inuyaki | a food blog

When my group leader at work told me that she made it through college by eating peanut butter and bacon sandwiches, I was immediately intrigued.

My version was made with Niman Ranch bacon and some Trader Joe’s organic crunchy peanut butter. It was really good, but I really want to try this with some creamy Skippy….you know, for that true “after-school snack” vibe.

Sorry for not getting these up sooner, but I wasn’t able to get to it until yesterday, when I did some more pulled pork. I was inspired a couple blogs when I was figuring this out, but especially Dave Naffziger’s instructions for getting the heating element controls out of the smoker.

I picked up a 20-inch terra cotta pot at Plant and Pottery Outlet in Sunol, CA, which is just down the freeway from me. Their selection of terra cotta pots is much larger than anywhere else I looked (Home Depot, Lowes, OSH), and the pots they carry are much thicker, which helps them retain heat a lot better. I got a 20-inch bowl to serve as the lid. Total cost: $56.00.

Inside the pot, I got a standard, 18-inch Weber cooking grate, which fits perfectly inside the 20-inch pot. To hold the wood chunks, I used a large deep-dish pie pan from a bygone Chicago-style pizza experiment. The pan sits right on the heating element, which is a deconstructed electric hot plate that I picked up for $10 at Walgreens.

One challenge of this setup is that adding wood chips or chunks becomes an issue because you’re bound to let out a lot of the heat when you remove the lid. I get around this by using only wood chunks, which don’t burn up as fast as wood chips. For meat that needs to cook longer, like pulled pork or brisket, you can simply finish cooking in the oven when the smoke dies down.

The main challenge is figuring out how to keep the temperature steady. I found that by turning the dial to medium high, I could get between 230–240F pretty consistently. From there you kinda have to baby it if you want cook at a lower temperature. I recently ordered a remote wireless thermometer with two temperature probes, which should help me both monitor what I’m cooking, as well as the temperature of the smoker.

My Lazy Barbecue posts (beef ribs and tri-tip) were an easy and convenient way to make barbecue in an oven, but it also stoked my dormant curiosity about smoking meats…with real smoke. We’re technically not allowed to grill or barbecue where we live, so I started looking for ways to build a smoker that didn’t look so conspicuous. Google eventually led me to an old episode of Alton Brown’s Good Eats where he made a smoker out of a terra cotta flower pot and bowl and an electric hot plate. I’ll write more about the smoker in another post since i want this one to focus on this:

(I’ll talk about the ribs some other time…let’s just discuss the pulled pork.)

Making pulled pork is pretty simple. For this attempt, I coated the entire pork butt with yellow mustard and then sprinkled the meat with a barbecue spice rub and let sit in the refrigerator uncovered for 18 hours. Generally, pork butt is smoked for more than 12 hours at a fairly low temperature (usu. between 225-250F) until the meat reaches a temperature of 195F.

From what I’ve read, the meat stops “absorbing” smoke at around the 3–4 hour mark and any time after that just adds to the smokey bark that accumulates on the meat. Since I was using an electric hot plate and didn’t want to leave it on overnight, I smoked the meat for around 4 hours at an average temp of 240F and then double wrapped it in heavy duty foil and put it in a 225F oven to finish.

The total cooking time was around 16 hours, and after I took it out of the oven, I put it in an empty ice chest where it rested until I was ready to pull the pork and serve it. Here’s what it looked like after removing it from the foil. The “gap” in the meat is where the shoulder bone used to be.

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No, not Kentucky Fried Chicken or even my beloved Korean Fried Chicken…I’m talking about Keller Fried Chicken.

Nearly a year after Food and Wine magazine published Thomas Keller’s Lemon-Brined Fried Chicken Recipe, the September 2008 issue of Bon Appétit magazine features another version of Keller’s fried chicken.

It’s no secret that I really love Keller’s fried chicken. I’ve had it at Ad Hoc on several occasions (Mothers’ Day, New Year’s Eve Brunch, Fried Chicken Night), and I’ve even gone into the kitchen to make it for family and friends (Ad Hoc Fried Chicken Recipe, Comfort Food Christmas).

Conceptually, the Bon Appétit recipe for Thomas Keller’s Buttermilk Fried Chicken is very similar to the Food and Wine version—brine, double dredge, fry. The proportions are a little different, and I’m sure Keller is always tweaking his recipes anyway.

I’d transcribe this recipe for y’all to read, but it hasn’t made its way to bonappetit.com yet. You can always pick up the magazine next time you’re at the grocery store and after reading the recipe and checking out the pictures, you might even be tempted to start adding a few more items to your shopping cart.

Do it. You know you want some.

(Thanks to Susannah at Amuses Bouche for this tip!)

This installment of Lazy Barbecue is all about beef ribs. Now, I love a good rack of baby back ribs, and it’s no secret that I love me some beef short ribs (see here, here, here, here, and here). I’ve even written about making Cook’s Illustrated’s Texas-Style BBQ Beef Ribs, but this version is a little easier.

I did these ribs two different ways. One batch was kept in slab form and cooked for around six hours. The end result was fall-off-the-bone ribs, which tasted great, but I wanted ribs with a firmer texture. The ribs were so tender that it was actually a challenge to keep the slab intact for this picture.

The second batch of ribs I tried were cut into individual pieces and cooked for only three hours. These ribs were great because they were the exact texture that I wanted, and it allowed me to pick up the rib and eat it right off the bone.



The constants with both batches of ribs were applying Texas Best Barbecue Spice Rub to the ribs before curing them overnight in the refrigerator, the cooking temperature (225F), and basting them with Texas Best Barbecue Sauce about 30 min before taking them out of the oven. You can use any rub and sauce you want, but if you can get your hands on the Texas Best rub or sauce, it’ll feel a little more “real” won’t it?

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I found this on Flickr, but don’t know its origins. Anyway, that doesn’t matter. Just click on the picture so you can read it.

It’s funny.

I swear.

Bacon Flowchart, originally uploaded by ChrisL_AK.

My friend Maria was in town on business, which gave us another excuse to go to Ad Hoc. I learned there were some issues with the menu on this night. Originally, the main course was supposed to be veal osso buco, but by the time we arrived for our 9pm reservation, the main course was prime New York steak. Apparently the osso buco wasn’t up to standard and they made some changes on the fly. A coworker who had been there earlier in the evening said he was served pork belly and that they made the menu change after the first table had received their osso buco.

While I was bummed about not being able to get my hands on some osso buco, the steak was really good. But the revelation of the meal was the Heirloom Tomato Salad—Thick, juicy, and meaty tomatoes with mixed greens and kernels of Brentwood corn.

Can’t wait to go back in August when my sister-in-law comes to town.

No marinades. No drowning meat in sauces. Just meat, a good spice rub, and the oven. This is about as easy as good food gets.

We’re not allowed to grill or barbecue where I live, so this technique is perfect for us. It’s also great for lazy cooks since you can use a digital probe thermometer to tell you when the meat reaches the right temperature.

INGREDIENTS
Your favorite spice rub
1 beef tri tip (any size)

1. Sprinkle rub on all sides of the tri tip and let stand at room temperature for at least an hour. I suppose you could do this overnight, as well, but make sure tri tip is at room temperature before you start cooking.
2. Preheat oven to 400 F
3. Sear both sides of the tri tip, fat side first, approximately 5 minutes per side
4. After searing, place meat fat side up on a rack set on a foil-lined cookie sheet.
5. Place in oven and cook until the internal temperature is 125 degrees. (I had my digital probe thermometer in the tri tip, so I didn’t really keep track of time, but it was somewhere between 20-30 minutes.)
6. When meat reaches temperature, remove from oven and wrap in foil, resting for 10 minutes before slicing. The meat will continue to cook and you should end up with a medium rare/medium tri tip.
7. To serve, slice tri tip against the grain into 1/4-1/2 inch thick slices. Serve with your favorite BBQ sauce.

NOTES
I used a BBQ Spice Rub and BBQ Sauce from Texas Best. Texas Best BBQ Sauce was top rated by Cook’s Illustrated magazine a few years ago, but it was impossible to find because they had ceased operations. A couple months ago, Texas Best resurrected itself is now back in business. Check them out at www.texasbestbarbequesauce.com.

Some of you might remember my previous post on the infamous Cheeseburger in a Can. They’re sold by a company in Germany, and they weren’t taking direct orders directly from America. A couple months ago, my wife told me she had a friend in Germany that could order this oddity for us. I asked for two cans, and they arrived earlier this week. Why two cans? One was for our collection of weird food, and one was…to eat.

Here’s how the product looks according to the Trekking Malhzeiten Online Store:

Looks appetizing, right?

Did the actual canned cheeseburger possibly resemble that picture? Not even close.

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We’ve already seen this in Los Angeles, and truth be told, similar disputes have been going on for years in much smaller California cities like Modesto, Patterson, Ceres, Riverbank and Turlock.

But the regulations passed by Sacramento’s City Council in February seem pretty unreasonable, including a time limitation of 30 minutes in one location and no sales after dark. The time limitation is pretty severe, but the night restriction severely impacts folks who work the second and third shifts (police officers, janitors, nurses, etc.) who frequent taco trucks on their breaks.

Yumtacos.com is starting a petition to save Sacramento’s taco trucks, although I couldn’t find a link to an actual petition (unless they’re just collecting them in their Web comments). They also articulate a lot of the other issues that have been brought up in this struggle.

Here’s an excerpt from the actual text of the ordinance:

5.68.170 Operation on the public right-of-way.
It is unlawful for any person to operate a food vending vehicle while stopped, standing or parked on the public right-of-way:

• A. Between the hours of eight p.m. of one day and five a.m. of the following day during the months of April, May, June, July, August, September and October;
• B. Between the hours of six p.m. of one day and five a.m. of the following day during the months of November, December, January, February and March.
• C. For more than thirty (30) minutes in one location, without moving to a new location at least four hundred (400) feet away;
• D. Within four hundred (400) feet of a location where the same food vending vehicle previously operated, on the same calendar day;
• E. Within four hundred (400) feet of any other food vending vehicle; or
• F. Within one hundred (100) feet of any street intersection controlled by a traffic light or stop sign. (Ord. 2008-008 § 2)

If you’re interested, you can read the entire ordinance.