volume by expanding and contracting.  A kettle, however, can be reasonably regarded as a confining vessel.  Nevertheless, pressure of magnitudes commonly associated with confined gases are not present in back-yard barbecue kettle.  Consequently, the general idea, that a mixture of cooler gases displacing a mixture of hotter gases causes an upward gas current, still applies.

Are you still with me?  All right, then.  In a barbecue kettle, hot gases get that way because the fuel burns, and the amount of heat depends upon the rate at which the fuel burns, which in turn depends on the amount of air present – the more air, the hotter the fire.  But by the same token, the less air admitted into the kettle, the cooler the fire burns because there is less available oxygen.  Thus you control the rate of burn, and the amount of heat thus generated, by controlling air flow into the kettle.  To control air flow, you adjust the dampers.

Now, what exactly is a damper, anyway?  The word damper has many meanings, but for our purposes, a damper is merely a mechanical device for varying the size of a ventilation opening in the kettle.  It’s a movable piece of metal attached to the kettle in such a way that is adjustable so that openings in the bottom and lid, respectively, of the kettle, openings which admit air or which exhaust combustion gases, can be fully open, fully closed, or partially open.  Two dampers, one on the kettle itself and the other on its lid, are each mounted in close contact with, and snuggly attached to their respective parts.  The closeness of fit is intended to prevent the leakage of intake air into, and the leakage of exhaust gases out of, the kettle.

With a little practice, the volume per unit time, or current intensity, of both intake air and exhaust gases, can be controlled fairly precisely.  The trick is to balance the volume-per-unit-time of intake air and the volume-per-unit-time of exhaust gases,nbsp;which is always greater than the volume-per-unit-time of intake air because there's more matter in the exhaust gas, and have the fuel smolder instead of burn. This is not as difficult in practice as it might seem.

Now, after what I just wrote, and with me being one of those engineering types and all, you might think that I use all sorts of fancy, complicated, and expensive scientific instruments, such as digital thermometers, pressure gauges, flow meters, etc., to get my fire regulated precisely.  Well, I don't.  I'm not that anal-retentive.  Nope. I just eye-ball it; here's how.

What I do is, after the drip-pan's in and I've arranged (as described in yesterday's post) my fat wood and hardwood chunks on either side of the drip-pan, I open the bottom (intake) damper fully and light the fat wood.  Then, when the hardwood chunks are fully in flame, I open the (exhaust) damper on the kettle lid fully and place the lid on the kettle, tightly so it seals good.  Next, I adjust the intake damper until the flame disappears.  I determine this by looking through the exhaust openings in the lid at the fire, i.e, by eye-balling, to see if the flames have disappeared and the fuel is smoldering.  When the fuel is smoldering, I remove the lid, throw my pork shoulder onto the kettle's rack over the drip-pan, replace the lid, and adjust the exhaust damper so it covers about half the total area of the openings.  At this point, I'm barbecuin'!

Tomorrow, I'll get to the "meat" of the matter, and describe in detail how I barbecue a pork shoulder using a cooking kettle.

Happy cooking!

Pork Barbecue: Kettle Cooking Method, Part I - Introduction

First of all, please note that, despite what I wrote yesterday about 'sacred truth', and despite the outrageous (or is it???) theory I postulated, about the true origin of the name barbecue being suppressed by a special-interests conspiracy, kettle cooking works not only for pork shoulders, pork butts, and uncured hams, but also for beef brisket and whole chickens.  It's probably good, too, for whatever else you want to cook, but I only say probably because pork, beef, and chicken are the only foods with which I have personal experience, and I wouldn't want to mislead you.

Anyhow, you do know what I'm talking about when I say barbecue kettle, right?  You don't fill it with water and light a fire under it.  Instead, a barbecue kettle sits up off the ground on metal legs, and both the food and the fire go inside it (not necessarily in that order).  The remainder of this post deals with selecting the right kettle and the right fuel.

The most popular barbecue kettles, and the ones with which I am most familiar, incidentally, are manufactured by Weber®.  Over the years, I've owned several of these kettles, and I can vouch for them.  They're inexpensive, well-designed, simply constructed, made of high-quality materials, they last for years, their cooking performance does not degrade over time, and they have convenient, fairly precise, and easy-to-use controls (i.e., ventilation/damper system).  The only maintenance a kettle needs is a good cleaning at least once a season.

There are even kettles available that come with LP gas-fueled starter systems.  If your kettle pulls double duty - you use it for both barbecuing and general charcoal grilling - such a starter system can be convenient.  When you use your kettle for charcoal grilling, use the starter system to ignite the charcoal instead of charcoal lighter fluid.

Bottom line, kettles give you a lot of bang for your buck.  That's a good thing, too, because a little kettle won't do for the kind of barbecuing we're talking about here.  You'll need a middling big one.  My kettle's a no-frills thirty-six (or thereabouts) incher, which is plenty big for a 10- to 14-pound pork shoulder.

Now, as to fuel, it's been my experience that hardwood gives the best results, and so I recommend it.  My kettle, which is used only for barbecuing and, hence,  has been fueled only by hardwood - chunks of hickory, mainly, with a few chunks of mesquite thrown in for some spiciness to the smoke - since the day I brought it home.

For starting my barbecuing fire, I use fat wood.  Fat wood is a by-product of tree farming.  It consists of long, thin slivers, called splints, of highly resinous - and highly flammable - pine wood.  The splints are taken from the stump of the pine tree after the tree itself has been harvested.  Since fat wood contains a lot of resin, it burns really hot.  This ignites the hickory/mesquite fuel very quickly.

Fat wood (also spelled fatwood) itself leaves no residue to affect food flavor, and it has been consumed entirely by the time the fuel wood is burning sufficiently to start the cooking.  I just lay a few splints in a crossing, or "asterisk", pattern in the grate of the kettle, and carefully stack wood chunks on top of the fat wood.  I pile the wood chunks high, in order to expose more of them to the flame of the fatwood.  Then I light the end of a fat wood splint, which I made sure would be sticking out like a fuze from the wood chunk pile when I stacked it, and before long, the fire's blazing nicely and I'm ready to barbecue.

Now, it's ironic that the first fat wood I ever saw for sale was labeled 'Georgia Fat Wood', and yet fat wood is not available year-around in Georgia, or at least it isn't in the Atlanta area.  Oh, well.  This just means that I have to lay in a goodly supply of it when it is available.  I hope this is not the case where you live, but if it is, you can do like I do in a pinch and order the stuff from L.L. Bean (http://www.llbean.com).

Monday, we'll talk in detail about fuel and temperature control in kettle barbecuing.

Happy cooking!

Barbecue - from Barbacoa or from Barbe à Queue?

Now that I’ve gotten on the subject of barbecue, let’s talk about it some.  A good place to begin is with the word barbecue itself.

According to Webster’s New World College Dictionary, Third edition, barbecue comes from the American Spanish barbacoa, which was adopted in turn from the Tainó, a people indigenous to the Caribbean region.  In the Tainó language, barbacoa means, literally, framework of sticks.  According to the Wikipedia article barbecue, not only is the word barbecue derived from the word barbacoa, but also the word barbacoa is found in the language of the Timucua people of Florida as well as in that of the Tainó.  The Wikipedia article differs with Webster, however, as to the literal meaning of the word.  According to Wikipedia, barbacoa means sacred fire pit.  One thing that there’s no disagreement about, though, is that the word barbecue is not derived from the French barbe à queue, which means from
beard to tail

Well, hell. For all these years, that’s where I thought barbecue came from.  It’s just a damn shame that it doesn’t.  If it did, we in the Southeast might have some real leverage when we insist that if the dish is to be called barbecue, it must be pork.  According to legend, you see, French visitors to a Caribbean island saw the locals cooking a whole hog over a fire in a pit, and one of the visitors remarked to the others that the unfortunate porker was being cooked from beard to tail, or barbe à queue.  Anyhow, again according to legend, the term caught on and the rest is history.  If that were really how the name barbecue came about, not only could we Southeasterners insist that barbecue has to be pork, but if push came to shove in cook-off showdowns with non-believers, we could insist that in order to call it barbecue, it had to be a whole hog.  Either way, we’d have them disqualified on a technicality.

It is just possible, incidentally, that barbe à queue is really the origin of the word barbecue, but the truth is being suppressed by a conspiracy.  There is a significant segment of barbecue society who believe that you can have barbecue beef and barbecue chicken and barbecue turkey, and on and on, the important thing being the belief that you can have barbecue that isn’t pork.  It follows that there might be certain individuals among us with private and nefarious reasons for not wanting the sacred truth, that barbecue must be pork, to get out.  Certain wealthy but unscrupulous people, you see; renegade Texans or Californians, maybe.  Anyway, such a gang of rascals might have pooled their resources and approached the world’s etymologists – scholars who study the origins of words.  Well, everyone has his price, you know,  and scholars as a group are not exactly known for their wealth.  Thus would the scalawags have been able to bribe a majority of these scholars, impoverished creatures that they are, to say that barbacoa is where the word barbecue comes from, even if they knew or suspected otherwise.  Hey, it could have happened . . .

Happy cooking!

Special Barbecue Sauce for Ribs

Barbecued pork ribs were the topic of yesterday’s post, and if you’re going to do them, I think you need a special barbecue sauce to go with them; well, at least I do. Here’s the sauce we had with our ribs last Sunday.  My wife usually avoids sauce when we have barbecued anything, but this sauce was so flavorful that she made an exception.

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1 recipe dry rub, from yesterday’s post.
1/2 C distilled vinegar.
1/4 C prepared mustard.
1 C tomato catsup.
4 thin slices lemon.
Tabasco® sauce, to taste (optional)

In a saucepan, dissolve the prepared mustard in the vinegar and mix thoroughly. Add the dry rub and stir until dissolved. Now, add the catsup and mix thoroughly. Float the lemon slices on top of the mixture.

Bring the saucepan to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 30 minutes. Stir gently periodically. The intent here is to extract some lemon flavor while minimizing extraction of the bitterness in the white membrane under the peel of the lemon.

Remove saucepan from heat and allow contents to cool. When cooled, add the Tabasco® if you want it.  Makes about a cup and a half.

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Incidentally, a little bitterness is a good thing in a barbecue sauce; hence the turmeric in many recipes.  Too much bitterness, on the other hand . . .  That's a different story altogether.  I once had the bright idea of trying to cook a different barbecue sauce recipe, one which also calls for lemon slices, in a slow-cooker, overnight.  Come next morning, I sampled a sip:  yuk! it was just gawd-awful - unsalvageably bitter - and lemon was the culprit.  I ended up tossing the sauce and starting over.  Learn from my mistakes.  Please!

In my opinion, barbecue sauce of any sort is best when made a day or two before it’s to be used, and held covered in the refrigerator.  Just let it to come up to room temperature before you serve it.  I guess it’s a little like home-made chili – refrigerate it overnight, on account of "it ain’t fit to eat the day you make it."

Happy cooking!

Labor Day Weekend - Barbecued Pork Ribs

Whew!  Glad that's over.  This laboring is for the birds.

Well, not really.  I 'labored' in the kitchen (and on our back deck), cooking, but as I've said before, that's not really labor.

On Sunday, I barbecued two racks of pork ribs, using a method that I'd never used before. We'd seen an indoor/outdoor method for barbecued pork ribs on an episode of America's Test Kitchen (PBS). Since I wasn't particularly enthusiastic about tending the fire in the kettle all day, and worrying about it raining, I thought it would be worth a try.

Although we cooked the ribs on Sunday, the preparations began on Saturday.  First, I mixed dark brown sugar and spices into a dry rub  for the ribs.  Then I put enough rub on each rack of ribs to cover the top completely, and massaged it into the meat.  I rubbed the top of each rack only and not the bottom.  After the rub-down, I covered the ribs loosely with plastic wrap and put them in the refrigerator so they could fester (a technical term we use at our house to describe the process of flavor exchange among food as the result of mutual physical contact) overnight.

Incidentally, I made enough dry rub for two doses on each rack and then some, and covered the remaining rub tightly and refrigerated that, too. Also, I did not remove the membranes from the ribs because I needed the membrane to test the slab for doneness, as explained below.

Sunday morning, I fired up my barbecue/smoker kettle.  I usually use mainly hickory with just a little mesquite for fuel, but I used only hickory this time because the idea was to smoke the ribs without cooking them through completely, over a coolish but smokey fire, and I just didn't want to go to the trouble of getting out the mesquite. 

Anyhow, after the kettle was smoking along nicely, I put the rib racks in, membrane-side to the grill surface, and put the lid on.  I smoked the ribs for 3 hours. Then I brought them indoors, gave them another dose of the dry rub, and finished them in the oven.

I lay the re-rubbed rib racks, membrane-side-down again, on a wire rack in a shallow roasting pan and covered the pan tightly with aluminum foil. I then put the pan of ribs in a 200-degree oven. At the end of 3 hours, I removed them from the oven and tested them for doneness by bending them in such a way that the membrane is stretched to see if, and how easily, it breaks. Nothing happened.  The membrane held firm.

Now, this was an experiment, remember, so I wasn't disappointed.  We just crimped the aluminum foil back around the pan and threw it back in the oven.  I raised the temperature to 300 degrees, and after an hour, I repeated the test. This time, the membrane broke easily.  We let the ribs cool for 30 minutes, then sliced the racks up into individual ribs and served them.

The ribs were delicious, but just a little chewy for my taste. Next time, I think I'll cook them in a 300 degree oven for 4 hours after smoking them for 3 hours. That combination should result in meat that is fall-off-the-bone tender.

Here's my recipe for dry rub for pork ribs:

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1 C dark brown sugar, loose - not packed.
1/4 t ground allspice.
Ground cayenne pepper, to taste.
dash ground cinnamon.
1 t ground clove.
1 t ground mace.
1/2 t dry mustard.
1 t ground nutmeg.
1 T ground paprika.
1/4 t garlic powder.
1/4 t onion powder.

Combine all ingredients in a bowl and whisk thoroughly, being careful to break up all lumps.  Makes about 1 cup of dry rub.

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Note that brown sugar is moist, while dry mustard seems to attract moisture, even when it's kept in a hermetically-sealed container.  Thus, if your rub wants to stay lumpy, blame it on the sugar, or the mustard, or both.

Our racks were larger than average, but 2 cups of the rub was plenty for two application on both of our racks.

Happy cooking!

Corn Bread

Toward the end of yesterday's post, I mentioned corn muffins and corn sticks.  These staples of Southern dining are the topic of today's post.

Cornbread, in every imaginable form, has been a staple at the Southern table for as long as there's been a South.  Not so long ago, folks in the South ate cornbread at every meal.  Hoecakes, so called because fieldhands cooked them over an open fire in a shovel or hoe, were served for breakfast, dinner, and supper (the big meal of the day, dinner, was the midday meal; there was no such meal as lunch in those times), and cornpone was served for dinner and supper.  Big sheet-cake pans of 'citified' cornbread, containing baking powder and/or baking soda, eggs, etc., were usually reserved for Sunday dinner.  Some cornbread even contained berries or other fruits, and was eaten as dessert.

Corn muffins and corn sticks, however, had special status, at least they did at our house; they were reserved for days when snap beans or greens were on the menu, when there'd be plenty of pot liquor.

Pot liquor, as you know if you've spent any time in the South, is a by-product of the traditional Southern method of cooking vegetables in water, an example of which is the snap bean recipe of yesterday's post.  Pot liquor is the cooking liquid that remains after cooking, with the vegetables removed.  It contains many or most of the nutrients that the vegetables contained before they were cooked, as well as much of the flavor of the seasoning ingredients.  Thus, in order to get full nutrition of a vegetable after it's been cooked Southern-style, you have to drink its pot liquor.

Corn muffins/corn sticks and pot liquor are natural partners.  I mentioned yesterday that corn sticks were my favorite.  The reason is that corn sticks are long and narrow, so they're easier, and a lot less messy, to dunk in pot liquor.  You don't have to pull them apart like you would a muffin.  On the other hand, muffins are easier to eat slathered with butter or margerine.  Of course if you do that, they're not fit for dunking in pot liquor anyhow.

To make corn muffins and/or corn sticks, our ancestors first made a loose batter of plain (non-self-rising) corn meal (white or yellow), all-purpose flour, buttermilk, melted lard or bacon grease, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.  They then mixed the batter thoroughly, with a spoon or old-fashioned hand-cranked egg-beater.

Before they started the batter, though, they would have greased the muffin and/or corn-stick tins they were going to bake the bread in, with lard or bacon drippings, and put them in a hottish (425-475 degree) oven to heat up.  There's nothing that sticks to the pan quite like muffins and corn sticks, and pre-heating the greased tins prevented the muffins and sticks from sticking.  If you don't grease and heat your tins, you're just begging for trouble.

When the pans were judged to be hot enough, they were removed from the oven.  Then batter was spooned into the muffin and corn stick molds.  Because stuff with baking powder and baking soda in it rises, the molds weren't filled all the way up.

The filled muffin and corn-stick tins were returned to the oven.  After 20 minutes or so, they were removed from the oven and set aside to cool a little.  They were a beautiful golden brown, and the aroma made your mouth water.  They were served as soon as they were cool enough for the cook to remove them from the tins without getting burned.

Now you may ask, do I make corn sticks and muffins this way?  Well, I won't lie; the answer is no.  I haven't baked muffins or corn sticks to this recipe in a long, long time.  There is a reason for this.  Simply put, I remember doing it the old way, and what a pain it was, and now I'm just too lazy to do it that way.  Especially now that I don't have to.

Corn meal millers, you see, took pity on the likes of me years ago; they started selling corn muffin mixes.  These convenient mixes come with all the necessary dry ingredients.  All I have to supply is the buttermilk, the vegetable oil, and the elbow grease to mix them together.  And I wouldn't even need to supply the elbow grease if I wasn't too lazy to get out my electric mixer.

What brands of corn meal/muffin mix are out there?  I honestly have no idea.  Personally, I use Martha White® Corn Meal Mix, but I don't think it's available nationally.  I believe it's a regional brand that's only available in the Southeastern United States.  If you can buy it locally, fine, but if not, I'm sure that similar products are available in your area.  Seek them out, and if you can't find 'em, please let me know.

Just make sure the ingredients list on the package does not include sugar, because in order to be authentic, muffins and corn sticks, which are to be eaten while you sip your (snap bean, or whatever) pot liquor, should not be sweet.

To prepare the batter using a corn meal mix, merely follow the instructions on the package. And if the package does not instruct you to pre-heat your tins, do it anyway.  Spraying a moderate amount of a cooking spray into the cavities of your tins is a good way to grease them.  Heating the tins in the oven, while the oven pre-heats to the instruction-recommended baking temperature, should do the trick.  After all, you don't want your corn bread to stick, and you have to fight with it to get it out of the tin, do you?  Your pot liquor's liable to get cold.

Happy cooking!

. . . Snap Beans (continued - again)

All right, now.  With the preliminaries out of the way, we can finally start cooking snap beans.

To do snap beans my way, you'll need at least 2 dry quarts of fresh green beans, preferably purchased at a road-side produce stand.  After you've tipped and tailed and strung and snapped the beans (Tuesday's post), rinse them but not for too long.  Just put them in a collander and run tap-water through them to rinse off any soil, fertilizer, or other unsavory stuff that might be on them.  A sink sprayer is ideal for this, but it may also be done by turning on the tap and moving the collander around in the stream.  Use cold water, and be sure you mix the beans in the collander so that they all get rinsed.

You may find that it's easier to do this in batches.  In fact you'll have to do it in batches if all the beans won't fit in your collander.  This goes for the sprayer method, too, incidentally. There are fewer things more unappetizing than biting into a snap bean, and hearing and feeling the "crunch" of sand in your mouth.  Be thorough.

Next, find yourself a pot (and a lid that fits it) that's large enough to hold your batch of snap beans and still have 3 to 5 inches between the top of the beans and the top rim.  It's time to season the beans, but you do this in the pot, before you add the beans.

Into pot, place some salt pork.  Salt pork is also known as fat back or streak-o-lean.  I've also used smoked ham hock.

If I'm using salt pork, I render it some.  Rendering is nothing more cooking the pork over a LOW fire until fat from the pork turns to liquid.  I don't cook all of the fat out of the pork, which would leave only bits of identifiable meat.  I just get some liquid fat, because I want substantial-sized pork pieces in the finished beans.
If I'm using a ham hock, however, I don't render it.

Incidentally, a ham hock is the cured and smoked joint (small) end of the shank of a ham.  It's used in the smokehouse as a convenient point of suspension, by which the cured ham is hung during smoking.  The hock is separated from the shank after the smoking process, as part of the process of preparing the ham for sale.  Ham hocks, traditional ones at least, are sold bone-in, but I've seen boned ham hocks for sale.  I won't say anything, positive or negative, about them because I've never used boned ham hocks myself.

Next, I add the snap beans to the seasoned pot.  Then I add enough tap-water to cover the beans (or more, if I'm really desparate for pot liquor that day), bring the pot to a boil, reduce heat, and cover and simmer over a LOW fire for at least one hour, usually longer.  During cooking, I look in now and then, and add water if the liquid in the pot looks like it's getting low.  Got to have plenty of pot liquor, you know.

Snap beans cooked this way can be a meal in itself, and was, in fact, a meal for many a South Georgia farmer (and 'towny' as well) not so long ago.  It's just plain good.  All you need to go with the beans is a big coffee mug or two of pot liquor, and a couple or three (or a dozen) hot corn muffins or (my favorite) corn sticks to dunk (or not) in the pot liquor, and you've got yourself a meal to satisfy the hungriest fieldhand.

Here's my recipe.

Snap Beans

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2 dry quarts snap-beans, tipped and tailed and strung and snapped.
Water.
Salt pork or ham hock.

To season snap beans, render salt pork in pot.  For ham hock, don't render; just add to pot to season.  Use as much or as little of either as you like.

Add beans.

Add tap-water to cover beans.

Bring pot to a rolling boil.

Reduce heat.  Cover and simmer for at least an hour, checking liquid level periodically, adding water as needed.

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This recipe can be varied by adding chopped onion, to taste, to the pot and sweating them after you've rendered the salt pork.  If you're seasoning with ham hock, you can sweat the onions in a little vegetable oil before adding the ham hock, and get the same result.

Also, you just might find that snap beans cooked this way are so good that you want to eat them often.  Well, don't.  It's kind of evident that this dish is a little on the heavy side when it comes to saturated fats.  While snap beans this way are good, I don't prepare them this way every time.  If I want snap beans with salt pork flavor, but without as much saturated fat, I use defatted bacon instead of salt pork.

To defat bacon, I take my trusty kitchen shears to strips of raw bacon, and I cut most of the fat and toss it.  This trick works best if the bacon is cold.  Then I toss the defatted bacon into the empty pot, but I don't render it because if I've done a good job of defatting, there's not enough fat left to render.  I'm just looking for pork flavor, anyway, and there's plenty of that in the lean part of the bacon,

Now, I've never done this, but I suppose that if you wanted a 'ham-hockish' flavor without the saturated fat,  you could use a ham flavoring.  There are many ham-flavored buillons, ham-flavored pastes, etc., available in supermarkets.  You would add the cubes, crystals, paste, or what have you, to the pot first, following the instructions on the package, before adding the beans and water.

Now, before you go off and substitute ham flavoring for ham hock, I have to caution you:  Most, or at least many, bouillons and other packaged flavoring agents I'm familiar with tend to be a little high in sodium.  If you're concerned about your and/or your family's sodium intake, you'll want to read carefully the nutritional information on the package when buying ham-flavored buillons and flavoring.  Actually, this caution applies when you're buying any meat-flavored buillons or meat-based flavorings.

That's it for today.  Try snap beans cooked my way, then let me know what you think.

Happy cooking!

. . . Snap Beans (continued)

I know what I said yesterday, but today we'll talk only about buying snap beans.  I had second thoughts about covering buying beans and cooking beans in the same post.  There's just too much information, so we'll consider the cooking of snap beans in tomorrow's post.

Since I don't grow them myself, I have to buy my snap beans.  If you live in an area where snap beans are grown and are sold by growers (or others) at road-side produce stands, you're in luck.  These stands are the best places to buy green beans and other produce, because the produce is fresh and has been subjected to a minimum of handling.  In some cases, the stand is adjacent to the field.  The only handling the beans go through are harvesting, by manual or mechanical means, and transportation to the stand, likely by means of the farmer's own tractor or pick-up truck.  The beans you purchase in the afternoon were likely picked that morning.  You can't get beans fresher than that unless you grow them yourself.

While a road-side produce stand is my ideal source, you can get good beans at a supermarket or grocery store.  You have to be careful, though.  Actually, you should be careful wherever and whenever you buy snap beans, and other produce as well, for that matter.

For snap beans, you'll want a fresh look and feel - light green and firm.  If the beans are limp and they look shriveled, or their skins are wrinkled, don't buy them.

Snap beans should smell fresh, too.  I can't describe what to smell for in words.  Since we don't have technology equivalent to scratch-and-sniff available on the internet yet, all I'll say is this:  If the beans have a musty odor about them, they're probably moldy; give 'em a miss.  And do not even consider beans if there's any black color on them; either they're moldy or they're beginning to rot.

All produce is subject to damage during harvesting, whether harvested by mechanical harvester or hand-picked, and during later handling.  That's just a fact of life if you're born a fruit or vegetable.  String beans are no exception.  Expect some of the beans to be broken or scathed.  You don't, however, want to see too many such specimens.

Now, as to how much to buy, snap beans are customarily sold by the pound in supermarkets and groceries.  Road-side produce stands sometimes sell by weight, but more often they sell by volume.  In the State of Georgia at least, this is probably on account of you must weigh goods in a legal-for-trade scale, which must be inspected, at the merchant's expense, annually by the Weights and Measures division of the State Department of Agriculture. Such scales ain't cheap, and neither is the inspecion fee, so road-side stand operators sell by volume to avoid the expense.

This is not a bad thing for you though, though.  In the first place, it saves you money and, and in the second, you're interested in volume, rather than weight, anyway.   Most of the road-side stands I've visited display their goods in half-peck (4 dry quarts) baskets.  One-half peck is about 270 cubic inches.  To give you an idea of its size, a typical rectangular half-peck basket measures approximately 11-1/2 inches long, by (aprox.) 6-3/4 inches wide, by (approx.) 4-1/2 inches deep.

Now, I've been known to buy a half-peck basket of beans, at least when the snap bean fit really takes me.  A half-peck cooks up into a lot of beans, however, so if the fit's not on me, I'll purchase only half that amount, or 2 dry quarts.  I've found that, for many recipes, there's a sort of minimum amount I need to get the results I want (one expected result is that there's plenty of pot liquor), and for snap beans, that minimum is 2 quarts.  I may be able to get away with using less and still get good results, but certainly not much less.  Depending on how you like your snap beans, though, you may be able to use considerably less than I do.

Incidentally, if you're forced to buy snap beans by the pound and you're wondering whether there's some formula to convert weight to volume for snap beans, there isn't.  This is because the volume of a pound of snap beans (and other produce, too) varies.  Based on the time of harvest, how long they've been sitting, where the beans were grown, how much they were watered while they were growing, etc., a given volume of snap beans' weight can vary all over the place.  All this means, though, is that you'll simply have to learn how to judge volume by eye, just like our ancestors did.  It's only a matter of practice, not rocket science.

Happy cooking!

Great green gobs of . . .

. . . beans.

Green beans, string beans, snap beans . . . whatever you want to call them.

I figured it was time for a break from steak, and snap beans are a darn good side dish to accompany any main course, including sundry variations of breaded and fried cubed steak.

There was a time in South Georgia when almost everybody kept a vegetable garden and grew this delicious legume, in one variety or another, every summer.  And with the long growing season and other favorable conditions, even if you were too feeble, or too lazy, or were otherwise disinclined to plant and tend a garden, you still could get home-grown string beans.  Chances were, your neighbor had a garden, was overrun with beans, and was more than willing to share.

Some years we had a garden, some years we didn't.  Regardless, we enjoyed snap beans when they were in season.  On many a summer morning, you could find Nannie sitting on her front porch, preparing snap beans for the noon meal.  She would 'tip and tail' each bean, and 'string' it in the process, and then 'snap' it.  It was a labor-intensive affair, but it was a labor of love for Nannie, and it's still a labor of love for me.  Here's how it's done.

First, you tip and tail the bean.  What does that mean?  Tipping and tailing is the act of removing of the 'tip', or stem, of the bean, and removing of the 'tail', or the end of the bean opposite the stem, which actually looks like a little green tail.  Don't use a knife for this.  Break the tip and the tail off the bean.  If there's a 'string' in the bean, you'll see it.  Since the 'string' of a string bean has roughly the toughness, texture, and mouth-feel of monofilament fishing line, it needs to be removed.  Just strip it away as you remove the tip or tail.

After you've tipped and tailed and strung the bean, you 'snap' it by breaking it into bite-sized pieces.  Incidentally, if you haven't guessed, a 'snap bean' is so called because of the snapping sound it makes when you break it. 

These operation must be performed on each and every bean in the batch, and can be tiring if your doing a dinner-size 'mess' (a term people in the South used to use to describe a substantial quantity of anything) of snap beans.  You're going to a lot of trouble, granted, but for fresh snap beans, it's worth it.  Besides, it's the only way I know of, short of paying someone else to do it, to get fresh snap beans.

Tomorrow, I'll share with you what I look for in beans when I buy them at the market (too lazy to plant a garden these days), and how I fix 'em, with lots of pot liquor.

Happy cooking!