Weber's Charcoal Grilling

Talking Super Bowl Parties

I got a call recently from the producers of the television show Fox & Friends, asking me to come to New York City to share some ideas about Super Bowl parties. Their question was essentially is: What’s on the menu for the ultimate party of the ultimate sporting event? Jeez, that’s a lot of pressure, but here’s what I said, and I’d say the same thing about almost any big, casual party where friends will be hanging out for quite awhile.

Serve whatever food you like. Now I am not trying to dodge the question --- I’ve suggested some favorite ideas below ---- but the more important issue to remember, I think, is that a Super Bowl party is not a fancy-pants dressy dinner party with one entree and china water goblets. It’s an ongoing, extended feast that depends on both the quality and variety of food. Think about it. Seared and spicy steaks are fantastic as one option, but if everything else coming off the grill over the course of several hours is seared and spicy too, well then, your friends are bound to lose some enthusiasm for your menu.

Fortunately the grill provides a solution. One of the things I’ve learned as a chef and cookbook author is that a grill is not a one-trick pony. In the right hands, it’s capable of several types of cooking, including:

Searing
Roasting
Barbecuing
Braising
Smoking
Even steaming

Let me give you some examples. If I were throwing a Super Bowl party (this year I didn't because I was in NYC for the show), I would begin early in the day by barbecuing several slabs of pork ribs. They can be cooked well ahead of time, wrapped in foil, and reheated later. They would bring some awesome barbecued flavors to the party.

As the first round of friends arrive, I’d give them some noshing options beyond the usual chips and dip. I’d grill some chicken wings on one side of the grill and steam open some clams on the other side. While writing Weber’s Charcoal Grilling, I learned a cool little trick for a New Englander about keeping clams moist on the grill. Arthur Sampson suggests spraying the clams with beer for a hoppy, steaming effect. It works really well. Seamed clams, beer, and a little cocktail sauce on the side. That’s a good start.

Then, an hour or so later, I’d bring on the brats and steaks. I get one part of the grill raging hot for searing, and set up another side with low heat. The steaks would sear over direct heat before I’d move them to the low side of the fire to finish. For the brats, I’d braise them in a pan over low heat with peppers, onions, and beer. In that little savory hot tub, they would stay warm and fabulous for hours.

If the party kept rolling into the night, I’d probably smoke a whole side of salmon. I’d pre-cut the salmon into reasonable portions (see page 180 of the cookbook for details) before smoking it on a cedar plank. I’ve learned the hard way that best friends sometimes think a pound of salmon whacked off one side of the fish is just the right serving size for them. Poof, you’re salmon is gone in a matter of seconds, and few people get a taste.

Hopefully you get the idea of how I’d mix up the menu with various grilling techniques and flavors. Done right, with a judicious offereing of some side dishes like baked beans, coleslaw, and a green salad, you have created an extended feast of both quality and variety. It’s a well-paced, multi-cultural, multi-colored, multi-tasting smorgasbord … otherwise known as the ultimate Super Bowl party.

For actual recipes, please click here.

Birmingham BBQ

Pit Master Eric Maxwell at Miss Myra's Pit Bar-B-Q

Alabama’s nexus of barbecue extends across the hills and valleys of Birmingham. It’s only one city but the variations of southern barbecue might surprise you. On a recent trip there, focusing primarily on barbecued chicken, I found stark differences among the most famous and longstanding joints.

I began my roundup at Dreamland, a sprawling two-story saloon in the shadows of the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). Crimson-clad students pack this fraternity-style establishment, swigging beer and devouring all manner of smoked meats. My chicken was unfortunately cooked too quickly and too close to blazing hot hickory logs. Under its blackened skin, I found bland, rubbery meat.

My next stop was just down the street but a world apart in terms of atmosphere. The polished wood and leather interior of Jim ‘N Nick’s BBQ give the place a clean, clubby feel. In a shiny stainless steel smoker, chickens are slow-cooked according to an electronically mechanized system that turns out respectable barbecued chicken: tender enough for my liking (with just a little chewiness) and smoky all the way to the bone.

Nice, but I hadn’t tasted yet the kind of barbecue that transcends expectations. For that I had to drive a lonely highway to the outskirts of the city. In a single-story nondescript building that used to be a mom-and-pop convenience store, I found Miss Myra’s Pit Bar-B-Q, where the walls are littered with faded photographs and newspapers clippings of Bear Bryant, the patron saint of Alabama football. When I sat down at one the cafeteria tables and lifted the drumstick of my golden half-chicken, the bone slipped clean out of its place. I didn’t chew the meat as much as I slurped it. It separated into glistening strips and traveled down my gullet like smoky stew meat.

To accompany the chicken, Miss Mabry’s offers a mildly hot, tomato-red barbecue sauce or Alabama’s local pride: white barbecue sauce, which is nothing more than mayonnaise whisked with white vinegar plus salt and pepper. Period. That’s it.

The chickens also get minimal seasoning (just salt and pepper). So how is it that it has such deep, intoxicating qualities? Well, I asked the pit master, Eric Maxwell (pictured above), and he explained that in his big brick pit he slow cooks and smokes half-chickens for about an hour and a half the day before they are served. The day before!!!??? That seemed like a crazy idea to me, but Maxwell explained that as the chickens cool off, the meat begins to separate from the bone. When they are slowly re-warmed the following day on the smoker, the meat almost melts. Then he slathers the chicken on both sides with red barbecue sauce and white vinegar, wraps it in a tight little pouch of aluminum foil, and holds it in a warmer to steam until someone orders it. That usually doesn’t take long. After all, we’re talking about Birmingham’s finest variation of real southern barbecue.

A Big Swath of Succulence

Labor Day means a little time off and a lot of well-deserved respect for the working men and women of this country. Respect can come in a variety of forms, and I suggest that one of the tastiest is a perfectly grilled steak. You will go a long way to honor the hard-working folks in your life if you serve them charcoal-fired, rosy-red meat.

With that goal in mind, here’s my number one tip for grilling steaks: sear and slide! The idea is to develop plenty of flavors on the surface of your steaks by searing them over direct heat for a few minutes on each side but then sliding the steaks away from the coals so they can finish cooking over indirect heat. With the grill’s lid closed, the circulating indirect heat will allow the center of each steak to reach the right doneness with little risk of drying out the top or bottom. This technique is especially important with thick steaks that require more than about eight minutes of grilling time. A large steak cooked with my sear-and-slide technique will show a wide, even band of juicy red meat running right through the middle. And nothing says thanks like big swath of succulence. Happy Labor Day, everyone!

Korean BBQ

My roving quest for food and fire recently took me to the culinary wonderland that is Seoul, South Korea. Arriving jet-lagged and ravenous, I headed straight for a kalbi house, that is, a restaurant specializing in beef short ribs seared over glowing charcoal embers. In terms of cooking techniques, Korean barbecue is about as far removed from Memphis barbecue (see previous post) as Seoul is from Memphis, but still the situation centers on food and fire, so satisfaction is likely close at hand, right?

Korean chefs typically begin with sinewy cubes of meat and bone, and butterfly each one open to create a thin strip of beef with some rib bone connected at one end. They score the meat several times for tenderness and then marinate it in soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, Asian pear juice, garlic, ginger, and sesame oil. In kalbi restaurants, the cooking is done indoors, in the center of each table, over a recessed charcoal or gas grill that is vented through the ceiling. Charcoal is much more expensive than propane gas in South Korea (big chunks of it sell for almost a dollar each in supermarkets!), so usually only high-end restaurants and affluent outdoor cooks can put it to use regularly. I did hear though from many Koreans that the popularity of outdoor cooking, especially with charcoal, is on the rise, like a lot of other American culinary cutoms.

Waiters swing by your table every couple of minutes to turn the sizzling beef and cut the long strips into bite-size pieces with kitchen scissors. Then they move the meat to a cooler side of the grill, indicating that you are meant to dip each ready morsel in bean paste, wrap it in a lettuce leaf, and pop the whole package in your mouth at once. Devout carnivores gnaw on the singed meat that clings to the bone. To accompany your beef barbecue, you may choose from at least a half-dozen miniature side dishes spread across the table. Kimchee is of course the most important and perhaps the most misunderstood of these Korean dishes. That wonderfully fermented mix of vegetables, usually Napa cabbage and radishes, appears at virtually every meal, and so do some subtler and more savory items, for example, baby spinach sautéed with just a bit of sesame oil and garlic, a delicate salad of paper-thin onions and greens, a warm broth with radishes and eggs, and almost always steamed rice.

After such a meal, all feelings of jet lag and hunger fade like smoke off the embers. My enthusiasm for Korean food grew every day, as I moved beyond the silly stereotypes of too much garlic and kimchee and witnessed an amazingly varied, nuanced approach to cooking and eating. I predict that as Americans come to know this approach better --- with help from talented chefs and cookbook authors working in the U.S. --- Korean BBQ will be an irresistible phenomena blazing across this country.

Love Me Tender?

True barbecue made itself at home in Memphis long before Elvis drew crowds to his Graceland mansion. Since the early 1900s Memphians have been slow-cooking hogs in clouds of wood smoke, and even today the city has more old-school, authentic barbecue restaurants than most big states can boast. So it’s shocking that at one of the more popular joints in town the cooks don’t barbecue their ribs at all. They grill them. Yup, for more than half a century the legendary ribs from Charlie Vergos' Rendezvous (pictured above) have been grilled directly over charcoal fires.

One other curiosity at Rendezvous: There is no sauce. Oh, you will find squeeze bottles of red barbecue sauce on your table, but most locals push it away. The ribs in this subterranean dining room are served “dry.” As the ribs come off the grill, the cooks baste them with a little glaze of vinegar and pork fat drippings and then sprinkle a mixture of dry rub seasonings over the meat. That’s it. The flavor stands up and whacks your taste buds pretty well, though you need a strong set of teeth because the meat is as chewy as a thick slab of pepperoni.

What I ate a few blocks away, right on the banks of the Mississippi, was at the opposite end of the tenderness scale and, without a doubt, the finest real-deal barbecue this boy has ever witnessed. As a judge at the Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest, I sampled ribs and pulled pork from several of the most successful barbecue teams in the world. For me the culinary epiphany at the competition was in the ways some of these teams “season” their meat with smoke. Not just any smoke. Nearly every team has its own recipe of wood types. The options start with oak and hickory (pretty standard stuff in the South) and continue with fruitwoods like apple and cherry. Then some teams venture into esoteric territory, using hardwoods like birch and sassafras and locust. There was even talk of grapevines and nut shells! Of course few teams gave me their exact proportions of wood types or the timing of just when to add what, and some of the guys were probably telling me big, fat barbecue lies, but I left with a renewed interest in blending woods. That seems to be one of the secrets to layering flavors.

Here then is a concise guide to some of the most popular woods available, including recommendations for how to pair them with barbecued meats, etc. Try whatever appeals to you and then blend a couple favorites together for your own personal style of smoke seasonings.

Alder: Sweet, delicate flavors. Best loved for smoking salmon, but also good for poultry.

Apple and/or Cherry: Mildly fruity. Nice with pork and poultry, especially turkey.

Hickory: A Southern favorite for pork ribs and shoulder. Strong and hearty. Think smoky bacon flavors.

Maple: Mellow and sweet. Superb for chicken, ham, or seafood.

Mesquite: Bold and earthy aromas that can turn bitter if you use too much for too long.

Oak: Assertive and delicious. Great for beef, pork, poultry, almost anything!

Pecan: Beautiful, subtle flavors favored for barbecued pork by folks along the Gulf Coast. Not as intense as hickory. Try it with chicken, too.