Continuing my summer of learning to cook new dishes, I decided to tackle steakhouse burgers. I’d already mastered diner burgers, so I wanted to work on these. I didn’t follow Meathead’s directions 100% in that I didn’t create ground beef out of a nice cut of meat. But I did follow his recipe for using 2 zone cooking to make good-tasting, thick burgers.

Now, it’s possible that it’s because I crowded my burgers (18" kettle, not much of a choice), but it took WAY too long to come up to temp. After 20 minutes it was not anywhere near 155. Since it was getting late, I just moved them to the sear side to speed up the cooking.

Part of the fun of being into BBQ has been trying new things. As I’ve mentioned before, when I was growing up “BBQ” was what we called grilling and it MOSTLY consisted of burgers and hot dogs. Very occasionally it would be something else. Lots of lighter fluid and mediocre results. But now I know about low and slow and smoking and 2-zone grilling. And once I mastered ribs, chicken, and brisket it was time to experiment. So I tried Meathead’s recipe for Alabama Birds with White Sauce.

I’d never made bread before (not counting pizza dough), but I recently got a dutch oven on sale on Woot.com and was looking for some things to make in the device. Then I came across this recipe for No-Knead Dutch Oven Bread. It seemed really simple, so I figured it’d be a great activity to do with Scarlett. She did in fact love working on it.

Lessons learned - the crust looked fine after 45 minutes and I already cut the time with the lid off to 10 minutes. Next time I might just take it out after the 45 minutes if the crust looks good. Other than that, it’s very delicious and tastes amazing with butter.

In the past few years I’ve been moving away from seeing pizza as junk food towards seeing it as another food that is sometimes made with care, skill, and love and sometimes make in a hurry for a buck. I can’t remember the exact timeline and can’t be bothered to search for photo evidence, but the two restaurants that changed my mind on pizza were Two Amys in Maryland and Grimaldi’s in Brooklyn. Two very different styles of pizza, but Grimaldi’s cooked in a fire-based pizza oven and authentic Neopolitan at Two Amys. So now there was a new measurement against which to measure all pizzas: the wood-fired pizza.

Do you know why a lot of people don’t BBQ that often? Because they always make the same thing and that’s boring. So I’ve been going through all the recipes in Meathead’s book (and other sources) to see if anything else is tasty to my palette. This time it was smoked chicken. I cut the chicken in half.

I’d tackled all the major BBQ meats. It was time to try and make my own sauce. So I assembled all my ingredients and followed Meathead’s recipe. It’s supposed to be like KC Classic, which I’ve never had. I also went with the secret optional ingredient of Tamarind paste.

Then I finished cooking

And canned it while it was still hot:

So what was the verdict? Again, I’ve never had KC Classic. My favorite commercial BBQ sauce is Trader Joe’s Kansas City sauce and that’s nice and sweat. This sauce was very tangy. While it has grown on me over the past couple months, it’s definitely not my favorite and my wife doesn’t like it at all. I want to try one more time, this time tweaking it to be a sweeter sauce. Also, I want to see how it changes when caramelized, something I haven’t had a chance to do yet. Still, it was fun to make my own and add it to my other BBQ/smoke creations.

I had been wanting to do brisket for a very long time, but I couldn’t find anywhere convenient to buy a whole packer brisket. But right before I was convinced I was going to have to go to a butcher, Costco decided to carry them.

Yeah, it was 20 lbs, which is ridiculous for what was essentially going to be just 3 adults, but it was USDA Prime for only $3/lb! I had no choice. I put it in my shopping cart and resolved to deal with the consequences later.

For the first time in a few years, my mom was going to be in town for Mother’s Day. We didn’t have a ton of events to attend or anything, so I asked her what she would like for dinner if she could have anything. She said she wanted prime rib, so I figured it was the perfect time for me to try out a prime rib roast on one of my BBQs. Meathead has lots of tips for eliminating most of the hassle of making a prime rib roast. First of all, remove the ribs - they only serve to block heat and keep the roast from cooking evenly. Second, use twine to make it into a cylinder so it cooks evenly from the outside to the inside.

This past winter I smoked a pork shoulder for the first time. I learned some lessons, continued to work on getting better with my kettle, and decided it was time for pulled pork again.

I cut the pork shoulder into roughly equal halves. I had three things I wanted to experiment with:

1. Would it cook faster?
2. Would it be nice to have twice as much bark?
3. I wanted to try a Mexican-ish rub on one to have pulled pork tacos.

In my opinion, for a long Weber Kettle cook you can’t beat a snake. If it’s going to go VERY long, it can be a pain as you have to move the water pan to continue the snake. But for medium-long cooks, it’s a nice, perfect way to have a consistent temperature throughout the cook.

We were debating what to eat. There are a lot of dishes we like, but it’s easy to forget all of them when you’re constantly thinking of the half dozen foods your toddlers eat and the dozen or so foods your preschooler eats. Lamb was on sale at Costco, so I told the wife we should have lamb and I would cook it outside and we’d have gyros. Well, modified gyros because we used naan for the bread instead of pita. The image above is Danielle’s wet brine for the meat. Based on the size of the chunks Danielle chopped up, I decided to do a reverse sear.