Wood

Another thing: When the ground hardens up back there, I need to get to the woods and pull out some fallen, dry maple and oak boughs for smashing up and smoking. Grapevines too. Maple and grapevines are supposed to be particularly nice for smoking and my God do we have a shitload of that everywhere.

Update: OK, so I made these today. Homemade rub kicked butt. I didn’t use any pellets or chunks. Just lump charcoal, so I could get the feel for this creature. I used the deflector plate so that they cooked more like a smoky convection oven, instead of straight grilling over fire. Worked quite well, the food still got a nice roasty-toasted color and little crispy edges.

However, I was too afraid of leaving the ribs on too long. Instead of cooking at a higher heat and then taking them off so soon, I should have left them on a longer time at a lower temperature and then popped the heat up higher at the end so more of the fat would turn to candy.

They were still pretty good though. A surprising thing about the Egg is how stable the heat is.  The porcelain it is made out of is very thick and porous.  And even though the food roasts evenly, it seems to be fairly steamy inside the dome, instead of the normal dry heat you get from a grill. Very strange to open the top of a charcoal grill and have steam hit my glasses, just like with my indoor oven.

It stayed so hot for so long after shutting it off, I could have made some baked goods in there without adding fuel. I think next time out of sheer economy I will slide a cheesecake or some muffin tins in, right after I take the meat off.

Have you ever had cheesecake cooked over wood? I have. Boy howdy. Good stuff.

 

You can see they are done, but not crispy-brown-pork-cracklin’s-done.

Next time!

Today Scott smoked a couple of chuck shoulders. I’ve got one in the crockpot with veggies and spices for shredded beef burritos again. The other will be cubed into little beef pot pies. Tomorrow Scott is also doing a couple of chickens to test out a rub for the Thanksgiving turkey. I also made a big chicken stew today with leftovers, homemade stock, and some of my homemade linguica.

The freezer is going to be working hard in the next couple days. After this weekend I won’t need to cook anything but side dishes for quite a while.

Creosote Is Like Sucking On Turpentine

So he got a new Big Green Egg and tested out some chicken breasts with the same amount of wood he would usually use on the grill.

I tasted one and the front of my tongue went numb. In the trash they went! Yow. That was a lot of smoke. Too much smoke.

This new thing requires much less wood, is what I’m trying to say.

Next batch was cooked at higher heat with fewer pellets and came out okay.

Today I’m grilling country pork ribs on there. No heat deflector dish, straight-up slow-grilling with some crabapple chunks in the fire. See how we do.

Maybe. I’m being pressured to use the dish. Makes it more like a smoky oven, than a grill. Which might be better for this.

I made my own rub and treated the ribs last night. There’s a cheap bulk spice place over in Manchester, and I saw a display of theirs at the food store last night. Bought a few big containers of stuff; cumin, chile powder. I can see I’m going to need to clear a cupboard and organize a new spice area.
I’ll ask Scott to take pictures of my pork today and post them here for all to see.