Category: Recipe

Recipe File: BBQ Beef Back Rib Meat

I keep telling people there’s two types of BBQ, what the restaurant sells to customers and what the kitchen eats.  And what the kitchen eats is always light years better. That’s because the kitchen can afford to make things for themselves that simply don’t scale in labor or food cost to have on the front menu.

Case in point, if your BBQ restaurant serves Beef Back ribs, no one in the kitchen is going to eat chopped brisket. One of the greatest secrets about BBQ beef is how much more tender and flavorful rib meat is over brisket. So why doesn’t everyone eat ribs then?  Well first off as far as an eating exercise beef ribs are messy and don’t yield a lot of meat per rib.  Second of all, going the route of shaving or peeling the meat off every bone is simply too labor intensive (it can take 30 minutes just to yield a properly trimmed and chopped pound of rib meat, and the person doing it has to know just how much fat to trim over keeping enough to make the meat flavorful and moist.)

But after hours when the customers have left and there’s a couple of racks of ribs left that will otherwise go to waste?  Well….Let me tell you how to enjoy this for yourself. With a little time and effort you’ll be eating like the kings of BBQ: The kitchen staff.

I prepared 24 pounds of this recently for a private event among friends, not only did they devour it all the general opinion was it was the best meat many of them had ever had.  I can’t claim to have invented this.  I can only claim to have benefitted from 5 years Texas BBQ restaurant experience.

Ingredients:

2 racks of grass fed Beef Back Ribs. (You don’t *have* to do grass fed, but it’s healthier and more "beefy" in its flavor.  The downside is less soft fat. You can absolutely use normal store bought beef back ribs and have a great experience)

12-16 ounces of your favorite sweet BBQ sauce.  (For the purposes of this recipe I usually use Sweet Baby Ray’s Sweet and Spicy sauce. WARNING: Contains HFCS but it’s one of the few times it’s worth it)

4-6 ounces brown or yellow mustard.

1 cup dry rub (I use my own, but Salt Lick BBQ’s is outstanding)

First off let the meat sit at room temperature for 30 minutes, then peel the membrane of tough fat off the backside of the ribs.  It should come off in a clean rib-wide strip less than a mm in thickness but you might have to work at it.

Next, rub that meat thoroughly with the rub.  Allow it to sit another 30 minutes.  The meat will sweat a bit over time, allowing the rub to adhere to the surface a bit better.  While the meat is resting with the rub, combine the mustard and BBQ sauce in a bowl and mix thoroughly.  We’re adding mustard here to give it a South Texas style flavor.  Don’t worry if you don’t like mustard, combined with the sweet sauce the final product after slow cooking on the meat is very subtle, especially after we chop it all up.

Now delicately spoon half the sauce all over the meat, using the back of the spoon to spread it around, DO NOT USE A BRUSH.  We’re not looking to brush our rub off, but at the same time we’re going to go so low and slow with this meat that spooning a thin layer of sauce all over the top of the rub at the beginning actually creates a kind of moist crust over time when its cooking.

Ok the meat should be covered in a very thin layer of sauce.  Set your oven to 170.  That’s right, the oven.  You can absolutely use a smoker if you wish, it will make things about 5-10% better flavor wise but adds a lot of work tending it properly. Beef ribs don’t need the smoke preservation that pork ribs do to cook them so low and slow, and unlike baby back pork ribs I find overly smoked beef to be a distraction flavor wise. This is one of the reasons I cannot stand “Smoked Prime Rib” or “Smoked Tenderloin”.  To each their own if you enjoy such things, if you do please use a smoker in this recipe and you’ll be pleased.

Now let those ribs cook for 7 to 8 hours, checking once or twice just to make sure the low and slow isn’t drying them out.  Note that you can go even longer if you wish. At the four hour mark you can choose to apply more sauce, but what I prefer to do, since some fat is rendering slowly at the point, is spoon the fat/sauce/rub drippings onto the meat and massage it in with the back of the spoon.

At roughly the 7 hour mark the exterior should look like it has a moist saucy crust from the rub and sauce, here it is safe to *lightly* spoon or brush 1/2 of the remaining sauce, but keep a quarter of the prepared total on hand.  We’re going to need it later.  In other words at this point you should have used 3/4’s of the prepared sauce.  You should also notice the ribs have changed significantly and peeled far back from the ends of the bones, almost like braised short ribs.

Let the ribs cook for another hour, bringing our cooking time to somewhere between 8 and 9 hours (it can go longer as long as the meat is moist). Take them out and let them rest for 20 minutes.

At the 20 minute mark, with some sharp meat scissors and a good fork and knife set, separate the ribs.  Then take the individual ribs and shave the meat off the bone with a knife, you can use your hands to get the stuff at the end of the bone. You want to lose some fat here, but not too much.  You also want to avoid mixing in the tougher membrane on the “fat” side of the rib wherever possible. As a general rule I like to reduce the fat by about 50% or so from what it would be if I just ate the meat off the ribs, so some trimming is going to be required. After 30 minutes or so you should have a nice pile of picked meat.  Chop to your desired fineness either for sandwiches or eating on its own, then mix in the remainder of the sauce to taste or for moistness. You’ll want to then put the meat into a warming oven if you plan to eat it soon, or seal it and prep to reheat in the oven at 170 again for when you are ready to serve it so that the moistness is perfect.

If everything has gone well your first bite will be a revelation. Properly done, rib meat can be wonderfully tender.  Slow cooked over 9 hours with a nice rub and sauce then chopped and mixed up yields the most succulent melt-in-your-mouth beef with a much more choice flavor than brisket, such that while you would never give up good sliced brisket, it might be knocked down a notch in your favorite beef BBQ sandwich list.

Oh and did I mention the whole experience can be achieved for about 1/2 the price of a large brisket?  The painful part is the skill required to shave the meat off the bone in such a way that you don’t end up with an overly fatty mess, and the labor in prepping the rack and trimming it.  It’s messy and takes a lot of time vs simply slicing brisket with a meat processor.

Best part?  Not only do you have amazing meat, you have roasted rib bones all cleaned off and ready to make beef stock out of!

Enjoy!

Recipe File: There’s the rub.

For years I’ve been using either store bought meat rubs or creating general purpose meat rubs from the Intertubes.  Recently Rochelle and I have been getting a meat package from our local farm drop.  It contains locally raised grass fed beef and pork, chickens, etc.  For the first time I got a cut of side pork.  Basically the easiest and quickest way to explain what side pork is would be to call it uncured, unsmoked bacon.  The cut is fatty, but with a little more meat than bacon. 

To deal with the lack of curing and smoke you can do two things: cure and smoke the cut, or season and cook it.  I chose the latter.  The cut came pre-sliced, so I chose to marinade the slices for 8 hours in a mixture of 90% Apple juice and 10% Garlic infused Tabasco sauce. I decided on an oven roasting cooking method so I wanted to season each slice with a rub. 

Now, as I mentioned there’s a bazillion general purpose rub recipes out there.  Most of them are variations of black pepper, chili powder, paprika, onion powder, sugar, and salt.  I didn’t deviate too much from that basic foundation, except that I added a special ingredient that yielded a really great rub that tastes better than the general purpose ones I’ve been making for years. 

The secret ingredient?  Habanero infused cane sugar from Flavorstorm.  This created a rub with bite, but not the normal bite of cayenne pepper.  I omitted brown sugar and garlic powder (two common bbq rub ingredients) because for the amount of rub I wanted to create, I figured that I could better focus on onion as a flavor and use regular sugar so that the habanero would power through even only using a tablespoon.  I also substituted Ancho Chili powder instead of regular chili powder.  (I do this for most recipe’s that require chili powder.  I find the ancho chili powder to be a nice change of pace.  Ancho chili powder is just ground dried pablano chilies, but the powder has a slightly sweeter taste)

I hate “secret” recipes, so here you go:

1/2 cup paprika
2 tablespoons black pepper
2 tablespoons onion powder
1 tablespoon sea salt
2 tablespoons ancho chili powder
1 tablespoon habanero infused cane sugar
2 tablespoons regular cane sugar

Shake it up good in a container to mix it evenly.  It doesn’t have a strong salt component so you can be ok using a little more rub so you get that onion and that sweet ancho chili and  habanero flavor to come through.

I’ll let you know how the side pork turned out.  Enjoy!

Recipe File: There’s the rub.

For years I’ve been using either store bought meat rubs or creating general purpose meat rubs from the Intertubes.  Recently Rochelle and I have been getting a meat package from our local farm drop.  It contains locally raised grass fed beef and pork, chickens, etc.  For the first time I got a cut of side pork.  Basically the easiest and quickest way to explain what side pork is would be to call it uncured, unsmoked bacon.  The cut is fatty, but with a little more meat than bacon. 

To deal with the lack of curing and smoke you can do two things: cure and smoke the cut, or season and cook it.  I chose the latter.  The cut came pre-sliced, so I chose to marinade the slices for 8 hours in a mixture of 90% Apple juice and 10% Garlic infused Tabasco sauce. I decided on an oven roasting cooking method so I wanted to season each slice with a rub. 

Now, as I mentioned there’s a bazillion general purpose rub recipes out there.  Most of them are variations of black pepper, chili powder, paprika, onion powder, sugar, and salt.  I didn’t deviate too much from that basic foundation, except that I added a special ingredient that yielded a really great rub that tastes better than the general purpose ones I’ve been making for years. 

The secret ingredient?  Habanero infused cane sugar from Flavorstorm.  This created a rub with bite, but not the normal bite of cayenne pepper.  I omitted brown sugar and garlic powder (two common bbq rub ingredients) because for the amount of rub I wanted to create, I figured that I could better focus on onion as a flavor and use regular sugar so that the habanero would power through even only using a tablespoon.  I also substituted Ancho Chili powder instead of regular chili powder.  (I do this for most recipe’s that require chili powder.  I find the ancho chili powder to be a nice change of pace.  Ancho chili powder is just ground dried pablano chilies, but the powder has a slightly sweeter taste)

I hate “secret” recipes, so here you go:

1/2 cup paprika
2 tablespoons black pepper
2 tablespoons onion powder
1 tablespoon sea salt
2 tablespoons ancho chili powder
1 tablespoon habanero infused cane sugar
2 tablespoons regular cane sugar

Shake it up good in a container to mix it evenly.  It doesn’t have a strong salt component so you can be ok using a little more rub so you get that onion and that sweet ancho chili and  habanero flavor to come through.

I’ll let you know how the side pork turned out.  Enjoy!

Recipe File: No-Knead Cheddar/Olive/Sundried Tomato Bread

I’ve been experimenting with no-knead bread recipes lately and can report HUGE SUCCESS in creating incredible fresh bread without a bread machine and with very little baking skill.  After honing my basics, I struck out on a mission to create the ultimate cheese olive loaf.  What I created can only be called a god among bread.

Ingredients:

3 cups bread flour (not All Purpose flour, bread flour.  AP flour doesn’t rise quite right)
1.75 cups warm water
1/4 tsp Fast Acting Yeast/Quick Rising Yeast
1 tsp Garlic Salt
2/3 cup finely diced large green olives
1/3 cup finely diced sun dried tomato
1 1/4 cup freshly shredded extra sharp aged white cheddar

This recipe is essentially just combining stuff then letting it rise, then baking it.  The real trick to this recipe is actually the cheese.  You will need a nice aged white cheddar.  I recommend at least a 6 year extra sharp from Wisconsin.  The power of the flavor of the cheese will counteract having to use a lot of it.  So the sharper, the more “in your face” the cheddar, the better off you are because you really don’t want to use more than a cup and a quarter for a loaf this small.

Combine the garlic salt and flour in a much-larger-than-you-need mixing bowl.  Remember we’re making bread dough so it’s going to need to rise.  Once combined, sprinkle in the olives, tomato and cheese.  Give it a rough mix with your hands just to get things integrated, but don’t spend too much time on it. Sprinkle it all over the top of the flour/salt mix and mix it with your hands for 30 seconds.

To the 1.75 cups warm water, add the 1/4 tsp of yeast and stir.  Let sit a moment, then grab a mixing spoon and pour the water/yeast mix into the ingredient mixture you have created, stirring like a mad man to get all the dry flour mixed in with the water.  After a few minutes you should end up with a *very* sticky and shardy mixture, both a bit wetter *and* a bit dryer than you would expect.  No worries.  Cover with saran wrap and let sit for 18 hours.

That’s right, I said 18 hours.  During this time it will rise in the bowl, which is why we wanted to make sure we had some room in there.  After 18 hours you should see tiny bubbles dotting the surface, and the dough might have doubled in volume.

Set aside a large sheet of wax paper.  Lightly dust it with corn meal or some more bread flour such that even if the dough is still wet, it won’t cling readily to the paper.  Gently scrap the dough out of the bowl onto the paper.  Covering your hands with bread flour so your fingers don’t stick to the dough, fold it once on itself with the floured side (from the dusted wax paper) facing out.  Lightly dust with more corn meal or flour, and cover with another sheet of wax paper.

Let the dough rise again for 1.5 hours.

At that point, preheat your oven to 450 degrees.  Take a 5.5 quart or larger ceramic crockpot liner or a pyrex bowl or container, and put it in the oven.  Let the dough rise for another 30 minutes while your baking pot preheats. You’ll know the dough is ready when it’s swelled in size another 25% or more, and when you poke it, it does not spring back. Don’t worry about the size though, if it doesn’t increase, still just use the poking trick.  This recipe is really tolerant of mistakes or other normal baking errors.

Ok now the only tricky part.  I really recommend a crockpot ceramic liner pot for this, because you want the loaf to rise enough for high (sandwich) slices.  But you don’t want to actually fold the dough on itself such that you get veins of flour or corn meal in the loaf itself. 

Take the baking pot out of the oven with mitts onto a safe surface.  In one swift motion take off the top wax paper, and grasping the bottom layer, lift the dough and dump it into the pot.  Shake the pot quickly to settle the dough using an oven mitt.  Two or three hard shakes should work.  Cover the pot with an oven-safe lid, or foil works fine too, and put it back in the 450 degree oven for 30 minutes.

During this time, the smell of BREAD AWESOMENESS will begin to fill your kitchen, especially with the shredded cheese melting into the baking loaf.  At the 30 minute mark, open the oven, remove the cover or foil, and bake for another 15 minutes to create a nice hard crust.

At 15 minutes, take the pot out of the oven, you should have a nice hard bowl shaped loaf.  Dump it upside down onto a cooling rack then quickly upright it.  Let the loaf cool for 30 minutes.  If you have done your job right, the loaf should crackle like a bowl of rice krispies as it cools. 

There is no better sound on earth I think.

Once cooled you have three options.  Slice off what you want to eat right away, then slice the rest and immediately freeze it.  Or, present the loaf within 4 hours of baking as part of a meal or larger spread.  Or, with enough people, just eat the whole loaf right there.

You should end up with a DELICIOUS heavy white loaf that is moist, slightly rubbery (in a good way) due to the cheddar, and that has strong notes of the sweetness of the tomato and the salt of the olives.

Enjoy!

 

 

Recipe File: Tapas: Red Onion and Orange Salad

Our normal table top gaming cadre is having a Spanish theme to the dinner we usually have prior to playing.  Thusly I finally got the chance to put together some tapas (appetizer) recipes.  I made three dishes and I’ll put them all three up as separate recipe files.  This one is one I adapted from several Internet recipes and is easy to make.

Ingredients:

12 or so medium sized Mandarin oranges
1 medium sized red onion
6 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons lemon juice
Sea Salt and freshly ground pepper
6 tablespoons golden raisins
4 tablespoons chopped green olives
2 tablespoons honey roasted sunflower seeds
2 tablespoons honey roasted sliced almonds

This recipe is really just about assembly.  Take the golden raisins and soak them in hot water for 20 minutes to rehydrate them a bit.  Drain and dry them.  Peal the Oranges and cut the oranges crossways to create round slices of orange.  You should get a good three or four slices per orange.  Finely chop the red onion.  Lay the orange slices down on a large plate and generously scatter the red onion over the slices.  Combine the oil and lemon juice along with the salt and pepper and whisk.  Carefully spoon the dressing over each of the orange slices.  Dust the plate with the raisins, olives, and nuts.  That’s it!  Your end result should be bright and colorful, and will go great with a dry white wine or for a real cross taste experience, an IPA.

Serve chilled.

Enjoy!