The BBQ Fan Club

Having hailed from New England, when we hear the word Barbecue, what we think of is hamburgers and hotdogs cooked in someones backyard, then served on paper plates with some chips, myabe some potato salad. I literally had NEVER heard of BBQ before I moved to Kansas City. A humurous story when we moved here, we got asked to go out to a BBQ restaurant for dinner. For the life of me, I could not figure out why I would go out to get hot dogs and hamburgers. I finally worked up the courage to ask, and of course got a laughing response. I was told to trust the family that took us that we would like BBQ in Kansas City, and I have not looked back since.

The difference between Barbecue and BBQ is HUGE. BBQ is catching on now in the northeast now that there have been two competitve tv shows on it. We are even beginning to see the “yuppification” of BBQ with the advent of in kitchen “cookers” that make BBQ. Basically companies are selling crock pots made in a BBQ style to basically boil meat. Nothing wrong with it if you like the taste of that kind of meat.

Myself, I will stick with my Backwoods and my Guru!

Check out this article from California, from the Rosenblog

The city passed an ordinance saying that you could not grill outdoors without a permit! This is a TRAVESTY! I am pretty sure in the Bill of Rights the right to BBQ follows the right to bear arms pretty closely.

I am thinking about making a trip from Kansas to this town in California, setting up my Backwoods trailer, hooking up ten different gurus and cooking a marathon. ALL WITHOUT A PERMIT!

What’s next, an air breathing pass?

If you are a competition cook, you know that using Gas is a HUGE “no-no”. Gas is not allowed for use in any kind of competition, so why in the world do people still use smokers pictured on the left that run off of gas?

The simple answer? Because it is easier. It really is! Think about it, you get your meat all ready, you drop it on the smoker, fill your pellet holder with flavored pellets, fire up the gas and simply walk away! The gas does all the work, you can get a really nice result and you are “technically” smoking your food. I don’t know how many people I have met who smoke thier food using this method.

I remember when I started to get into BBQ, and my wife was talking to me about her brother who makes really good smoked food. I got excited since we were going to be with him in a few days, I wanted to see what kind of methods he uses and see if I could learn anything for competition. I was really disappointed. My brother-in-law does all his food on his weber gas grill! There was nothing I could take to use.

People love BBQ, they DON’T like making it if they don’t know how. There is a mystique and a difficulty to break into the BBQ community, this is why they are lured towards the easy methods of cooking, which really produce an inferior product.

Charcoal, even Kingsford (yuck) charcoal gives you a better tasting end product than gas does. It creates a taste that rivals no other. Cooking with charcoal does not have to be hard! It just doesn’t! It can be as easy to cook with as gas, if you have the right tools.

One of the tools you can use is the BBQ Guru to control your charcaol burn. One of the most important things fire needs is oxygen rich air. Oxygen makes your coals burn hotter, or colder if there is less air in your fire pit. With most charcoal smokers, cooks have to master their air vents, controlling the amount of air into their firepit to get to the desired temp. This is part of the fun of cooking, but once you master it can be something that most cooks can do without. Enter the BBQ Guru! The Guru controls just the right amount of air into your firepit to give you your desired temp without having to mess with ANY vents, bringing the ease of using a gas powered smoker to the charcoal world. Finally, a tool that can let even the most novice BBQ chef to create amazing results.

Apple pie man, I LOVE the stuff. I could die eating one. Give me a good apple pie, some Ben and Jerry’s Vanilla Bean Ice Cream and a small wedge of Cabot Special Sharp cheddar cheese on the side, and that is a meal in itself!

Now, if you want to make this American classic even BETTER, read on!

Smoked apple pie!

There are many ways to make this dessert. I will cover the general method, substitute your own touches to make it just the way you like it.

The first step is to smoke your pie filling. You can buy premade, or you can make your own from scratch, either way, once it’s made what you need to do is cold smoke it at about 125 degrees, just enough to make some smoke in your pit.

I use a Backwoods Cooker, what I do is get some apple wood, or some cherry. I take one small piece, lay a quarter chimney of well lit lump charcoal in the midde of my fire pan, lay the one piece of wood on top of that and let it start smoking up nice.

I do not fill the water pan in my Backwoods at all for this recipe.

I then take my apple pie filling, and spread it out flat in either a cookie sheet or other pan that will hold it, you want to make it flat so that all the parts of it can get a good smoke flavor.

I put the filling in it’s pan on the top rack of my cooker, if you use an offset, keep it as far away from the heat as possible. I let it smoke for about 30-45 minutes using my Guru to keep it at 100 to 125. I just want smoke, I don’t want to cook the filling really, enough to get it warm and flowing and to get the smoke inside of it. You don’t want to burn the sugar in your filling either.

After the smoking process, I take the filling out of the cooker, then transfer it to my pie shell. I do usually use a premade one, it saves time and tastes ok, but if you are really trying to impress or using it for a competiton, make a scratch one.

I create the pie in the shell, then, because I have a Backwoods, I get my cooker fired up to 350 - 375. I remove ALL wood, NO MORE SMOKE. it will make the pie shell black, it will still taste good, but it won’t LOOK good. While the cooker gets up to heat, I cover the WHOLE top of the pie with pats of butter. This will help to protect the top of your pie.

When the cooker is up to baking temp, I put the pie in the top rack, close the door, and let the pie bake in the cooker. Usually takes 30-45 minutes, sometimes more if you don’t have a guru to help keep control of your temp. I let the pie bake then take it out and the result is the best pie you have ever tasted.

If you do not have a smoker that you can get up to that kind of heat, go ahead and bake the pie in your oven, you will get a similiar product and it will taste just as good.

Garnish this treat with Vanilla Bean Ice Cream, and a wedge of Cabot Sharp Cheddar cheese. A lot of people give me looks when I talk about having cheese with apple pie, the cheese brings out the sweetness and taste of the apples as you nibble on it, and of course the ice cream just makes it right!

Enjoy this, play around with the directions to suit your needs. This will wow your friends and family!

As we approach the Thanksgiving season, our thoughts turn to our favorite bird to cook up and eat, the done Tom Turkey!

You may find this surprising, but I HATED turkey before I got my Backwoods Smoker. I could not stand the dried out, overcooked baked turkeys that my family did every year. By eating the dark meat, it was somewhat passable.

A couple of years ago I started to deep fry our turkeys, and fell in love with that method, if you really want a nice tasty dish, fry one up and see how you like it. However, heart healthy this method is NOT. So, with a little help from my doctor, I had to start looking for a new way to cook the bird.

Thank you Lord for moving me and my family to Kansas City! I now have the solution to a juicy, tasty Thanksgiving bird that not only tastes great, but the prep time required allows me to watch football uninterupted for the whole day! Here is how I prepare my birds.

1. BUY. Get a FRESH turkey if you can, NO BIGGER than 14 pounds for smoking. Because of Salmonella poisoning, bigger birds remain in the 40 -100 degree range while cooking too long, thus raising your risk exponentially of having someone get sick. Smaller birds are more tender in my opinion anyhow.

2. CLEAN. If you turkey is frozen, thaw it out safely in the ‘frig, then wash it and wipe it down, wash ALL the skin and and flaps off with warm salt water. Salt water helps to kill the bacteria. (My Grandmother taught me that).

3. PREPARE. You may have heard of people “brining” their turkeys. This is the process of soaking the meat in a salt - liquid mixture, there can be many things in a brine. I personally don’t use this method, there is nothing wrong with it, but I like to inject my birds rather than brining. I use a bunch of different injections, my families favorite is a Cajun Butter injection that I get from Sam’s club of all places! Every thanksgiving Sam’s sells an injection kit that has the injections, plus a really nice seasoning for the outside of the bird. My family like Jane’s Crazy Mixed Up Salt Mix for the outside of the bird, but that is to people’s taste.

Learning how to inject a bird takes a little practice. First you need a good injection needle. I recommend ordering one or going to an upscale cookware store to get a sturdy one. If you simply can’t do that, go ahead and get a cheapie from Sam’s or walmart.

The art of injecting is simple, your goal is to spread your injection flavoring throughout the meat of the bird evenly. When I first started injecting, I would fill the injector all the way up, jam it into the bird, the hammer the plunger down. What I found by doing that is that I had “puddles” of the injection fluid in one spot of the bird, rather than all through it. To evenly spread your injection, insert the needle of your injector into the desired part of the bird, then SLOWLY start to pull the needle out, as you do THAT, slowly start to depress the plunger on your injector so that a little bit of the fluid gets deposited into the bird at a time. Do this is in as many locations that you can get to, spacing the needle insertions by an inch or so. I inject while the bird is inside a metal pan, because you WILL have spillage and leakage. Be ready for that! After you have injected the bird, let it sit in the ‘frig again for another hour or so. This let’s it set in the marinade that you have put directly in the bird. This sets a real nice taste into it.

4. SMOKE, COOK, FINISH! While the bird is setting in the injection, I usually set up my cooker to get ready for the bird. I lay my fire pan and only use natural lump charcoal. DO NOT USE KINGSFORD FOR ANY KIND OF COOKING ANYMORE!! There are people who swear by it, and I used to, but I found out that it is no longer made in America, AND they are putting additives into their charcoal. Since I don’t like eating additives that I cannot pronounce, and I like to support American business, I usually use Royal Oak or some other natural lump coal. This will give you a MUCH cleaner and hotter fire anyway, try it out I gurantee you will see the difference. I lay down my cold lump in my pan, then lay down some hickory and pecan wood when I smoke a turkey. I like the mixture there of flavor. You can use any kind of wood you like to taste. I don’t recommend using any citrus woods since there is a lot of acid in them, but you can experiment if you like. I get a chimney full of coal lit, and let that burn for about 15 minutes before I put it into the fire pan.

I then hook up my BBQ Guru Pro-Comm and get it set up for the cook. I like to cook my birds at about 220-230 degrees, to a finish temp of about 170 in the breast. I am not going to give you a time for how long it takes to get there, smoking is not about time, but rather your finish temperature. (Chicken thighs and ribs aside in that comment, those ARE time based). If I was forced to give a total time to cook the bird, I would say 12-15 hours, but this fluctates since every piece of meat is different. So I set my Pro-Com to 220, get the fan going on it, and then pour the hot coals into the corner of the my fire pan, and close everything up.

Then, I go and get my bird from the frig, I find that cold foods smoke real nice, a lot of people let things come to room temp, that scares me a bit with the bacteria and stuff, so I always put the bird in cold. I take the bird, coat the outside with Jane’s Crazy Salt Mix, then put the bird on the top rack of my Backwoods. Close everything up, make sure everything is running, then take my Pro-Comm remote and go sit down and watch some tv and forget about cooking.

After about 8 hours I put more lump in, no more wood since the meat can’t accept any more smoke anyways, then forget the whole thing again until the Pro-Comm beeps at me that I have reached the internal temp of 170.

5. REMOVING AND SERVING. After the Guru let’s me know the bird is done, I go ahead out and disconnect the fan unit, then turn off the Guru itself, plug up the induction sleeve with the kill plug, then go ahead and open the door and ejoy the view! The golden skin and the fresh smell of smoked turkey fills your nostrils and makes you instantly hungry!

I usually grab my stainless steel fish turner, get underneath the bird without and lift it gently out of the cooker and into a pan. THIS NEXT PART IS KEY SO I AM CAPPING IT. WHENEVER YOU COOK ANY MEAT, YOU MUST LET IT REST BEFORE YOU CUT INTO IT! During the cooking process, the juices and the fluids in the meat get “pressed” into the outer part of the meat, when you see someone cut into a piece of meat and see all the juices flowing out of it, that is not always a good thing! Meat needs time to redistribute the juice throughout the cut after cooking. What I do with my bird is take it and place it uncovered into my oven, I make sure the oven is off and then let it rest for one hour. The oven will keep the heat in the bird, but let it cool down enough to let it rest and redistribute all the juice. You can also use a marine cooler to do this.

After an hour, I take the bird, get my trusty sharpened knife, and slice into the breast for the first sample. The result in our case is a buttery, slightly spicy piece of meat that has an excellent smoky flavor!

Feel free to experiment, you may find that you like brining, I personally don’t like the flavor of a brine. A lot of people also throughout the cook rub butter on their bird skin to give an extra glow. I personally like to keep my cooker door closed for the whole cook, I keep a consistent heat that way.

Tomorrow I will throw out an awesome dessert recipe for smoked apple pie!

Well, it has been two weeks since the American Royal, I had the pleasure of being able to cook with the IQUE team (powered By Harpoon Beer), and had a blast. I learned so much, and have had a lot of time to be able to think about the things that I picked up during my weekend there.

First let me say that the IQUE team is a Pro team, they have two professional chefs with them, as well as a head cook who is awesome at the details of making fine BBQ. Also on the team are excellent all around go to guys that really care about making a great product.

Watching this team work, I realized that I was making the mistake of not taking risks, of not trying new things. I recently saw a phrase that I had heard a long time ago, but had not remembered. “If you continue to do the same things over and over again, you will get the same results!”. This phrase hit me as I thought about the royal.

I tend to get into a certain way of cooking, and getting locked in, which is fine for feeding the family, but if you are not winning competitions, then something needs to change. I have been in a few comps, and have not placed, I have done well, but not placed in the money. The best competition cooks are the ones who can look at their product unabashedly and be able to critically look and make changes that will make their food taste even better than what they are doing at the time.

The other thing that I really picked up is that details matter! The best ingredients will make the best food. The head cook of Ique is a MASTER at this, he really pays attention to the best kinds of tastes to put into his product. It showed in the final product.

To be competitive as well we need to practice practice practice! If we are cooking only once a week at a competition then we are really not preparing for anything! We have to cook to practice. I have increased my cooking to three times a week, selling the product and asking for feedback, or giving it to people I know and also asking them to critique it.

Being a pro BBQ team means you have to treat it like any sport, you must practice your craft to get better at it!

The good news is that with the BBQ Guru we are able to concentrate on the cooking and the prep, and not have to worry about temps or fire. This frees a cook up tremendously. I honestly don’t know why people cook without them!

There is nothing like sitting down to jaw about BBQ is there? Telling “big fish” stories about the best BBQ we have ever made, the awards we have won and the titles we have lost because of sheer bad luck, since we all know that we make the best BBQ in the world! Talking about the bet tools, knives, techniques and secrets, talking about winning our first Grand Championship. These are all things that will take place here, on the BBQ Fan club!

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We are looking forward to talking with you about BBQ!