We’ve had an interesting winter in Buffalo – it really hasn’t been that bad. In fact, we have had a rash of pretty decent days here in February. I was in short sleeves picking up my yard last Saturday, when I remembered that there was a ridiculous sale on ribs at Save-a-Lot. $1.29/lb for full spare ribs! I had to get IN there! So I grabbed a couple racks – they were frozen, but that’s fine. I also picked up a whole chicken, a rack of baby backs and a shoulder to do up. That’s when I put together my rub that I mentioned in my last post. That rub turned out great, I don’t know why I would give away the recipe, but who cares, there are tons of rub recipes online, why not just give it to the people straight, right?
I got my smoker going, and continued picking up my yard – it was such a beautiful day, I grabbed my pad and started doing some sketching, and tried some of the Magnum 007 Red that I mentioned in a previous post – it was great! A little murky, but sheeeeeit!
Yes I started using my weber as a burn barrel. Don’t judge me – that’s what happens when you start drinking at noon after picking up sticks all day.
Then I said ‘well what the heck, I should get some people to come over – I started this meat early enough that I would actually have a finished product when the sun was still going to be up – might as well make a day out of it.” – so I texted a few people, why not. Sure enough, some people wanted to hang!
I actually had both of my smokers going! It was awesome.
Got to sample some Ghost Pepper jerky too! good stuff!
One of the things I didn’t like about the DynaGlo was that when the firebox really started cookin, because of its close proximity to the smoking chamber, it would flame up and burn things that were on the lower racks. I figured it would be wise to put a pan of water on the rack right at the level of the top of the firebox to serve as a ‘flame barrier’. Instead of a waterpan, I put a pan full of cut up potatoes, seasoned them, and dumped in a quart of apple cider. The goal was to have the flame barrier going, and to have the fat rendered from the meat drip into the pan, while the cider would reduce, and I’d end up with a delightful treat when all was said and done. All of the above actually worked as planned, and I will be trying that again soon, and will not fire up the dynaglo without protection!
My friend Chris brought over some pizza dough, and we decided to give grilling a pizza a shot – we had never done it, but pizza is wood-fired all the time, why not give it a shot, right? At this point in the day, I had pulled the ribs off, and the chicken had come off too – we were eating good! We pulled the barrel off the weber, and put a grate right over the coals of a fire we had going. We put a pizza stone right over the coals – this worked, but turned out to be a mistake. The direct heat of the fire caused the stone to crack – D’OH! but the pizza was great!! (this picture was taken before the crack)
We left the stone on the grill, luckily the break was clean, and tried another pizza. This time we used smoked chicken that I had smoked that day – and spread the coals out in a circle around the perimeter of the pizza stone. This made for a much better cook – look at the pizza!
Tasted great – the dough came from Trader Joe’s, it had a nice herbal component to it. Well, for not knowing shit about cooking pizza on a grill, I’m proud of us!
My pulled pork came out pretty awesome as well:
Check the penetration on that smoke ring! awesome.
After the sun went down, we took the party over to Volker’s for some bowling, I rolled pretty well on one of my games:
A little above average.
Lastly, brunch the next day was great!
Top left in that picture are the caramelized apple cider drip potatoes – they were super tasty – you gotta try it!