Trekchicks Butt Rub - Page 3

Pineapple Slaw

Have you tried the black oak for smoking? I've heard that this variety has a little higher tanin and lignan levels and can add a kind of acrid note to things. Otherwise than that, I would say you are blessed.

I'll give you another one of my secret recipes to go with the ribs. This is the easiest and the best cole slaw ever. Shred one head of cabbage, mix with one can of drained, shredded pineapple, and one bottle of generic ranch dressing. This is amazing slaw, is amazingly easy to make, and is the perfect compliment to smoked meats. If you do it for people who don't know the trick they will literally beg you for the recipe.

Aw shoot!

Back to the store. :

Just a quick update....

The stainless gas grill is feeling a bit cold and lonely



But we are smokin!



Coming along fine...Trek, Could be some Butt Rub on them!

This is a man who knows his smoke.


I'll second the green fruit wood. I once did a taste test of smoked Bluefish. I smoked filets in fresh apple, fresh oak, soaked chipped hickory and soaked chipped mesquite. We did a blind tasting and every single taster put them in that exact order. It was amazing just how much difference their was, much more definitive than any blind wine tasting I ever participated in.

After that, when I worked overseas, I started carrying sections of oak and apple heartwood in my suitcase to flavor our grilled Aussie beef in SE Asia.

Here you go. A WSM doing 20lbs of piggie overnight in a blizzard--


I could only hold temp until about 4:00AM, when it was down to 175F, I pulled the meat and put it in the oven til morning. This is what the WSM looked like when I got up a few hours later--

$47 for the Brinkmann Deluxe Gourmet model at our local Lowes (home improvement)... identical to Cirque's middle photo in post #63. Think I paid $30 for my Brinkmann (plain, no peanuts).

Lissen to da man! I made mistake last time I smoked jerky of pulling out the water pan, thinking that direct heat and smoke might be a good thing. It wasn't.... crispy critters. Water pan not only keeps some moisture in the air, but serves as heat deflector for the long slow burn.

One thing I've seen described is dumping marinade, marmalade, syrups, beer, other(?) into the water pan.... and letting that flavor join the mist. Haven't tried that yet.

I'm reading that thinking:

"'White Single Male doing piggie....' Hmmmm, what is this, Deliverance or a misplaced personals ad!?"

:

Make your life easy. Put a layer of heavy duty aluminum foil in your pan, fill it with clean sand, then add another layer or to of the foil. You no longer have to worry about the water evaporating.

Although, that works great in a WSM but you might have to be more careful in an ECB (El Cheapo Brickman). I don't think ECB have adjustable dampers so you don't have an easy way to throttle them back if they get to hot.

You are lucky indeed.

Have you tried olive wood? I once bought the display fish, a monster grouper, from a fish store window in the south of France. Under tremendous pressure (it wasn't cheap) and froggy scruteny, I made a fire from olive grove prunings. It was a huge success, but I'm not sure if it was the fish or the wood that made it so good.

Hey Newfy: After the "Cleveland Fire" that took out about 70,000 acres in 1998, I cut about 4 cords of Alder to use as firewood out of the burned out riparian zones on the mountain. This stuff was excellent, and especially good for Salmon. (salvage of forest fire wood smokes the cutter. Be prepared to look like a coal miner if you do this).

Olive is common here, but I don't have access to any. I bet I could ask some of the olive growers to keep me in mind if they have any tree removals. I suggest you vist and that we go investigate the vineyards where most of the olives are also grown. Side benefit is that wine tasting is free here unless you make the mistake of thinking Napa is the only place with good wine.

Dinner was good


even if it was a cheap "Brickman" (sniff)

BBQ appears to be as competitive as skiing. Anyone tried Partial Meat Tenderizing and Smoking (PMTS)? Does it require lightening the LTE prior to turning? I always thought the best results were from minimizing turns.

Tonight's big barbecue question...

Can anybody tell me where the boston butt comes from on the pig ???

Boston butts can be found at the trough.
It has nothing to do with the pig.

(as usual, the easterners got it backwards. A Boston butt is the shoulder roast or picnic ham)

If you know how to use your can, you can get great results, at least as good as the more expensive rigs...

A certain amount of rotation is good in your turning as long as you don't over do it, but I don't know about any partial tenderizing schemes. Seems to me you just have to have keep working at it and have patience if you want to get the right results.

Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, we have a winner. So should we retitle this thread Trekchick's shoulder rub??? Doesn't seem to have the same cache, if you know what I mean.

Now all we have to do is watch out for those crazy Red Sox fans...

What cut is the London Broil?

My personal preference is from the top round, but I have also seen blade cuts called London Broil here in the East. I think it's generally what the guy running the shrink wrap machine wants to call it that week.

OK, here's the routine. I do this on a 4-burner gas grill I modified to use as a smoker, but it can be done on a regular gas or charcoal grill with or without smoke.

* Butterfly a chicken (basically involves cutting out the backbone with kitchen shears, then breaking the breast bone to flatten the chicken).

* Apply favorite rub all over chicken, getting rub under the skin wherever you can. You can push your fingers under the skin to loosen it. Refrigerate overnight.

* Take chicken out of fridge (30 minutes max) while the smoker/grill warms up. I soak my wood chunks at the same time if needed.

* Put chicken skin side up on grill or smoker rack. Cook with indirect heat at 225-250F as long as it takes for the thigh to reach 180-185F (it's generally about 2 hours for me, if I remember right). On my 4-burner grill, the far right burner is on low (all others off) and the chicken sits slightly left of center.

I only run smoke for the first hour; it's easy to over-smoke a chicken and ruin the flavor, so if in doubt, less is more!

I rotate the chicken 180 deg after an hour. I also brush it with olive oil at that point, and maybe at 1:30 as well.

* When chicken is done on the grill, wrap in foil, then stuff in a paper bag and put in a cooler for 30 minutes or so. This step is optional, but really seems to improve the chicken!

--

The same approach could be used with chicken parts, I am sure, with adjustments in the time/smoke routine. I have also used a variation of this approach to smoke a turkey last Christmas, and it came out great.

I think I'm going to have to send you another can of butt rub.

And I'm going to have to print this thread out and put it in my cook book!
And I'm going to have to get a nice roast out of the freezer and put it in that nice marinade recipe(I think its back on page 2)
Much like in this thread

Mmmmm, whats for lunch

Hey CR, how did that boneless lol turn out?

You inspired me so that I did some pan grilled lamb chops tonight with a quick reduction of the pan juices with a little white wine and lea & perrins finished off with a knob of butter to bind it. Served a Swedish västkust salad as an appetizer:

http://fooddownunder.com/cgi-bin/recipe.cgi?r=274992

and haricots verts and fried baby potatoes with the lamb.

Well, I did another set of ribs tonight, and they came out awesome. Here's my rig:



On the inside, you can see two slabs; the top has oil, salt, and pepper on it and the bottom has a rub. The top slab has a real nice smoke coloring (shown here after 1 hr of smoking). Later on I would see that the smoke ring was about 1/4" deep.



You can also see my smoker setup here -- hickory chunks go down in a smoke pit I built over the 4th (rightmost) burner, to generate smoke and indirect heat for cooking.

I ran the ribs on the grill/smoker for 2.5 hours at 225F (real easy to control temps today since ambient temps were around 60F here) then cooked them in the oven at 225F for another 3 hours in foil. The plain (no-rub) slab got a coating of BBQ sauce before going in the oven. The results were fantastic:



The rub slab (for me) is shown on top here with a core sample taken out for quality control , and the no-rub/sauce slab (for wife) is on the bottom. Both were great, with fall-off-the-bone meat and just the right amount of firmness. This is definitely the way to do it -- these were the best ribs I've had anywhere! Tomorrow we're attending a pig roast, and I am going to be damn hard to impress after tonight's feast! Of course, between the ribs, the rib leftovers, and the pig roast, I will probably have a coronary early next week...

The leg of lamb turned out fantastic! Compliments all around. The initial sear at high temp held the juices and the slower cooking at about 10 inches off the fire allowed the meat to come to a nice internal temperature without excessively cooking the outside. Pecan smoke for only about 20 minutes added just the right flavor accent.

Thanks to all for the help and suggestions.

I think I might be ready to try to make a brisket edible. That would be a first. We bought a 4-H beef a few years ago and the brisket went to waste because I just didn't know what to do with such a tough cut. Time for redemption.

Skier219: Your grilling location has some view! Beautiful

Brisket is one barbecue cut where I think it is ok to cheat a little with the oven. Start it on the smoker for about 6 hours, then wrap in foil with a little extra liquid and finish it for another 6 hours in a 200-225 degree oven. The trick is to not let it get too warm at any stage during the cooking process or it will be tough like shoe leather and basically inedible. You want to go low and slow until you get all the collagen to denature and melt.

Ahhhhh.........4H beef

You know I was thinking about the ESA Improvement thread...........
Maybe I should up the ante with a Butt Rub for everyone

Only if I can rub shoulders too...

That oven stuff is cheating. Shame on you. It's all about the fire.

After this comment, I may get burned (pun intended) by asking this: does anyone have experiance with an electric smoker?

Normally I wouldn't even think of asking a question like this, but I live on the third floor of a building surrounded by pavement. I can't grill on the balcony, and I really have no desire to do so in a parking lot. Usually the grill is the only place that I'll cook over the summer, but since I'm out here this doesn't seem to probable.

I'm thinking something like this:
http://www.lowes.com/lowes/lkn?actio...447-810-7080-K

No flaming from me, at least... we all gotta work with what we got!

I have seen the electrics, including the very model you link, but no experience using. No reason they shouldn't work for purpose intended. I suppose one question may be if you have the same flexibility you have with charcoal smokers to add in your own woodchips (i.e. how does that work with electric elements)?

But this seems to be a crowd that does a lotta smokin'... so I bet you'll hear more shortly!

I have a friend who had a brinkman electric smoker. It did ok, but on cold days it had a hard time keeping constant temps. It could be a good compromise if you live in an apartment. But straight wood, with maybe a few extra briquets for constant heat, is best.