Baptist Chicken

It took me a while to admit to myself that my favorite meat is chicken. Well, grouse is better than chicken, but they're pretty close to the same thing. My favorite way to cook chicken is what we have termed "Baptist Chicken". That is, chicken that's first grilled then immersed in sweet sauce. The key is to coat it by immersion only after it's fully cooked.

It's real barbecue: we cook it in smoke at around 200° F. But chicken cooks pretty quickly: a whole chicken is completely cooked somewhere between four and six hours. When we're doing Baptist Chicken, we generally use legs and thighs.

With the Big Joe, Baptist Chicken has become the perfect slow-cooker meal. The Big Joe maintains its temperature beautifully – it once went 35 hours for me at a constant 215°F – nothing could be easier than throwing some chicken onto the Joe and ignoring it for four hours or so.

Let's address the first issue: rubbery chicken skin. Conventional wisdom says you'll get rubbery chicken skin if you cook chicken that low. That's only kinda-sorta true. The key is to cook the chicken directly over the fire, rather than using "indirect heat". On the Big Joe, that means I generally don't use the ceramic heat deflectors for chicken.

The mistake to avoid with barbecued chicken is saucing it too early. You don't want to even think about getting any sort of sugar- or tomato-based sauce on that chicken until it's at least safe to eat, if not fully cooked. If you sauce it too early, you'll get burned sauce on your chicken.

Once the chicken is entirely cooked, you want thin coats of sweet sauce on it. If you just want to use barbecue sauce from a jar (there's nothing wrong with that), then you'll want to thin it. I prefer to thin it with an eastern North Carolina style of sauce, but you can thin it with vinegar or a combination of vinegar and water. The key is to get it thin enough it'll coat the meat evenly.

So here's how I do it:

1. I coat a bunch of chicken legs and/or thighs liberally with salt, black pepper, and garlic powder. I use garlic powder instead of fresh garlic for almost every grilling application. Not for souvlaki...
2. I set up the grill. With my grill, I know that a one-inch opening on the bottom vent plus the daisy wheel set about half-open on the top gives me almost exactly 200°F, depending on the weather.
3. The chicken goes into the grill, directly over the fire. No heat deflectors, no indirect heat.
4. I close the grill and ignore it for about four hours.
5. I thin some sweet sauce. I've had good results using a combination of Kraft Original and Carolina Treet: almost any sauce should work, and a home-made sauce might be best.
6. I put the thinned sauce in a mixing bowl and immerse the cooked chicken in it, then return it to the grill so the sauce will caramelize.
7. You can repeat that last step as many times as you like, but you're going for thin coats, not large globs of sugary sauce on that chicken.

We have church pot lucks twice a month, and I live a short walk away. So my new potluck dish is Baptist Chicken. I put it on the grill first thing in the morning, and ignore it until just before lunch. A quick coat and back on the grill, the chicken is ready to eat almost on time.

Weekend cooking

We're planning on a "cookout" for Memorial Day (Monday). Most of my team at work is going to come over and we'll throw down with some food from the grill.

So today I'm cooking one of Ames' favourites: Baptist Chicken. We take some chicken pieces (I've never tried with whole chickens) and barbecue them (~200F for several hours). Once the chicken is completely cooked we immerse it in some sweet and sticky sauce and put it back on the grill to caramelize a bit. Get it? Baptist: full immersion after it's completely cooked. We started making this when we still lived in North Carolina:

From Baptist Chicken

So I put some chicken on the grill this morning: it smells heavenly out there right now.

From Baptist Chicken

Plenty of things taste better than chicken, but nothing smells better. There's just an indefinable goodness to the smell of chicken fat burning on charcoal.


On another front, I took some time off for my birthday (I had too much vacation time accrued and needed to burn some). Since I had the time off, my kids and I made some beer. I came up with a recipe with the help of Beer Calculus, and we put it together.

From Woolen Shirt

From Woolen Shirt

I'm calling this one "Old Woolen Shirt". It seems an appropriate name for a beer of that colour. I followed some advice I found online and have tasted one bottle a week since bottling. We bottled it two weeks ago today, so that's two beers.

The first bottle was not quite flat, but pretty close (at one week). The flavour was really good: caramel-y and toasty with a nice roast barley undertone, but not too sweet.

From Woolen Shirt

One week later and it was a lot more carbonated (at two weeks).
The flavour was still there, but it's a little drier. It's developed a definite yeast bite, but that should fade over time. I'm not really expecting it to be ready to drink until it's conditioned at least another week and then chilled for several more days, so I'm not too worried about the yeasty flavour.

From Woolen Shirt

The colour's dead-on, but it's a little cloudy. It should clear some more with time, but I don't think this one's ever going to drop really clear.

From Woolen Shirt

I'm really happy with this beer. I realize it's still pretty young, but it's very promising. I'll definitely be making this one again soon. I managed to get a huge crop of yeast from washing the trub when I bottled this one. That always helps with the $$$.


I've got one more batch fermenting right now: this one's an amber beer with wheat. I tried to make it lower alcohol, and I'm experimenting with Irish moss and longer fermentation to see how clear I can get it. I'm making this one with yeast I harvested from the Woolen Shirt, so that's a bonus. I haven't named the current batch yet.

Smoky Friday

I've actually accrued enough vacation time that I stopped accruing: I have to take some time off. So I had a chat with my boss and I took off yesterday and today.

So I got up early this morning and put a couple pig shoulders and a pork roast on the grill. 200 F, baby! It's been on there just over 9 hours now, and coming nicely.

I love me some BBQ.

We (re)watched Alton Brown's Feasting on Asphalt a few weeks back, and I noticed his comments on BBQ: you can't fake it, you can't hurry it up, you can't mass-produce it. With some minor caveats he's right. Barbecue is one of the simplest foods I know how to make; but it's one of the hardest to find made right. It's baffling to me the efforts people will make to produce decent Q when the genuine article is so simple. People will hunt for specialty woods, use exotic spice combinations, and buy all manner of complicated cookers (have you priced a Pitts & Spitts?) to produce what was traditionally cooked over an open pit in the ground with whatever wood was available.

So here's how to make authentic barbecue:

1. Choose a tough cut of meat, anything suitably low-grade will do. I prefer pig shoulders, but beef brisket, spare ribs, and whole poultry work well. I generally buy the cheapest pork I can find, which is usually the shoulder. The whole point of BBQ is to make something delectable from an inedibly tough cut of meat.


2. Cook over charcoal. Barbecue is cooked in wood smoke: charcoal is wood that's been burned in an oxygen-deprived environment to drive off moisture, phenols, and various other impurities. You can just cook over wood, of course, but you need to burn it down. Raw wood isn't fit for cooking over. Of course you might like to throw some bits of wood into your fire to add some interesting smoke, but don't do that too much: creosote doesn't taste good.


3. Keep a steady temperature. Barbecue is really all about rendering fat and tough connective tissues in the meat. If you hit the meat with a temperature that's too high you'll toughen it up, dry it out, and turn those tissues into knots. The ideal BBQ temperature is 200F, but I generally don't worry too much as long as my grill's between 190F and 250F. Temperatures spike up and down, but you want them to average in the low 200s.


4. Take lots of time. Barbecue takes a lot of time to cook; enjoy the downtime. I budget between 12 and 20 hours for a BBQ session.


5. Baste with mild flavours. I baste with a North Carolina-style baste made from apple cider vinegar, water, and spices. It's thin and vinegary, which offsets the high-fat pork. Sauces high in sugar or tomatoes can caramelize on the grill, so they really only should be used at the very end of the cook. I've had a lot of excellent Q that was cooked completely dry, but I like to baste a little now and then. It seems to make the "bark" a little more interesting.


6. Cook to a high internal temperature. The whole point of BBQ is to cook slowly so that the meat can actually get to a higher temperature. It's a lot like braising, but without moisture. The higher temperature is what gives the Q its beautifully soft and moist texture.

Ultimately it's easier to make good BBQ properly than it is to fake it. It's not about the wine barrel staves used for fuel or the rare pomegranate juice you put into your sauce. It's about watching your temperature and taking your time.

Which isn't to say I don't want a Pitts & Spitts, or that I don't like to try varying things now and then on my grill. And honestly, I've had excellent BBQ cooked too hot on a propane grill. But when it comes down to it, BBQ is all about the simple joys.

Ribs!

My mother-in-law is here for a visit. I'm one of her fans, so it's all cool. She brought me a couple bottles of barbecue sauce from North Carolina--which is, in fact, the Mecca of barbecue.

From Ribs

I had found some St. Louis-cut ribs at a restaurant supply store in Tacoma. I'd never found those before, although I've looked for them. So naturally I bought some and threw them into the freezer. My mother-in-law's visit seems a worthy occasion for breaking out those ribs.

Ribs are a serious topic. To get the real low-down, you ought to read Smoky's primer on ribs. But the short version is this: what you generally see in the store is "baby back ribs", which are actually from the pork loin. Those ribs are tender, and you can cook them almost any way you want, because they're an extremely tender cut of meat. But the price of tender, of course, is flavour. Just like with beef, the more tender cut is also the less flavourful cut. If you want flavour, you'll get the side ribs. They're higher in fat, harder to cook, and full of connective tissues.

But you can taste them.

St. Louis cut ribs are the middle of the rack of side ribs: side ribs with each end trimmed off. So they look like a rack of "baby backs", but they've got longer, flatter bones and a lot more fat. So they're like the best of both worlds.

Of course any time you have a tough hunk of meat with a lot of connective tissues and fat, you can deal with it in a couple ways. My preferred technique is to barbecue them. That means, you'll recall, cooking them in woodsmoke at around 200F for long periods of time.

From Ribs

The hardest part is temperature control. I manage that with a good thermometer, careful control of the fire, and adjusting airflow. One invaluable tool has been my 2X4 block to prop open the grill. Propping open the lid really helps keep it cool without choking the fire right down.

From Ribs

We started them slow in the morning, covered them in mustard and some spices, and threw them on the grill. We kept an eye on them all morning, basting them with our home-made basting sauce. Around noon, we broke open one of the bottles of Carolina Treet my mother-in-law brought me. It added a little colour to those bones.

From Ribs

And since it was lunch time, we made some pizza

From Ribs

We kept stoking and basting through the afternoon, until them bones were cooked and it was time to bake something sweet onto them. So we mixed up some off-the-shelf barbecue sauces, some of our own baste, and some of the Carolina Treet to make something red and sweet. That went on those racks, and we left them in the [cooling] grill for another 30 minutes or so.

Then it was time for ribs.

From Ribs

I love ribs! We made up some potato salad from the Red Hot 'n' Blue copycat recipe, Ames threw together some killer beans, and we feasted.

Ah ribs... my mother-in-law should visit more often!

From Ribs

Smoky Chook

My favourite smell is chicken fat burning on charcoal. The slightly sweet smoke is an aroma that always makes me breathe deeply and salivate.

There's a kinda-sorta restaurant supply store in Tacoma, not too far from where I work. A co-worker and I drove over there at lunch last week and poked around. It was actually pretty cool: this is the first place I've seen in the NW with meat that's right for BBQ. They have pig shoulders, Boston butts, and St. Louis cut ribs.

I was drooling.

Perhaps best of all, I found 40-pound bags of mesquite lump charcoal for $15. That's an incredible buy: I've paid as much as $1/lb for good lump charcoal. This is definitely the best price I've ever seen.

I'm no great fan of mesquite smoke: I don't dislike it, but I don't see why people rave over it either. But I have to say I really like cooking on it. It holds a steady temperature, burns long, and burns clean. I still like Wicked Good Charcoal the best, but lump mesquite has become quite a favourite here.

I realized Friday that we had a couple chooks in the freezer, and I thought "What a great opportunity to try out my new charcoal!" So out they came.

I thawed them out, put them in a pan, and sprinkled them generously with salt, black pepper, and garlic powder.

From Smoky Chook

I chopped up and onion and stuffed it into their little bottoms

From Smoky Chook

Then they went onto the grill

From Smoky Chook

You've heard me say it before: 90% of barbecuing is keeping a steady temperature. you want it to stay at or around 200F. The weather was windy and damp yesterday, and temperature was a slight challenge. But I gotta say, the mesquite really keeps a steady burn. Once I got it into the groove, it held a very steady temp for most of the six hours they were on the grill.

In this shot, the grill had just been open, so the thermometer's showing a little low. It caught back up quickly.

From Smoky Chook

We brought them in after dark. The one on the right was a little torn up, as I managed to tear the skin when flipping them (I cooked them partly on their backs, partly on their breasts).

From Smoky Chook

All in all, I'd call it a success.

For all you northerners...

a brief introduction to barbecue---the original Southern art form.

Smokin'

So this weekend was the first BBQ in the new place. Oh, we've been grilling, but this weekend we did a slow-cook on the grill for somewhere between 5 and 7 hours.

I love slow cooking, so I've been keeping an eye out for cheap cuts of appropriate meat. I stumbled on some reasonable prices at Fred Meyer, so I brought home two packets of meat:

Beef ribs:


and country-style pork ribs:


Barbecue can dry out the meat, so I always start by covering them in cheap yellow mustard, garlic powder, salt, pepper, and paprika. I first heard of that from a friend who made incredible ribs. I've altered the style a bit from his technique: he used brown sugar, for example, while I avoid putting anything sweet on meat I'm barbecuing until it's done.



It might be interesting to note that I can't stand mustard. Or ketchup. I have a serious food aversion to ketchup: the thought of eating it nauseates me. I only use mustard to prep meat before cooking.


The real key to BBQ is to keep the temperature steady. You want to keep it somewhere between 200F and 220F for several hours. That's difficult to do over charcoal, but 90% of good barbecue is temperature.

I have a remote wireless thermometer, which makes monitoring it a lot easier. But however you monitor your temperature, that's the most crucial part to barbecuing.


My efforts to maintain a constant temperature sometimes get comical. My grill was too hot closed, and too cool open: so I improvised with a piece of wood. This technique worked fairly well:




Once the meat has been cooking a bit, it needs basting. Low cooking temperatures do a lot to prevent drying the meat, but even at 200F, the meat will get dry unless it's basted to replenish moisture. I use a mop sauce loosely based on Smoky Hale's "Eastern North Carolina Basting Sauce" on p. 245 of The Great American Barbecue and Grilling Manual. My version of this sauce is a little different than Smoky's, but I think mine gives a more rounded flavour. And mine reminds me a lot of the sauces I've actually eaten in eastern NC. Here's my mop sauce:
2 C. water
1 1/2 C. white vinegar
1/2 C. apple cider vinegar
1 T. crushed red pepper
1 1/2 T. salt
2 t. black pepper
1 T. garlic powder
2 T. paprika
Just mix all that up and you've got a basting sauce.


Part-way through the cook I had to stoke the fire, so I used the hibachi as a burn pit. It worked very well.


Then, after several hours of basting, the meat was cooked. I covered it in something sweet and sticky (cheap Kraft BBQ sauce cut with my baste to make it spread better), and left them to caramelize a little:



After a couple coats caramelized, I took them inside:


The verdict? Not too bad. The beef ribs were a little bony: slim pickings. But the flavour was all there, and the pork was definitely decent.

Next project: Boston butts. Time to bring some BBQ to the West Coast!

Three Little Piggies

Well, a friend's brother-in-law raised three pigs this years, and just had them slaughtered last week. We were given an opportunity, so I purchased half a pig. Today I picked it up.

Head and organs were already spoken for: I just got meat. It came out to 83 pounds and some change. So today I brought home three coolers full of pork. They're in my freezer now. The freezer I just bought, specifically because I knew I had a half a pig coming, needing somewhere to stay until I need some of him.

There are ten pounds pf bacon still outstanding: the brother-in-law is smoking that, it should be here next week.

In the meantime, I have chops, ribs (not much ribs: there's only so many ribs on half a pig), hams, shoulder, sausage, ground pork, and butts. This could be a very interesting time in our life as far as food is concerned.

Of course the ham is not cured: it's just raw meat. I suppose I could cure it, but I've never cured or smoked ham before, and I don't have the facilities (i.e. a real smoke house).

So I'm thinking the hams, shoulders, and butts will all be barbecued: 18 hours or so at 200F in woodsmoke could make those really special.

Barbecuen

Disclaimer: I linked to a couple reviews I wrote for Epinions in this article. If you read my Epinions reviews, you'll earn me credit for traffic. Not like I really care, but I thought I should disclose that I have a material interest (however paltry) in directing you to my reviews.


Well, the Fourth of July was a Wednesday this year, so a bunch of us decided there wasn't a lot of point to coming in Monday or Tuesday. Well, Sunday night I was in the grocery store (after meeting), and I saw pork butts on sale for $0.97 a pound.

So Monday was barbecue day.

Now, barbecue is a greatly misunderstood art form. It's not about sweet and sticky ribs, salty beef brisket, or even vinegar-soaked pig shoulders. Barbecue is about tough cuts of meat, slowly and patiently cooked over coals at around 200F. Whether that meat is brisket, ribs, or hog shoulders; the point is to cook it slowly over coals at around 200F.

Personally, my favourite barbecue is the Eastern North Carolina style: where a whole hog is cooked overnight over coals. The folks out there make their barbecue sauce out of vinegar, water, peppers, and some spices; no sugar, no tomatoes. There are other styles, of course: Texans cook beef with tomatoes and sugar, folks in Kansas City cook beef with molasses, and folks in Memphis use molasses and tomatoes on pig shoulders or ribs.

But North Carolina is where barbecue started, and the flavours and styles vary from county to county. Further east, they cook the whole hog in vinegar. Here in the Piedmont, they cook only pieces of the hog (mainly the shoulders), and they add some sugar and tomato to the sauce. West of here in the mountains, the sauce gets more and more tomatoey, until you get over into Tenessee.

I can't cook a whole hog on my grill, so I just cook shoulders. But I do tend to use the simpler "original" eastern-style sauce. I use a mop sauce loosely based on Smoky Hale's "Eastern North Carolina Basting Sauce" on p. 245 of The Great American Barbecue and Grilling Manual (I wrote an Epinions review too). My version of this sauce is a little different than Smoky's, but I think mine gives a more rounded flavour. And mine reminds me a lot of the sauces I've actually eaten in eastern NC. Here's my mop sauce:
2 C. water
1 1/2 C. white vinegar
1/2 C. apple cider vinegar
1 T. crushed red pepper
1 1/2 T. salt
2 t. black pepper
1 T. garlic powder
2 T. paprika
Just mix all that up and you've got a basting sauce

Now I'll be honest and say I love the "Memphis style" sauces I buy from Red Hot and Blue. But I cook pretty exclusively with either my own baste or Carolina Treet, an excellent "eastern North Carolina" sauce.

This time, I cooked the shoulders for 14 hours, but I think I cut it a little short. It could have used another hour or so. There are those who claim to cook barbecue in eight hours or less, but they're really shorting themselves the final burst of flavour and tenderness that only come in the last couple hours: say after the first twelve.

Well, here's my grill with some meat on it:

Notice I moved my Santa Fe up by my other grill. Well, Ames and I lifted it up. I figure my brother-in-law can have it, just as soon as he comes to get it. Until then, I'll keep using it.



My daughter and I prepped the meat and got it cooking before 9:00 AM. I took it off the grill at 11:00 PM. What does prepping involve? For pork butts, it means spreading cheap yellow mustard all over the meat, then sprinkling it with salt, black pepper, and garlic. Then it goes on the grill.

The most important part of barbecue is the temperature. If you look at the photo above, you can see two temperature probes: one in the butt on the left, the other over the butt in the middle. The first measures the temperature of the meat, the other measures the temperature of the grill. Both readings come out on this display:

Its range is in the several-hundred-foot neighbourhood. I wrote a review of this thermometer on Epinions, if you care.

This go 'round, I created a grease fire on my grill. That is, a grease fire started when I was... er... detained. When I got undetained, I checked the temperature and found that is was too hot to register ("HHHH"). Oops! I ran outside in my bare feet, and saw a tremendous grease fire. I managed to stop it, but not before it completely destroyed my pit temperature probe:

That's why there's only one temperature showing on my thermometer above. I guess I need to replace the pit probe: it permanently reads "HHHH" now. I must have permanently shorted out the thermocouple in there.

Thereafter, I had no remote thermometer, so I had to spend most of the rest of my day in an adirondack chair, sipping a beer, and watching the grill. The built-in thermometer on the grill reads low, but it appears to read consistently low. That is, it appears to be very consistently 70F too low. So, I sat there, trying to make sure my grill thermometer was reading between 120F and 150F.

As I've said before, the key ingredient in barbecue is temperature control. Sometimes my grill gets too hot, so I have these little wooden blocks that I use to prop the lid open and lower the temperature a little. They're basically a cut 2X4, with a groove routed in them:

They sit on the lip of the grill and keep the lid cracked (these are old photos):



Well, after 14 hours and a few of these:

I finally took the meat off the grill at 11:00PM. It could've used a couple more hours, but I think it was (all in all) a good day's work:


Now that is a relaxing day.

Ribs!

I woke up today with the undeniable need to barbecue something. The standard fare: Boston butts, would take too long (I stayed up late last night), and chickens just don't cut it. So, I settled on ribs.

There's something undeniably wonderful about barbecued ribs. Everyone---good ol' boy, southern belle, yankee, and Canadian alike---can enjoy the smokey, sweet, tangy taste of a juicy rib, with a slight resistance to the teeth as the meat pulls from a clean bone.

So, I headed out to BJ's and picked up five racks of baby back ribs. Now, it is a fact that spare ribs are better than baby back ribs, but not everyone is of the appropriate taste and palate to realize that. Further, the side ribs are harder to cook. Not necessarily something to dissuade me from cooking on most days, but I was starting late, and I have house guests. So, baby backs it is.


Now, having bought the ribs, the question of cooking them arises. Should I cook them on the new grill, or on the offset cooker? We decided to go for broke and try the new grill out for a slow cook. So, with trusty remote thermometer in hand, I headed outside to fire up the grill.


If you want good barbecue (whether that's good Boston butts, chickens, ribs, or whatever), you need to use a good fuel. Personally, I use natural lump charcoal. I've played with a few different brands, and the best I've found is Wicked Good Charcoal's Weekend Warrior Blend. The only problem with the Weekend Warrior Blend is price and availability (or is that two problems?). It's a mail-order thing, and once you figure in shipping and handling, it's pricey (for lump charcoal). Today I'm using the store brand lump charcoals from Harris Teeter and Lowe's Foods. I suspect they're the same stuff, packaged with different labels, but they're good charcoal at a decent price. Just for the record, I tried the lump from Barbecues Galore recently, and found it roughly the same.

So, the ribs were cooking nicely between 200F and 250F. And the smell was wonderful.

Ribs, like all other barbecueing adventures. are primarily an effort in temperature control. I always use my wireless remote thermometer to monitor the temperatures, which need to hover ideally somewhere between 200F and 225F. Of course, baby back ribs are a forgiving cut of meat, and you can let the temperature wander up into the 250F range, if you need to. Now when it comes to monitoring temperature, you need to find one of these:This remote thermometer is worth its weight in gold for low, slow cooking.

So, with the temperature firmly set at 200F (or thereabouts), it's time to let the meat meet the grill.

When I do ribs, my method is fairly simple. Firt, make sure the ribs hang around 200F. Second, take lots of time, third, don't use too much sugar. One mistake with ribs is to make them too sweet. I tend to cook them more like I live in North Carolina (which, oddly enough, I do), and finish them like I live in Kansas City (which I don't).

So to start, I coat them in yellow mustard, then coat them in salt, black pepper, garlic (typically powder, but fresh garlic works too, it's just more annoying to work with), and paprika. Once that's done, I throw them on the grill. While the meat cooks, I baste it with an Eastern North Carolina-style sauce. I typically use my own sauce made from water, white vinegar, apple cider vinegar, salt, pepper, and garlic. I also sometimes use some Carolina Treet. Today I did one coat of Carolia Treet, along with several (I lost count) of my own.

Once the meat is cooked (juices run clear, bones protrude, and all that), I coat them in a sweet sauce (I make my own with tomato paste, brown sugar, molasses, and the Eastern North Carolina style sauce I mentioned above). That can be my own creation, or something sufficiently good from a store.

Personally, the best sauce from a store I know of is, "Mojo Mild" from Red, Hot and Blue. There are plenty of decent sauces available, so that's not a problem. As long as the ribs are cooked low and slow, the end result will be good.

The combination of smoke, meat, sour, sweet, and hot makes an incredible taste.

Once the ribs were more or less done, we brought them inside and cut them into three-rib lengths. Each section was immersed into a sweet sauce, and they were put back on the grill. Twenty or thirty minutes to caramelize the sauce, and they were be ready to eat.

What a great way to spend a day off!