My BBQ Adventures

Last Couple of Weeks

So I’ve decided to not only document the new restaurants and BBQ joints I dine at, I figure Ill start documenting my home BBQ Adventures. Ill try to cook a recipes or two out of my BBQ books every week, as well as try a few of my own recipes and document how they work out and the road getting there.

Well over the last 2 weeks I’ve already tried 5 different recipes- Cornbread, Grilled Chicken Thigh, Cole-slaw, Deviled Eggs and Baby Back Ribs.

The grilled Chicken Thighs weren’t out of a book, they were just something I threw together. I marinated them over night in a little Peach Nectar with roasted ground mustard, white pepper, sweet paprika, and kosher salt. After marinating I put a slight rub on them with some salt and pepper, then lit the grill. While the grill was warming up I started on some corn bread from scratch, following a recipe from one of my BBQ books. It consisted of your basic stuff- corn meal, flour sugar, etc… nothing out of the ordinary. I haven’t grilled chicken in a long while, and Ive only grilled chicken thighs once before, so its not my forte… but I want to get better at it and try some new things. By the time I finished grilled them, I decided I had started with too high of a heat (and couple bad flare ups) which resulted in slightly charred skin. But in the end, the chicken was moist, sweet and delicious. So next time, Ill stick with the same marinade, maybe add some brown sugar and remember to start with a lower heat on the grill. The corn bread was pretty good too, I personally would’ve preferred it to be sweeter, so I took a mental note of that.

Later that week, I cooked a beef stew that I just threw together… but thought this would be a good chance to try a revamp of the Cornbread recipe. I changed two things in the recipe- 1. I used nearly twice as much sugar. 2. I used a stone ground , mildly course, corn meal. The end result was a sweeter cornbread, with a very different texture. The courser cornmeal gave the corn bread a slightly more chewy ness to it, which I really liked. It was like gum chewy, it was just more to chew due to the bigger pieces, its hard to explain. I guess try to imagine a snickers with shopped peanuts, instead of whole ones. It totally changes the texture, but not in a bad way. Kinda made me feel like I was eating cornbread made out on the trail.

Today I decided to go all out, I smoked some Baby Back Ribs, made some cole-slaw and fresh deviled eggs. Two of them I made from recipes in one of my books, the ribs and the eggs. The cole-slaw I just kept it simple with mayo, lemon juice and sugar and just mixed together till it tasted good. The Ribs were a two day process. Day 1 I had to prep them, by removing the membrane and putting the rub on them. The rub was a “Caribbean” style rub, with allspice, cinnamon, garlic, onion, and a few other things in it. After rubbing it down, I wrapped it in plastic wrap and placed it in the fridge to rest over night.

Next I had to make the Pineapple BBQ Sauce from scratch. The Sauce consisted mainly of pineapple juice, dark rum and diced onions and diced pineapple. It was different from any other BBQ Ive ever had, and unlike most I wouldn’t eat this one “by itself.” For one it was a little chucky so I threw it in the blender, and two the flavor kinda restricts it to just saucing meats- while cooking and right after. Not really a “dip your bread in” type of sauce, but still very good. Would probably also be good on pork or chicken. So I finished making the sauce and threw it in the fridge until I began smoking the ribs.

The Ribs I started smoking at around 1pm, it was around 50 degrees with a little wind out side and felt great. I smoked them using mesquite and apple wood for flavor, and mesquite lump charcoal primarily for heat. Over the past few months Ive gotten a lot better at judging and maintaining the fires in my pit to where I can walk away for almost an hour at a time, as I refuel it and monitor the heat. Which is really pretty great, cause it allows me to multi-task… like watch some football, cook other items, or go do some work around the house. Where as the first few times I smoked stuff, I didn’t move away from the smoker unless I had to. Id just camp out there with a cooler, my ipod and a few books and maybe my laptop. So while the ribs were off smoking, I started work on the slaw and the deviled eggs.

Sorry to say I kinda cheated with the slaw, I really didn’t want to buy a whole head of cabbage cause I wouldn’t eat all the slaw it would produce. Soooo I bought a small bad of pre-chopped slaw mix. But I did use real Mayo, lemon juice and sugar. I kept it simple, using about a cup of mayo, a tsp of lemon juice and just kept adding sugar until it was sweet enough for my taste. In the end it was good, but I think I could’ve knocked up a couple more degrees of sweetness.
Now I love deviled eggs, and part of my job at work is to make them for the store and I like the ones we make at work, but I wanted to try a different “base”. So I went through my books until I found one that sounded good and put it to work. It is a mayo and sweet relished based recipe…But I did add a couple of things 1. I added some hot sauce for a kick 2. I added some egg whites for texture. And for fun, in half the “batter” I added a tsp of yellow mustard for little more kick. Then came time to fill the egg whites with the batter, but low and behold I lost my pastry bag… so I went poor school on it and used a Ziploc bag with a corner cut off. Both batched of Deviled eggs were pretty good, only thing that could’ve made them better would be the Apple Smoke Bacon I thought about adding.

Now that the D.E. were done and the slaw was done, there wasn’t really anything else to do but wait for the ribs to finish up. Every hour Id check on the pit, Id open up the smoke chamber to glace at the ribs and sprtiz with a pineapple solution, as directed by the recipe… to add flavor and moistness. At the 2 hour mark, I rotated the racks of ribs so they’d cook fairly evenly. I also cut out the apple wood after the 2 hour mark, cause I feel that after that point the meat has built up enough bark and flavor that can be applied from that specific wood. By 4:50 they were falling off the bone goodness, so right before I took them off I slathered them with the Pineapple BBQ Sauce, close it up and “turned up the heat.” After about 5-10 more minute of cooking I pulled them off, wrapped them in foil and left them to rest.

After about 10-15 minutes of Resting it was time to DIG IN! The ribs were very good… they had a nice smoke flavor that wasn’t too overpowering, the pineapple sauce added a nice sweetness and extra crunch to the bark, and the rub added subtle hints of flavor. Not only was the flavor good, but the meat was tender and could easily pull it off the bone, and it was moist, not dried out at all.
All in All, it was a very successful Week.

The Books I found these Recipes are as follow:
Corn Bread: America’s Best BBQ, Davis and Kirk
Deviled Eggs: America’s Best BBQ, Davis and Kirk
Caribbean Pineapple Baby Back Ribs with Pineapple BBQ Sauce: Planet Barbecue!, Steven Raichlen