New smoker!

My girlfriend really takes care of me! For my birthday Sue bought me a new smoker. I had thought of building one (still might build a cold smoker) and I was disillusioned at a lot of the prices I saw on some of the smokers I saw online.

This one is a very nice compromise between size and cost. It was $189.00, at Sears of all places. I hadn't been looking at Sears before I stumbled across this one. It has 4 shelves, shelves large enough to handle a half of a pork belly, or at least a medium sized turkey. It is large enough to handle 95% of my smoking needs so I am REALLY happy about it.

"Some assembly required" means that I spent 2 hours assembling it. However, it was so much fun it didn't bother me at all (I was watching the Super Bowl while I was doing it anyway!)

Here is what it looks like



And with the door open



So look out! I will be smoking a lot of things now. My pork loins have been curing in the refrigerator for about 5 days now, so I will smoke those first, tomorrow. Then my pork butt will be finished curing in a few days and I will be doing a much longer smoking with that one.

The only thing I can foresee doing with this smoker is building a block stand for it, to make it more easily accessible. I might add a gasket to the door to make it tigher also, but I don't know yet.

Can you tell I am excited?!?!? Well, I am. Sue knows how to take care of me; nothing says love like a new smoker...

Smoked Whole Chicken With An Oriental Twist

Many of my ideas recently have been from finding a bargain on some cut of meat, then thinking of ways to prepare it. Such was the case when I found two whole young chickens marked down 50% at the grocery recently. I wanted to brine them, then smoke them, then decided to jazz up the brine with a few extra goodies.

Here is the brine that I concocted, I totally winged this and made it up on the fly:



1 gallon of water
1 cup canning salt
1 cup soy sauce
1 Tablespoon powdered ginger
1 Tablespoon powdered lemon peel
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1 Tablespoon onion powder

I mixed all of this together well in a plastic tub and placed the whole chickens into all of this.



To keep the chicken submerged in the brine I placed a plate on top of the chickens, then put the lid on



The tub went into the refrigerator for almost 24 hours. After that I drained the chicken well and patted it dry. Next I put it on my smoker, I had to use both racks to keep the chicken spaced well apart to get a good smoke on all of it.



This is what they looked like after 4 hours of smoking



Next I wrapped them in heavy-duty aluminum foil with a little water, and placed them in a 350 degree oven to bring them up to a safe temperature of 160 degrees.

Here is one of them when it was all done.



This may have been the best chicken I have ever tasted. However, the spices weren't as pronounced as much as I had wanted. The next time I do this (probably soon!) I will increase the amount of soy sauce, ginger and lemon. This was really good though!

Smoked Beef Ribs

This is one of those things that turned out so good I wanted to serve it up to the whole neighborhood just to show it off! I saw some beef ribs at the store and thought that my babyback/sparerib recipe would be just the ticket for them. Luckily they turned out just the way my pork ribs do; juicy, tender, full of flavor.

The secret to great ribs

You probably know people that boil their pork ribs for tenderness. Yes, they are tender, but they might as well be unflavored pudding since all of the flavor is cooked out of them. About 7 or 8 years ago I got the idea of pressure cooking them, thinking that I can get the same tenderness without losing the flavor, and not having to slow smoke them all day. Then I follow that up with a few hours of smoking. It works great! And as you will see, it works great for beef ribs too.

First, into my pressure canner at 15 lbs for 20 minutes



As soon as the pressure is down to zero and it is safe to remove them, they go on the smoker for 4 hours




Here they are after being smoked



Now for a good sauce. I usually just 'wing-it' when I make bbq sauce and it always comes out the same (very well, if I may say so myself) but this time I actually wrote down the ingredients and measurements.

Marty's Kansas City Style Rib Sauce

3 cups catsup
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/3 cup balsamic vinegar
1/4 cup prepared mustard, any mustard that you like, I used a plain yellow mustard this time
2 Tablespoons molasses
1 teaspoon liquid smoke
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon onion powder

Heat all this up in a pan on low to medium heat for about 15 minutes or so, to blend the flavors well. This is my quick sauce, when I have more time and ambition I sautee finely chopped onions and add some other things like lemon juice. The next time I make a really good sauce I will post that.

The pressure cooking makes these so juicy and tender, and the smoker gives them the best rib flavor you ever had.

Hamming it up

I wanted to make a ham and smoke it, but didn't want to work with a whole pork leg. Knowing that you can make 'ham' from a lot of different pork cuts, I looked for a sale on a good, large cut of pork. There was an 8 lb. package of 'pork sirloin' that looked like it would make a good ham and bought it for 1/2 off because it was nearing the expiration date (again, I LOVE the 'Manager's Specials' at Kroger!)



Ham making is almost identical to making Canadian bacon that I wrote about earlier. It's just a larger cut of meat than the pork loins that I use for the Canadian bacon, and I won't be rubbing the outside of the meat with spices as I do with the bacon.

This will have to cure in a brine for about 4 days. Some articles call for 4-5, some 5-7, depending on the amount of saltiness that you want. I messed up a batch of Canadian Bacon once, making it way too salty, so I will start on the low side for this first-time batch.

BRINE INGREDIENTS

For every gallon of water:
1 cup of pickling salt
1/2 cup sugar
1/3 cup Instacure (Prague Powder, Pink Salt)
1 Tablespoon of Pickling Spice
1/2 teaspoon of Cloves



Mix all of the ingredients into the water well. You can use warm water so that it all dissolves easier, but you have to cool it to 40 degrees or below before adding the meat. I just used cold water, stirred a LOT, and then cooled it to 40 degrees.
Then place it into your container. I used my new plastic container I am using for meat curing and rubbing.



I placed the lid on the tub and put the tub in the bottom of my refrigerator. After 5 days it was time to smoke it. First I dumped the water out of the tub and replaced it with fresh cold water. I let that sit for an hour, then replaced it again. This is done to remove excess salt.

After draining the water again and patting the meat dry, I placed it on the smoker for about 4 hours to get a good smoke flavor on the meat.



After smoking I bring it up to the safe-pork temperature of 160 degrees in my oven. I place the meat in aluminum foil, add a little water, close it up and place it in a 300 degree oven until it reaches 160 degrees, measured with a probe thermometer in several places of the meat.

I wanted to slice about half of it for sandwich slices, so I cooled it in the refrigerator, still in the foil. That took a couple of hours, then brought out my new handy-dandy meat slicer.



Now I have a couple of pounds of sliced ham, plus a couple of 2-3 pound chunks for other purposes.

The flavor was excellent, the meat was SLIGHTLY on the dry side. The next time I will make sure the smoker's temp stays low, with plenty of smoke. This could have been from the cut of pork also; more experimenting is in order. All in all, it's some pretty good ham!

* Jan 16 2012 added note:  I got a half pig and had the butcher keep the ham intact, raw, uncured and unsmoked.  I am in the process of curing the whole thing.  I will post the results and process in a future blog!

Smoked Pork Butt

I've been accused of being a pig's butt, however that is not what we are talking about today. The butt is the butt-end of the pork shoulder, thus pork 'butt'. Pork shoulder is the Lord's way of telling smokers and grillers that he loves us, died for us, and that He is full of grace.

I found a good deal on a pork butt that was about 5 lbs or so. I swear the thing was calling my name from the meat case at Kroger. It is a well marbled piece of pork, and fat is something that is missing from most of today's store-bought pork. SOME fat is a good thing.

I also went to 'The Container Store' and guess what I bought? A container! I finally bought a dedicated plastic container for brining, curing and rubbing meats. It fits in the bottom of my fridge perfectly, and can stack them if needed. I can fit a pork belly cut in half, a couple of pork loins, and probably could have fit two of these pork butts in one of the containers.

I decided to brine the butt ahead of time. I have had great success in brining different meats so far and thought this would be a good experiment.
For the brine I used:

A gallon of water
3 cups of canning salt
a cup or so of dark corn syrup
- a couple of brine recipes called for molasses, but I was out of molasses. I could have used brown sugar, or nothing, but got the wild idea of adding the corn syrup. I guess we will find out how it worked. I am typing this while the butt is on the smoker.

If I had two pork butts I would have needed less liquid, the important thing is to cover the meat with the liquid. After mixing the brine, I put the lid on and refrigerated it for about 18 hours. I wanted to brine it for 24 hours but my impatience kicked in every time I opened the refrigerator and the meat was staring at me.



The next day I drained the brine and replaced it with cold fresh water,and let it sit for about a half hour in the water. After draining the water again, I patted the meat DRY.

I put the butt back into my new fancy-schmancy container and mixed a rub. This is what I use for a rub when I want a standard Kansas City style rub.

1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup paprika
1 tablespoon black pepper
1 tablespoon salt
1 tablespoon chili powder
1 tablespoon garlic powder
1 tablespoon onion powder
1 teaspoon cayenne/jalapeno/Anaheim powder I used my homemade jalapeno powder.

You can get creative however, and use whatever ingredients you want. I have 'winged-it' many times and have come up with some good mixes.

I used GENEROUS amounts of the rub. And I RUB my rub into the meat well. Many articles on rubs and meats state that it isn't necessary to rub the rubs into meat, I say 'meadow-muffins.' It's called a rub for a reason, and I want the rub to stick and get as deep into the meat as possible. -stepping down off soapbox-



I placed the butt on the smoker, using hickory chunks, but use whatever wood you want. I plan on smoking this for about 10-12 hours, but will monitor it as the day progresses. Here's what it looks like, the picture was taken soon after placing the butt on the smoker.



- "Later that day" -

Here is what it looked like after about 10 hours of smoking



It wasn't quite up to the FDA's safe temp of 160 degrees for pork (Rytek Kutas, THE man of smoked meats, states 152 is the safe temp for pork, but let's go with 160.) I placed it in heavy duty aluminum foil, added a small (1/4 cup?) of water, closed it up and placed in a 250 degree oven. I ended up cooking it this way for another 5-6 hours.

I took a fork and started to pull it, but most of the time I only needed my fingers, it was that tender.



Now to cook up a good sauce!

Smoked Turkey Breast

I was in the grocery store the other day and found some good deals in the 'Manager's Specials' section. Those are the meats that are close to the expiration dates and marked down considerably. That's the first thing I check when I go to the store. Meat that is aged in the proper temperature, of course for not too long, is very good. When I shoot a deer I like to hang it for 5-7 days if it is cool enough (under 40 degrees maximum), so I have NO problem buying most of those specials.

I found all of these for 50% off; a huge turkey breast, a brisket, a large flank steak and some frog legs. I figured I could smoke the turkey, make corned beef with the brisket, jerky with the flank steak and I could be daring and try smoking the frog legs. Hopefully that will be a new post here in the very near future.

I had great success with brining the Thanksgiving turkey so I thought I might try brining this turkey breast before smoking it. For the brine I used:

1/2 gallon of water
1/2 cup of canning salt
A few smashed garlic cloves
About a teaspoon of onion powder (I was out of onions)
2 teaspoons of Instacure (pink salt, Prague powder) This is optional, I was winging it and thought I would try it.

I mixed all of this up and placed the breast into the bowl and let it sit in the fridge for 24 hours. After this I patted it dry and placed it on my smoker.

I smoked it for about 4 hours but this did not bring it up to a safe temperature of 165 degrees(I need to build a bigger, better smoker!) This is not a problem though. I wrapped it in foil, poured a few Tablespoons of water into the foil, closed it up and placed it in a 300 degree oven. After about 45 minutes it was at 160 degrees. When you pull it out of oven, the temperature actually rises as it rests, and it did go to 165 degrees.



I placed it in the refrigerator until it cooled down considerably and became more firm for slicing. The fun part was using my new meat slicer that my girlfriend Sue gave me for Christmas. Nothing says love more than a Waring meat slicer! Ha!

I sliced it fairly thin and tasted it, I thought I had gone to heaven! It was that good. Take a look:



Turkey breast can be bought cheaply, so try this sometime.

Makin' Bacon

I've wanted to make homemade bacon for some time now. I finally jumped in and the water was just fine. I saw Cowgirl's post on her blog on making bacon and I just had to do it. I would just direct you to her blog, but mine was slightly different and possibly worthy of a different post.

First I had to get a pork belly. It was a week before deer gun season and the first few butchers that I called said I would have to wait until after the first of the year for them to start getting pigs. Apparently most of their work for the rest of the year is limited to processing deer.

So I called the place that I should have thought of first, my favorite meat store Mom Wilson's. Mom Wilson's is just north of Delaware Ohio on Route 23. They have an excellent supply of specialty meats like sausages, trail bologna, jerky, etc, etc. It was the day before Thanksgiving and they could have it by the day after Thanksgiving! Cool.

First, the ingredients for the cure:



1 cup of canning salt
1/2 cup of brown sugar
2 Tablespoons of Instacure (AKA pink powder, Prague powder, etc)

If your pork belly comes with the skin on, leave it for now, you can remove it after you smoke it.
Mix the cure ingredients well.



I cut my 6 lb pork belly into two 3 lb pieces so that it is easier to work with and to fit on my small bullet smoker. Using half of the cure, rub it generously onto the entire cut of meat, including the sides.



I need to buy a plastic bin to work on and cure meats, but lacking this I just placed it in two layers of garbage bags. I use two just in case one leaks!



Fold over the bag and remove as much air as possible. Then place it in the refrigerator for one week. Once a day turn the meat over.

After 7 days it's time to smoke it. First rinse the meat off well, then place it in cold water for about 30 minutes or so, change the water and soak it again. This is to remove some of the excess salt. I didn't rinse it very well with the first half of the meat, and it was way too salty! I soaked the second piece and it came out much better.

If you like pepper, sprinkle a heavy dose of FRESHLY CRACKED pepper onto the meat, then place on your smoker. There is a huge difference between pre-ground pepper and freshly-cracked pepper, I use fresh-cracked whenever I can.



I smoked my meat for a few hours with low heat, but a lot of smoke. Many recipes I read state to smoke it at 200 degrees until the meat reaches 150 degrees. I can't control my heat that well on my little smoker so I decided to try a different route.
I smoked it for a few hours, then wrapped the meat in foil with a small amount of water added (1/2 cup?). Then I placed it in a 300 degree oven until the meat reached 150 degrees, checked with a probe thermometer.
Then let it cool in the refrigerator overnight, still wrapped in foil. When the meat is chilled it slices easier. I need to buy a good meat slicer, but I just used a good sharp knife to slice it manually.



Now doesn't that look good? It tastes even better than it looks!

A few things I will make sure to do from now on:

- make sure the meat is rinsed well and soaked in cold water after curing in the refrigerator.
- make sure the temperature is LOW on the smoker, but the smoke is plentiful the whole smoking time.
- buy and use a meat slicer.

As you can see in the picture, this bacon was really lean compared to store-bought bacon. It doesn't lose most of its volume when cooked. The flavor will make me swear off store-bought, it was that good.

- Marty

Brining A Turkey

I have never been a big fan of Thanksgiving turkey, at least not the white meat. When I have eaten turkey I have always gravitated toward the dark meat because it has more flavor and is much more moist. I have read about brining turkeys for some time now and had my first one last year at my sister's in Michigan. It really turned out well, was moist and full of flavor and I had to try it on my own this year finally. I wasn't able to take pictures of the process this time because my camera is in the shop getting some under-warranty work done to it.

To brine the turkey I used a large cooler that I sanitized with a MILD bleach solution first. Then I rinsed it WELL, you don't want any remnants of bleach left in the cooler. A clean, never-used 5 gallon bucket would have probably worked better, since it took 4 gallons of water to cover the bird in my cooler.

You will need a bag of ice for the brining process. For every gallon of water that is needed to cover the bird (in whatever clean container you choose to use), you will need:

- 1 gallon water
- 1 Cup Kosher salt, canning salt or sea salt. I used my canning salt.
- ½ Cup sugar

There are many options that you can add to the water for flavoring, I chose to use:
- a small handful of fresh sage, thyme and one good stalk of rosemary.
- 2 quartered oranges
- 2 quartered lemons
- 3 fresh bay leaves

First mix the salt and sugar in a small amount of warm water. It won't dissolve easily in very cold water. Then add the solution to your cold water.

Make sure the bird is completely covered in the water, add your salt/sugar solution and any flavoring you want, then add a layer of ice. THIS IS IMPORTANT. The temperature danger zone for food is 40-140 degrees, so you want the water to stay under 40 degrees the whole time it is in the brine. The recipes I have seen call for brining for anywhere from 4 to 24 hours (a few called for a few days) and I ended up brining mine for about 18-20 hours.

When you are ready to roast the turkey, remove it from the brine and rinse it WELL to get the extra outer salt off of it. Pat it dry and follow your favorite turkey-roasting recipe and you should get outstanding results from brining it beforehand.


How I roasted my turkey

Preheat your oven to 500 degrees. Yes, 500 degrees. Make a square of aluminum foil and fold one corner over to meet the opposite corner to form a triangle. Push it over the breast of the turkey with the point of the triangle pointing toward the rear of the bird. Form it over the bird, then remove it from the bird but keep the resulting shape of the foil. This will be placed over the breast meat later, and you don't want to form it over a 500 degree turkey!

Place the bird in a roaster that preferably has a raised rack to it, and place in the 500 degree oven for 30 minutes. This will brown the turkey very nicely. Now lower the oven temperature to 350 degrees and cook the turkey until the temperature of the thickest part of the breast (don't touch bone with the thermometer) reaches 160 degrees. This should take a 2-3 hours. Let the bird rest for 20-30 minutes before slicing. Eat hearty.

Infused oils and vinegars

Necessity was the mother of invention for this project. Not that I invented this but it was somewhat new to me.

I grew quite a bit of purple basil for the first time this year and needed to find a use for it. The thought of purple pesto was somewhat strange so I started surfing the internet for ideas. I saw a picture of some beautiful purple-basil-infused vinegar and I had to try it.

I mixed cider vinegar and white vinegar at a 50/50 rate, which has a beautiful color even before infusing. In a half gallon of the mixed vinegar I added about 2 cups of purple basil leaves.


I let this set on the counter for a week, then filtered out the basil leaves and anything else that might have come off of the leaves.


Muslin was a good choice for a filtering material. I also use it in cheese making instead of traditional 'cheesecloth', which is almost worthless when actually trying to use it for cheese making. I could have left the leaves in the vinegar but I know from experience that the leaves start to fade and wilt quite a bit and do not look very good.

I also infused another batch with garlic. I smashed about 6 cloves with the flat side of a knife and let those sit in the vinegar with the basil for a week. It smells wonderful after a week, with the basil and garlic smell. It will probably be very good in many Italian dishes.

Nasturtiums are an edible flower that I grow, I haven't used them in any dishes yet but need to do it. I have read some nice ideas for cooking with them. A simple salad topped with a few nasturtium flowers would be a very nice presentation. I tried to keep some of the fresh flowers in a bottle of vinegar but the acidity of the vinegar wilts and fades them too much. However, in that failed attempt I found that the flowers color the vinegar with a beautiful color:

The bottle on the right is 50/50 cider/white vinegar right after adding the nasturtiums. The one on the left is a few days after adding the nasturtiums. Also in both of the bottles are stalks of garlic chives.

I also have started a couple batches of basil and garlic infused extra-virgin olive oil.


These leaves are green basil and not the purple basil (the purple might make an interesting looking oil though!) From what I have read I will have to let this sit for a month or longer to properly infuse the oil. Before adding the basil leaves it helps to smash the leaves quite a bit to help release the flavor of the basil. I also added about 4-5 smashed garlic cloves to this. I plan on filtering all of this out when it is completed. If I am going to use this to actually cook with, I am going to research whether this will require heating after the infusion is complete. I think that even if I don't find any information about it, I might heat it to a little over 212 degrees (boiling point of water, and a low heat for oil) for about 10 minutes, just to kill any of the 'nasties' that might be in there. I can't see that it will hurt it, and can only help.

Another herb that I grew again this year was tarragon. Simply cut the tarragon to the right length and slip into the jars of vinegar. It's very simple and look great.


The hardest part of this project is finding nice looking bottles to use. The ones pictured here with the spouts I found at Walmart for about $4 each. I have seen some very nice ones on sites online, but they can be pricey. If I decide to get any of those, I would probably make them into Christmas presents.

There are a lot of other ideas that you can find online, search with the term 'infused vinegar recipes' or 'infused garlic recipes' or something similar. Or simply use your imagination and think of what would look good or taste good with vinegar and/or oil.

Canadian bacon

I've made Canadian bacon a couple of times and it has really turned out well. It tastes good with a lot of things, but my son's favorite is homemade "Egg McMuffins"; a muffin, egg, a good cheese and a slice or two of this Canadian bacon. Use a pork loin, not a pork tenderloin. Mine was 5-6 lbs. In a nutshell the loin is cured in the refrigerator for 5 or 6 days, then it is smoked for a few hours.

My brine is usually something like the following. It varies a little, depending on what I feel like adding to it at the time.

Water to cover the meat, usually about a gallon, depending on the container you are curing it in.
For every gallon of water use:

- 2 Tablespoon of Instacure #1 (Prague Powder) for every half gallon of water.  Some recipes call for more Instacure, I tend to go lighter on it.  - OR use the appropriate amount of Morton's Tender Quick. I don't know the conversion factor, since Tender Quick has the salt and the curing salt combined.
- 4 Tablespoons of canning salt.
- 5 to 10 (depending on your taste, I use 10) smashed garlic cloves. Take a wide-bladed knife turned sideways or something similar and smash the garlic on your counter, but not so hard that it flies into pieces. This releases the garlic oils and taste.
- About a Tablespoon or so of onion flakes.
- 1/4 cup or so of sugar, preferably brown sugar.

Some optionals; be creative, there are a lot more options than these:
- 2 or 3 FRESH bay leaves. If you don't have a bay tree growing in a container, get one! Once you've had fresh bay you will never go back.
- a teaspoon of fresh-cracked pepper.
- a Tablespoon, or more, or less, depending on you, of a hot-pepper powder. If I add pepper I use dried jalapeno powder because I dry my own jalapenos.

Put the meat into a bowl/pot large enough to hold it, covered with the brine. It looks awful in this picture but that is because the water has spices and such in it. The piece of meat in the middle is the pork loin, the other smaller pieces were something else I was working on at the same time:


Place something on top of the meat to hold it under the surface of the brine. I usually use a small plate with a mug full of water to weigh it down. Keep it in the refrigerator for 5 or 6 days.
When the loin is done curing, pour out the liquid and replace with clean water. Let the meat soak in the water for about an hour, and change the water 2-3 times. This will remove some of the saltiness. You can get creative with your rub at this point, but I covered this one only in fresh-cracked pepper. I ran out of pepper, and usually cover the meat a lot more than this:


Next I place it on my smoker.


I have a small smoker and it is hard to regulate a good cooking temperature, so first I smoke it at a low to medium smoker heat for about 3 hours. I like to get it to a safe heat of 160 degrees, and I don't want to dry it out, so I finish it up in the kitchen oven. I wrap the loin in heavy duty aluminum foil and pour in a small amount of water.
At 350 degrees I think it took an hour or two to get it to an internal temperature of 160 degrees, checked with a meat thermometer.

After the loin has reached 160 degrees, I remove it and let it rest for about 30 minutes.


Next simply slice it up. I usually slice it about 1/8th to 1/4th of an inch, but the thickness is up to you.


I usually store half of it vacuum-packed in the freezer, it seems to stand up to freezing well. However, there is nothing like a fresh piece!