The BBQ, Grilling & Smoking Thread

You know what? You got some [people] coming over, shishkebabs are the best, simplest thing you can do.

It's dead simple to prep the meat: Buy some chicken breast, douche it down in salt, pepper, and oil. If you want to get jiggy, add some lemon/lime juice, soy sauce, honey, rooster sauce, garlic, etch.

Let that shit set for an hour or two. Cube up some assorted peppers, onions, and throw in some mushrooms. [MUSHROOM, MUSHROOM!!]. Add some olive oil. Stick on bamboo skewer.

Fucking awesome.

[But watch your own alcohol consumption or you'll wake up the next morning, still buzzed and with no recollection of the last few hours of the evening. ]

 

^ Shish kebabs is a generic term.

I have some good kebab recipes from around the middle east, especially Iranian ones.

I thoroughly recommend a joojeh kabab.

 

Your Search-Fu is weak, old man.

http://www.wordforge.net/showpost.php?p=1812616&postcount=1

 

Chicken, sausage and corn for my daughter's 20th birthday party.











She wanted orange/pineapple marinated chicken but I didn't buy quite enough orange/pinapple juice. So I "stretched" it with tequila.

 

And to address an earlier topic of "cleaning" the grill:

This is the grill before I started a fire in it:



This is after, with only fire burning off the old greasy stuff, before I hit it with the stainless steel brush:



Right down to bare metal.

 

Here's a hickory apple beer can chicken I cooked a few weeks ago. It was one of the best chickens I've had.

 

This thread gives me a hard on.

 

I like two kinds of chicken, fried and deep fried.

Putting chicken on a grill is a waste of grill space and energy IMO. Pork, beef, and lamb are what grills are for, fish can get on, but it needs a waiver.

 

Chicken is my least favorite thing to grill. Because of the bones, it's harder to cook through properly so it's done on the inside and not scorched on the outside (even "rare" pork is more acceptable to me than "rare" chicken ). It takes a marinade/brine really well, though, and it's cheap as hell which is why I cook so much of it.

Beer can chicken is great, though, because it's so frickin' easy. Build a fire, season the birds, load up the liquid reservoir (I almost never use beer) and let 'er smoke until it's done. Oh, and drink heavily while you're doing it.

 

I've never been able to grill chicken - it just dries out. My best grilled food is steak - a thick steak with no bones.

 

I bought a charcoal chimney, and on a whim decided to put a grate right on top of it to cook some steak today.

It was pretty much the most delicious, fastest cooked steak I ever had.

 

shootER agrees: Saw that on Good Eats just this week.

What is Good Eats?

 

http://www.foodnetwork.com/good-eats/index.html

 

I normally cook on Saturdays, but my family had plans then so I cooked today instead.



Sweet potato fries:




Green beans:


Skirt steaks:

 

Today I loaded up the trusty low-end tailgate Weber and lugged it down to the park to throw some chicken kebobs on it with some friends. Fucking great. Cheap. Very tasty. Hard to fuck up. And for some reason, people think you know how to cook if you make 'em.

 

I was going to grill today. But the 7 year old asked me to extend the invitation to the ex-husband - seemed only fair since I invited his parents and sister and her kids - and he offered to pick up pre-cooked chicken (Popeyes), I figured it might be best since my grill only a foot high and a foot in diameter.

Can't wait to see what my mother in law is cooking tomorrow, tho. She's from Alaska - could be moose, could be salmon, could be ... something else. You wouldn't believe some of the things she has snuck onto my plate over the last 15 years.

 

SHootER, your backyard is looking like it's slowly becoming a Barbecue mecca. It's one of the places I am thinking of putting on my bucket list of places to visit before I die.

 

It's not BBQ, Grilling or Smoking, but it is cooking outside.

Fried catfish and hushpuppies.

 

Well WF fellows, I got a smoker for my birthday, from ma and pa. Great news, but everytime this week I wanted to assemble it, it had been pissing rain outside, with low chances of ever seeing the clouds dissipate.

But today, I could stand it no longer, and assembled it. It had been sitting in the box since last Saturday, and I was dying to get some cooks into it. Hell, summer is half over!!

So I started off with chicken thighs. This includes both the wing and the drumstick. The smoker itself is suppose to be a BBQ/smoker and grill, but since I already have a propane powered grill, I wanted to use this one solely for smoking. It is one of these:



Pretty much the exact same model. I started a fire in the fire box, added a few wood charcoals to it, then basically let my chicken thighs smoke for more than to two hours. They were brown at the end, and if it hadn't been too dark out, I woulda snapped a picture. The meat inside was nice and smoked, but the skin, although browned, and almost blackened, had a kinda plastic texture to it. Basically, it was like when you take one bite, the skin doesn't rip when you bite down, but rather, your teeth end up pulling the skin off the rest of the thigh.

I had these wicked chicken thighs in New York City, at a place about a 2 minute walk from Times Square called Virgil's, almost right beside the Toys 'R' Us, and those wings were ejaculationigny good! Tonight, I could get the meat to taste that smoky, but not the skin.

I was wondering, how exactly are you suppose to use the smoker? Is it suppose to be low heat, then smoke it for however long, then throw it onto the grill to brown it? The chicken inside the smoker was already browning, and if I had thrown it onto the grill after that, I'd get burnt chicken. Are you suppose to keep the heat low enough that the chicken doesn't actually cook?

Another thing I noticed with this smoker is that the wings closest to the fire box were getting tanned a lot quicker than the ones on the other side, so I had to rotate the thighs every once in awhile. The birds cooked at about 200 degrees F, yet were still not completely done in the middle when I took them out. This seems a pretty low temperature, but adding more wood chips and raising the temp would brown the chicken even faster.

Any thoughts or suggestions on what to do with the next batch?

 

Unless I'm cooking a whole bird, I don't smoke chicken. I grill it over direct heat.

Pieces of chicken are too small for smoking, IMHO. They need a faster cook time than that or they end up tasting like shit.

 

Yeah, I've been playing around with this lately. It's a trial and error process, usually involving newspaper, charcoal, little pieces of wood, and burnt wood. Definitely more of an art form than a science.

Those little smokers are generally low quality, but get the job done. The problem is even when the thing is shut tight, smoke still escapes through the cracks in the smoker. This shouldn't happen, and the professional ones are sealed well. I have heard they also have thicker steel, and retain heat better than these cheap counterparts. But then I'm not gonna spend 500 bucks on a smoker either so this one will have to do.

They say with a little bit of customization, it can be turned into a very decent smoker. You are suppose to seal the cracks with a high temperature, food safe sealant. As with any grill, it's like getting to know your woman. It takes time, constant vigilance, and periods of adjustments before you and her settle into a nice rhythm and you can comfortably trust her with your meat inside her.

 

Oh, and here are some pictures to tempt you with lust of the flesh....


This is my cookin' of kabobs for my pa's 60th birthday. This is starting 'em out.


This is when they are almost done.


And on the plate.


Beef strips marinaded in teriyaki sauce overnight, and stuffed with white mushrooms.


Picture while grilling. Since they are so thin, they dry out easily. I had to remove them pretty fast.


I smoked these ribs for 6 hours tonight, adding wood chips to the pile every 15 minutes or so. Marinaded in honey hoisin sauce and red chili flakes. Fuckin' to die for, but I found this set of pork ribs to be pretty fatty. Next time I do ribs, I think I'll try to find some beef ribs instead.

Next up, I will probably try to smoke a fish.

I am a chain smoker.

 

For the most part (though not always) smoking is for thicker or tougher pieces of meat. The low and slow method helps to break down the meat fibers, making it more tender than if you use a faster, higher heat method. You'd smoke a brisket or a pork shoulder, but you'd grill a steak or pork chop.

 

This thread is the manliest thread in history.

 

Cleaned out the "chimney" on the small grill.



Then cooked some carnitas for supper.



And some sausage.



And the obligatory lamb chop for my wife.



The scattered remnants of tropical storm Don came a calling.


The food turned out great, though.