Six Avoidable Grilling Screw-Ups (And What to Do Instead)

May 24, 2013/ Charlie

If yours is one of the estimated 62% of American households planning on grilling on Memorial Day, there's a lot riding on success - for a lot of folks, Monday will be their first big backyard party of the year. Friends and family will be there, bellies will be rumbling, and it's show time for the grillmaster.

But cooking over live fire that's throwing off 600-800 degrees of heat is harder than it looks. Here's the Cooking Animal's advice on taming the flame: six avoidable screw-ups that could sink your Memorial Day barbecue, and how to avoid them.

The Necessity and Chemistry of Resting Grilled Meat

May 23, 2013/ Charlie

The results of resting meat are well-known and unarguable: letting meat hang out, unsliced, on the cutting board for about ten minutes per pound of meat results in juicier meat and a smaller quantity of delicious flesh juices left puddled on the block. What's more mysterious is why, precisely, this should be so.

The received wisdom on this phenomenon is that as meat cooks, the muscle fibers contract and twist. These contract under heat, squeezing out water, which the heat of the grill drives into the center of the meat. A good rest, the wisdom goes, lets the dehydrated muscle fibers reabsorb the liquid they've given up.

I think that's only part of the truth.

Five Grilling Techniques You Need To Try This Summer

May 21, 2013/ Charlie

You're a pretty good griller - great, even. But you're getting bored with the same old steaks, burgers, and the odd fish here and there. It's time to mix it up and try some new techniques that'll bring new flavors, textures, and ingredients to your grill. Here's a few ideas I've come up with to bust out of the grilling rut and crank out something new.

Kitchen Conundrums: where there's smoke, there's.....wait....

May 21, 2013/ Charlie

Reader Compy222 writes in.....

How do I get real southern long smoked BBQ flavor ribs in my oven. I've been tweaking on this for awhile and cant seem to get it right....This is Michigan. I'm not wading through a foot of winter snow to get to my grill.

Well, bud, the short answer is to take them out of the oven, buy a $60 Brinkmann smoker, and be that guy shivering outside surrounded by heaps of snow while his spouse and children stare at him with a mix of pity and disgust.

....but that's not what you wanted to hear, now is it?

fire and iron: grilling on a plancha

May 20, 2013/ Charlie

It's odd to admit to being thunderstruck by a cookbook, but that's what happened when I finally got my hands Francis Mallmann's Seven Fires: Grilling the Argentine Way. Some of the greatest grillmasters in the world list Mallmann, as a hero and inspiration, a teacher to even the best among them. After years as the chef of classical French kitchens, at the height of what a chef might expect in the way of success, he decided that it was all crap and went back to the cuisine of his Patagonian mountain-town roots. And that's when his career really took off. The cuisine of Argentina and southern Brazil melds Spanish, Italian, and native Patagonian influences. The result in both places are intense yet subtle flavors, perfumed by the smoke of the fires they're cooked over - true soul food with a similar spirit as my local New Mexican.

The defining themes of Seven Fires are wood fire and hot iron, and the smoky, even burnt, flavors that arise from their use.

la paloma huilota: a classic cocktail with a desert twist

May 17, 2013/ Charlie

Any given summer afternoon, if you sit on my front patio to escape the howling white blast of heat the summer sun pours into the back yard, you'll hear the distant "hoo-hoo hooooo" of the mourning dove off in the distance. They're not exclusive to the Southwest, but there's something about how their call fills the still heat of a desert afternoon that's fitting and pleasant.

On such an afternoon, the desert dweller is in need of something crisp and refreshing, and one of my favorite afternoon cocktails is the paloma, the margarita's lesser-known sister.

A Food Geek Project: The Periodic Table of Herbs and Spices

May 17, 2013/ Charlie

Are you a cook? Are you a geek? I am both. Very, very much so. This project is right up my alley, and it might be up yours.

User SinginLow on Instructables has put together this killer Periodic Table of Herbs and Spices - a magnetic spice rack that organizes the culinary elements by botanical family much as the Periodic Table of the Elements organizes elements by atomic number and series. So there's rows for the Myrtales, Zingiberales, Asparagales, and so forth. It's a brilliant idea, and it'd look great either as a poster or as the full magnetic spice rack pictured above.

is lump charcoal really worth it?

May 16, 2013/ Charlie

If you read most of the high-profile grilling cookbooks - Steven Raichlen's Barbecue! Bible and How to Grill, Weber's Way to Grill and Weber's Big Book of Grilling by Jaime Purviance, Adam Perry Lang's recent and interesting Charred and Scruffed - the author usually insists that one should really grill only over lump charcoal.

I've started to wonder if that's really useful advice. I'm not going to lie: I questioned the advice because I'm cheap, and lump charcoal is expensive. I'd rather get a giant bag of briquettes at Costco for $10 than a small 8.8lb bag of the lump stuff for about the same. But does lump charcoal really improve flavor or the grilling process?

francis mallmann's burnt tomatoes: all the reason you need to buy a plancha

May 14, 2013/ Charlie

So I got a new grilling cookbook called Seven Fires: Grilling the Argentinian Way, by Francis Mallmann . Its author is a classically-trained Argentinian chef who, after cooking his way though a number of famous kitchens and mastering the art of classical French cooking, decided to chuck it and went back to his roots - cooking simply over live fire.

It's an inspiring, heroic book that'll change how I grill forever, and I'll get to reviewing it soon. Today, though, I'll give you a sneak peek.

One Day Left for the Great Chile Giveaway!

May 14, 2013/ Charlie

A few weeks ago, in my Five Indispensable Hot Sauces post, I mentioned that Santa Cruz Chili and Spice Co.'s green salsa was one of my all-time favorite hot sauces. They were so tickled by the shout-out that they got in touch with me and proposed a partnership. On May 15th, I'm going to randomly select one entrant to receive a basket of salsa, chile pastes and powders, barbecue sauce, and a cookbook. Santa Cruz is a small, family-owned company that's been producing hot sauces and chiles in the Santa Cruz valley of southern Arizona since 1949. My grandmother was a friend of the owner, and my family has used their products for decades. I'm really excited to be working with them! Their hot sauces and chile pastes are produced by hand and from their own fields, and it really shows.

Here's how it'll work.

You can subscribe to my email list using the form below.
You can go to my Facebook page and "Like" it, if you haven't already.
You can share any post I write between now and May 15th on your own Facebook wall. Use the social icons at the bottom of each post!
You can post about the giveaway or The Cooking Animal, including a link to www.thecookinganimal.com, on any discussion forum or social network you use, and email a link to that share to thecookinganimalblog@gmail.com
You can tweet "Santa Cruz Chile and Spice Co. heats up your dinner!" on Twitter, using the hashtags #santacruzchili and #giveaway and tagging @santacruzghili and @thcookinganimal in your post.

And yes, you can enter multiple times by doing one of the above and boost your chances.

On May 15, I'll randomly select a winner using Rafflecopter and get the lucky person connected with Santa Cruz Chili to handle shipment! May the chiles be ever in your pantry.

Thanks for readingThe Cooking Animal and for sticking around through the name change from The Ingredient List! You guys are awesome and I love interacting with you.

- Charlie @ The Cooking Animal
thecookinganimalblog@gmail.com

Disclaimer: I received no compensation from Santa Cruz Chili and Spice Co. for this promotion or for my product reviews, but they did provide me samples for my evaluation.

Why I Love Costco's Tri-Tip Steak

May 13, 2013/ Charlie

The Tri-Tip roast is a California thing, most prominently associated with the town of Santa Maria and the Central Coast region of the state. It is to the Central Coast what, say, brisket is to central Texas - traditional, beloved ranch cooking, and California's contribution to the world of American barbecue. Generally rubbed with salt and garlic and slow-roasted over coast live oak coals, it's a broad triangular hunk of well-marbled beef from the bottom sirloin with a ton of flavor. Usually, it's served with pinquito beans and a fresh pico de gallo-like salsa.

It's one of my favorite cuts, because it violates the general rule that steak can be cheap, tender, or flavorful, but you only get to pick two.

How I Learned To Make The Best Damn Pizza In Alamogordo: Baking (Part 4)

May 09, 2013/ Charlie

It's absolutely astonishing how quickly a pizza bakes at 800F.

We're talking, like, two minutes. Tops. It's kind of shocking, because I guess I've always viewed baking sort of a "bake for 45 minutes or until golden brown" kind of thing, but that's stuff like cakes and bread that get baked at less than half the temperature. Can you tell I'm not a baker?

To get to 800F, I first ignited a heaping chimney-load of Kingsford charcoal in my Weber chimney igniter, then let it go until the top coals were fully ashed over and glowing red.

How I Learned To Make The Best Damn Pizza in Alamogordo: Topping The Pie (Part 3)

May 09, 2013/ Charlie

With a delightfully easy-to-work dough in place and my Weber grill turned into a superbly hot-burning outdoor oven with the addition of the KettlePizza insert, I had the fundamentals of good pizza in a dusty food desert of a town in place. Time for the fun part: the toppings.

How I Learned To Make The Best Damn Pizza in Alamogordo: The Dough (Part 2)

May 08, 2013/ Charlie

Yesterday, I went into depth on the ins and outs of my pizza setup. I’m convinced that my slightly modified KettlePizza setup is the perfect way to achieve the 800 degree F temperatures required to quickly cook a crisp pizza crust. But what about that crust?

Nothing sinks a pizza faster than a bad crust. One of the reasons I’m undertaking this project is because the crusts at the pizza places around here are so awful – from the moist, structurally unsound crust of a Carino’s pizza to the saccharine sweetness of Pizza Hut or the Wonder Bread blandness of the local place, they're all mediocre at best.

The ideal crust has a paper-thin layer of crackly, browned crispness all over, lightly spotted with light charring...

Pizza Setup Update! or, We Don't Need No Stinking Pizza Stones

May 07, 2013/ Charlie

I will be cooking food on this. Ew. But steel cleans up good.

Just a quickie tonight - after mentioning the notion of baking pizza on steel plate in my main post today, I must have had steel on the brain. On the way home from work, I stopped at Basin Pipe and Steel and bought myself this spectacularly grody, scaly piece of cold-rolled 1/4in thick mild steel. I'll have to clean it, probably with some oven cleaner and hydrochloric acid, but it should be a good way to experiment with baking on steel...and for $17, it was a hell of a bargain compared to the $80 Baking Steel I mentioned.

The idea is that 15lb of steel holds, and re-radiates, a hell of a lot of thermal energy. When you put a pizza on it, it will dump a ton of energy into the crust, promoting "oven spring" and a bottom side leopard-spotted with browning and crispness. Can't wait to try it.

How I Learned to Make the Best Damn Pizza in Alamogordo: The Setup

May 07, 2013/ Charlie

I make the best pizza in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

Admittedly, I am not exactly playing against the varsity here. There's a place called Pizza Patio, which cranks out edible but exceptionally bland pie. There's the attractive, appetizing-looking, but moist and floppy pizza at Carino's. And there's a place called Pizza Mill & Sub Factory, which produces Chuck E Cheese's-grade pizza with a topping list that includes canned mushrooms.

My pie? Yeah, it's pretty damn good. It's not perfect. But even when we relocate in January to a larger city, I bet I'll keep making it.

It started in early May, when I learned that I'd be staying here for another 9 months. 9 months is a long time to go without ready access to good pizza, and by then, we'd been at it for five. Clearly, some lifestyle changes would have to occur, because we do like us some good pizza.

intriguing finds: gochujang

May 06, 2013/ Charlie

Mike over at Dad Cooks Dinner has piqued my interest with a mention of gochujang, a fiery Korean chile paste he describes thusly:

Gochujang is Korean red pepper paste. It has the color of ketchup, spreads like tomato paste, and has a fiery afterburn. I tasted it, then had to restrain myself from eating it straight out of the tub. If you like trendy ingredients, get in on Gochujang now. I think it is going to be the next big breakout flavor, like chipotles in adobo, or sriracha.

Well, now. The Koreans are chileheads of renown, so I'm excited to hear of this. He presented it along with a recipe for grilled pork belly marinated in the stuff, but I bet it'd find a home in marinades and grilling of all kinds.

Gochujang is ground chiles, blended with salt, sugar, rice, and soybean paste and fermented; it's described as sweet, spicy, and deeply complex, and a number of commenters have called it Sriracha's more sophisticated cousin. Given that Sriracha ended up on my list of Five Indispensable Hot Sauces, that's high praise indeed. I've ordered a tub from Amazon and will report back, but I'm very intrigued.

Behold: the Srirachavocado

May 03, 2013/ Charlie

Reader 20DYNAMITE07 says:

Charlie, this isn't a question - just something that I found that I think you would appreciate. The simplicity of it all is just a thing of beauty.

Yes. Yes, it is.

Five Beers I've Discovered Lately: a Friday Five

May 03, 2013/ Charlie

The town of Alamogordo, my current residence, is a funny place for drinkers; the closest thing to a bar one might find here is the "lounge" section at Chilis or Applebees, but the local grocery store, Lowe's, has a shockingly excellent beer selection. Between that and supply runs when I go to Colorado to visit family, I'm pretty set. A colleague was in town recently and suggested grabbing a beer; we ended up watching my dog run around in the back yard because my fridge had easily the best beer list available. Here were our choices - five beers I've discovered lately that are just perfect for early summer.

Ingredient Review (And Giveaway!): Santa Cruz Chili and Spice Co. Chili Barbecue Sauce

May 02, 2013/ Charlie

When they proposed a giveaway contest, Santa Cruz Chile and Spice Co. also asked me for my thoughts on a few of their products. And I found that several of them sort of stumped me, until I tinkered with them a bit and all of a sudden "got it." Their chile pastes seemed redundant to the other red chile products I use until I started using them for things, like a vinaigrette, that I'd never use chile powder or dried chiles for.

Their chile barbecue sauce had a similar effect on me. Mostly because I was expecting, well, a barbecue sauce.

Let me explain

The Cooking Animal

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