Entries Tagged 'Product Review' ↓

This time of year I get a lot of folks asking me what tools and toys I recommend as gifts for their grillmeister. Here’s a list of some of the gear that I’ve found to be useful for my cooks on the Big Green Egg:

Apron - after trashing a couple of shirts, this cool apron helps keep me clean and keep my tools organized. It’s got plenty of pockets and comes with the all-important bottle opener .

Barbecue Sauce – Blue’s Hog Original is an exceptional sweet and spicy sauce. The Carnivore BBQ sauces are also winners.

Chef’s Choice 610 Electric Food Slicer – I’ve run a ton of cottage bacon through this and it does a great job. Also great for pepperoni, cheeses and other goodies for holiday trays.

Grilling Gloves – this is essential protection for working around the grill.

Lodge Cast-Iron Melting Pot – I’m big on basting and this little pot does a great job of keeping my sauces warm.

MAPP Torch – fastest way to light lump charcoal (fun too).

Maverick ET-73 Wireless Thermometer – great for low-n-slow cooks, particularly overnighters. Two sensors let you monitor the temperature of both the meat and the smoking chamber and transmit them up to 100 feet to a portable receiver.

Panasonic GF1 Digital Camera with 20mm f/1.7 Lens – this was my early Christmas present (thanks honey). I love this little camera and lens combination, particularly for food photos. It lets me work without a flash and has excellent image quality.

Rubs – I’m a huge fan of both Dizzy Pig and John Henry. The Dizzy sample pack makes a great gift, but you might as well go ahead and buy them all.

Thermapen – pricey, but it’s the thermometer to go to for speed and accuracy. Three second reading times are great when the cooking is hot and fast. New version is splashproof.

Tongs -16 inch tongs are almost the only tool I use for moving food around the grill. Oxo makes a great pair.

Tool Wizard Grill & BBQ Brush Wizard Grill Scrubber – best grill cleaner I’ve ever used. Cleaning heads are washable and replaceable.

Weber Grill Pan – keeps little stuff from falling through the grate. I use it a lot for veggies and shrimp. You need to bend the ends in just a little to fit a large Big Green Egg.

Happy Holidays to all and to all…..Great Grilling!

We’ve been curing a lot of our own meat for a number of years now. It tastes great, but slicing it all up for storage has always been a bit of a chore.  This summer we developed a slight addiction to BLTs made with cottage bacon. At 8 bucks a pound, my dear wife offered that if I made our own bacon she’d get me an electric slicer.

Behold the Chef’s Choice 610 Premium Electric Food Slicer.

• Food carriage is large and tilted so that slicing goes pretty quickly.
• All the parts (blade, food carriage, food pusher, food deflector, and thickness guide) come off for easy cleaning.
• 7-inch blade slices cleanly from deli-thin to 1-inch thick slices
• High-torque motor handles hard foods and big slices.

So far I’ve run 14 pounds of cottage bacon, several sticks of pepperoni, and a load of zucchini through it and it has handled it all like a champ – nice even slices with no tearing. Some of the slices of bacon were a good 7 inches long, but the motor never slowed down.

It cuts very quickly and the feed is real smooth, so make sure to use the guard and food pusher.  I ran both pork butts through it in under 5 minutes.

All the moving parts come off for cleaning (I put them in the top basket of the dishwasher even though the manual says not to), and the then you just have to wipe down the body.

If we had a little more counter space I’d even consider leaving  it out as an alternative to a box slicer or mandolin.

I’ve been hearing great things about Carnivore BBQ sauces on the Big Green Egg Forum for some time now, and finally decided to give them a try.

Being allergic to wheat gluten, I first sent them as email asking if their product was gluten-free. I was pleasantly surprised that instead of the usual corporate response, I got a nice email from the owner himself,  asking for more information on gluten allergies and what products might contain gluten. We exchanged a few emails, and while his sauces aren’t certified gluten-free, we couldn’t identify any ingredients that would be an issue.

I ordered up a bottle of each of their 3 sauces – Robust, Sweet, and Hot Chipotle. Of course, the day the sauces arrived I wanted to taste all 3 of them, but after my dear wife (kindly and with much love in her heart) pointed out that I already had 6 bottles of other barbecue sauce in the fridge I decided that maybe it would be best to start with the Hot Chipotle.

Initial tasting -  plenty of heat right up front. Hot, but transitory and balanced with some sweetness, so it’s not overwhelming.  Some smokiness, but it doesn’t scream CHIPOTLE, which is nice. Has a very rich base with plenty of herbs that doesn’t get lost in the heat. Wow, there’s a lot going on in there. This is a very, very nice hot barbecue sauce. I can’t wait to try out the others.

Now, what food to pair it with for grilling? We’d just picked up some nice-sized prawns, so I decided to make some skewers and use the Carnivore sauce both as part of the marinade and drizzled over the finished product.

Ingredients

1 1/2 pounds large (21/25 count) prawns or shrimp, shelled and deveined
1/2 cup Carnivore Hot Chipotle BBQ sauce
1 tablespoon olive oil
Juice of 1 lime (about 2 tablespoons)
1 teaspoon kosher salt
6-8 bamboo skewers

Directions

Place skewers in water to soak.

Set your grill up for a direct cook over high heat (about 450°F).

Combine barbecue sauce, olive oil, lime juice, and salt in a lidded container. Add shrimp and toss to coat. Refrigerate for 30 minutes to an hour.

Skewer the shrimp – run one skewer through the head end and then another through the tail.

Grill 2-3 minutes per side, or until shrimp turn pink. Don’t over cook.

Serve with more barbecue sauce on the side.

This recipe turned out really well. The sweetness of the shrimp paired nicely with the heat of the sauce. I plan on using the Carnivore Hot Chipotle instead of the usual hot sauce in my next batch of  buffalo wings.

Dinosaur Bar-B-Que: An American Roadhouse by John Stage & Nancy Radke

Dinosaur Bar-B-Que is a small chain of NY rib joints. Their new cookbook does an excellent job of capturing not just the food, but also the look and feel of the classic blues and barbecue roadhouses.

This is not strictly a barbecue cookbook. It’s more a celebration of all things honky-tonk. The focus is recipes, but it is also full of cooking tips, bold photos, and bathroom graffiti.

There are a lot of recipes for pit-smoked barbecue classics like ribs and brisket that have been adapted to work on your backyard grill. There are many non-traditional recipes like Drunken Spicy Shameless Shrimp and Vaca Frita, as well as a good collection of tasty sides and desserts. I particularly enjoyed their techniques and tips sections that do nice job of walking you through the hows and whys of good barbecue.

So far I’ve made my versions of their Grilled Pork Chops in Brandied BBQ Peach Sauce and Asparagus, Red Pepper Potato Salad. Both were excellent. I’m looking forward to cooking up quite a few dishes from this book this summer.

Meaty portobellos stuffed with a spicy crab and cheese filling. This was a big hit as an appetizer on Valentine’s Day. You could do them in an oven, but since the rest of the meal was grilled (of course), it was just as easy to throw these on beforehand. Many thanks to my very tolerant and understanding wife for waiting for me snap this photo before we dug in.

Ingredients

1 can (6 ounces) crab meat, drained
4 ounces cream cheese, softened
1 tablespoon dried parsley
1/4 cup green onions, chopped
4 tablespoons Parmesan cheese, grated
1 teaspoon Chesapeake Bay seasoning
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon black pepper, ground
1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes
2-3 portobello mushroom caps, stems removed and finely chopped
2 tablespoons bread crumbs
Olive oil

Directions

Set the grill up for an direct cook over medium-high heat (400°F). Grease the bottom of a small, smoke-proof baking dish (a disposable, 9-inch pie pan works fine) with a little olive oil.

In the bowl of a mixer, combine crab meat, cream cheese, parsley, onion, Parmesan, Chesapeake Bay seasoning, garlic powder, black pepper, red pepper, and the diced stems. Mix well to combine.

Stuff the mushroom caps with the crab mixture, top with bread crumbs and a drizzle of olive oil.

Arrange the stuffed mushroom on the baking dish and grill for about 20 minutes, or until the caps are tender and the tops are brown and bubbly.

After pulling one too many packages of barbecue out of the freezer only to find it ruined by freezer burn, my dear wife and I decided to invest in a vacuum sealer.

Vacuum sealers extend the storage life of food by removing the air and sealing the food for storage. Food can stay fresher up to five times longer with this method, and since there’s almost no oxygen in the packaging, there’s much less risk of mold or spoilage.

We did a bit of research and settled on a FoodSaver V3825 that Costco was selling for $159.99 (this looks like the same unit as the V3840 that FoodSaver sells directly for $173.97, just with a different accessory set).

One of the big reasons we picked this model is that it sits upright and has a spiffy silver and black finish so we can leave it out on the counter top all the time.

Continue reading →

Commander’s Palace has been a fine dining institution in New Orleans since 1880. Executive Chef Tory McPhail and managing partner Ti Adelaide Martin have mined this restaurant’s extensive collection of recipes to coauthor the Commander’s Wild Side: Bold Flavors for Fresh Ingredients from the Great Outdoors.

As the title suggests, the book focuses on wild game dishes – crayfish, rabbit, elk, boar, etc., prepared in ways that enhance the natural flavors, not cover them up.

The book is organized into nine sections: Sea, Stream, Air, Land, Not-So-Wild Game, Campfire Cooking, Showstopping Dishes to Impress Your Friends, Sensational Sides, and The Sweet Finish.

While the focus is on the entrees, care has been taken to ensure that all of the side dishes and desserts are designed to “fit with what you’re fixing.”

Now, there are lots of great game recipes out there, but this book is more than that. There’s a strong theme that runs through every recipe of doing the best with what is fresh. I’ve always thought that the best way to test a cookbook is to make a full meal from it, so I (and my dear wife) put together five recipes to create a feast for some of our foodie friends. Continue reading →

My only complaint with the Big Green Egg ceramic cooker is that grilling directly over the lump can be a little challenging. The standard direct setup puts the cooking grid right on top of the hot coals. The heat can get plenty intense and the angle makes it hard to get at the food to move it off of the hot spots. After losing a prime ribeye to immolation after a sear-gone-wild, I decided to investigate some options for remedying this shortcoming.

The Woo2 (now Woo3) from The Ceramic Grill Store is a stainless extender that solves these problems by raising the cooking grid. The grid is moved up about 4 inches so it’s almost level with the bottom edge of the cooker, creating 8 inches of clearance above the firebox. This makes handling food a lot easier and gives you much better temperature control. Continue reading →

The Maverick ET-73 Redi-Chek® Wireless Remote Smoker Thermometer is the perfect tool for barbecuing.

Big cuts of meat require low heat and long cooking times to be transformed into that smoky, tender fare that we crave. And those long times mean that the pit master is often chained to the cooker. That’s fine if it’s a sunny afternoon and there’s a ready supply of company and adult beverages. It stinks if it’s just you and your bunny slippers crawling out of a warm bed in the middle of the night.

The ET-73 has two sensors that monitor the temperature of both the meat and the smoking chamber and transmits them up to 100 feet to a portable receiver. So instead of having to go out to check on the cooker all the time, you can just check the display on the receiver. Continue reading →