Not to get all political

Not to get all political, but Don Boudreaux's excellent post Theatre of the Absurd over at Cafe Hayek is well worth the read.

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.

Admiration

I'm always impressed when I hear about people who clearly understand what's important. This couple meets at the race track,
gets married there, and hasn't yet figured out their plan for what their new family looks like: they still live in different towns.

I like this kind of thing. I'm a little jaded by the standard fare of long-term dating and perpetual engagements. Ames and I had only known each other 10 months when we got married: it'll have been 16 years next month. We'd only known each other four weeks when we decided to marry: looking back it seems we should just have headed to town hall right then.

Don't get me wrong: gimmicky weddings are a blight on what little remains of Western civilization. But there's a difference between gimmick and enthusiasm.

So all the best to Greg and Linda.

Unexpected arrival

We made pizza last night. And it was good. Really good. Really, really good. I think we've finally figured out how to make good pizza.

From Really Good Pizza

The crust was thin but chewy, with lots of air bubbles and a definite structure; but it was soft and bready, not pastry-like.

From Really Good Pizza

The crust is certainly the single most important factor to good pizza. We started out making the dough he night before, refrigerating it immediately, and letting it rise just before using it. That worked very well, but we thought we could do better. We've tried several different things to make it better, but we've really only been able to improve a single aspect of the crust at a time; at the cost of others.

This time we made the crust the night before, let it rise and punched it down a few times overnight, and portioned it into crust-size dough balls the next day, which we refrigerated until an hour or so before we used them.

I've been told the secret to good bread is to let it rise many times. All my experiments appear to confirm this statement. Certainly this last batch of pizzas seems to do so.

From Really Good Pizza

So I guess we can stop making pizza now. We appear to be at the top of our game.

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.

True craftsman

I just love this film. It runs about an hour, and it's well worth the time to watch it.

Watching this guy is simply stunning: he is clearly master both of his tools and his medium. Whether it's the axe or the paddle, he's right at home.

I only wanted a cheesbuhguh!

I'm not a big fan of that quintessential American food, the burger. I'd rather have a dog with chili and jalapenos any day. But the love of my life esteems burgers roughly equivalently to how I think of pizza, so I've been trying to learn to make the perfect burger.

I started with Alton Brown's Burger of the Gods recipe, which is basically just ground meat, salt, and pepper. The advice about being careful not to over-work the meat is sound: I've learned the hard way that burgers are best when the meat is only "lightly tossed" with the salt and pepper.

From Cheeseburger

We've been cooking them on a griddle, with a flatten on the flip. I form the meat into balls and throw them on the griddle. When they're browned on the bottom, they get flipped and pressed flat with the spatula to form a patty.

From Cheeseburger

Flattening them takes some practice. I'm not an expert yet, but I've been working on it...

From Cheeseburger

From Cheeseburger

Of course cheese is necessary for a cheeseburger.

From Cheeseburger

It needs to be added on the griddle so it melts properly.

From Cheeseburger

It can overcook pretty easily, so I keep an eye on it as it cooks.

From Cheeseburger

Then off to the bun.

From Cheeseburger

But I've been having trouble with getting a good hamburger bun. Last week I tried a Kaiser roll recipe I found, but they weren't quite the ticket. Don't get me wrong: the recipe worked reasonably well. But the rolls weren't quite what I was looking for. So today I tried the perfect burger bun recipe on Annie's Eats. This might be the one I've been looking for.

From Cheeseburger

I'm the first to admit that Annie's look better than mine, but these are at least respectable.

From Cheeseburger

Annie's recipe calls for bread flour: I just used the same unbleached all-purpose flour I use for everything else. I let the dough rise twice before shaping it, to try and get a little more yeast action. I figured that might make up for my flour choices.

From Cheeseburger

From Cheeseburger

This might well be the bun recipe I was hoping to find. I have to say, the finished product was good.

From Cheeseburger

And ultimately, it got the results I've been hoping for.

From Cheeseburger