More Than Q

Summer is a time for family, friends and neighbors to get together and break bread.Looking for something new to barbecue? Use your imagination to grill things you thought you couldn’t. Here are some suggestions:

Clams are so delicious in the summer, plus they’re easy, quick and relatively inexpensive. And cooking them on the grill is fun! The cooking process is so quick that you’ll be firing them up and popping them in your mouth as you go. A perfect snack to keep the fam gathered at the hearth.

Scrub and soak your littleneck clams but keep them refrigerated until you’re ready to use them. Place the clams directly on the grill and cover for 2 minutes. They’re done when they’ve popped open – if the never open, throw them out, there’s always one or two in a bunch. Remove the clams as they’re ready, and continue to add more to the grill as there’s room.

When removing the clams, be careful not to spill out any of their natural delicious juices. Set them in a large, shallow bowl with any of the following combinations:

Mashed garlic, melted butter, salt, lemon, finely chopped parsley, and a pinch of cayenne.

Chopped and cooked bacon, lemon and red pepper flakes, mixed with a bit of the bacon fat, and some olive oil as necessary.

Saute finely chopped garlic and onion in olive oil, add half a cup of beer, cook on high for 4 minutes.

Who said meat has to take the center stage of a grill fest? Probably the same people that said salad has to be served in bowls. Clearly, these people never had Salad Kababs. Be creative and put whatever you want on your kabab, just follow the one golden skewer rule: make sure all the pieces are relatively the same size.

Take your favorite salad items and skewer them to grill, or try the following combinations:

The Caesar: hunk of romaine, hunk of bread, hunk of par-cooked chicken breast or fully raw shrimp, when done, douse with Caesar dressing and grated Parmesan.

The Caprese: Mozzarella, tomato, bread, garnished with chopped basil and olive oil, don’t leave this on too long or your mozz will be all over your grill.

The Nicoise: Hunks of fresh tuna steak, cured black olives, par-boiled potato, grape tomatoes, garnish with chopped hard boiled egg and capers, and a vinaigrette of red wine vinegar, minced shallot, Dijon mustard, bit of garlic, anchovy paste (optional), and olive oil.

Celery Root. Not everyone knows what to do with this knobby creature, but we have an easy, sure fire winner right here. As you’re getting your grill geared up, cut the celery root in half and place it cut-side down on the grill, letting it sit in the low-heat section for a while. You’ll know it’s done when it’s heavily charred on the outside, but it’ll be creamy like mashed potato on the inside. It’s important to cook the root until well-done so that all of it’s natural bitterness has left the building.

For a slightly sweet and a gorgeous desert, experiment with some fruit on the grill. When choosing your fruit, go for the more firm pieces and feel free to garnish and serve with something that has a nice contrasting texture and temperature. Or, you can always let it stand on its own.

Peach halves are a classic. Brush with olive oil, grill until there are marks and serve plain, or with ice cream, whipped cream or yogurt.

Cut a pineapple in half or in quarters down the long way so that the core is still intact. Grill until there are marks, season with black pepper, fresh lime juice and honey.

Add a handful of your favorite berries and a sprinkling of sugar into a homemade foil packet and put it directly on the grill. After 5-10 minutes, depending on your grill and packet size, drizzle the smoky, gooey and hot (!) goodness over ice cream, shortbread or pound cake. Take it that extra mile with a garnish of whipped cream and chopped mint.

Slice open a banana length-wise but leave it in its peel. Grill with the open side down for 2 minutes. Flip over and add any of the following into it’s pocket for the remaining 5 minutes of grilling: chopped dark chocolate or Nutella, a mixture of brown sugar and cinnamon, marshmallow with graham cracker and chocolate, or crumbled Nilla wafers.

Bizarre Ways to Barbecue

The folks at The Royal Institution have a few unorthodox barbecue methods you can try, but maybe don't expect great results.

For their "Extreme Physics BBQ," chefs Andy and Greg tried a few different approaches including electrocuting a brined steak (meh) creating a hot dog circuit that lights LEDs (functional!), cooking a bite of steak using parabolic dishes to focus light into a cook-beam (tasty!), and searing a shrimp with a DIY jet of flame (spectacular to look at).

Culinary historian Michael Twitty has been tracing the roots of southern cooking in African and African-American traditions for decades, including the origins of barbecue. His latest project follows his family’s genealogy back to the 17th century through food. NPR spoke with him about what the past can teach us about today’s familiar dishes and why things aren’t always as they seem.

Listen here:

Beef ribs are gaining on pork ribs as American’s favorite. But which ribs should you purchase? Beef ribs can actually come from three separate locations on the steer.

Big beef back ribs are known in butcher-speak as NAMP 124 (the acronym stands for North American Meat Processors, the organization responsible for standardizing wholesale cuts of meat). They are trimmed off the outside of prime rib (part of the rib primal behind the forequarters) and consist of 7 rib bones with the feather and chine bones removed. Usually, the bones are 6 to 8 inches long and are sold in racks. Some butchers sell individual bones. They sometimes go by the name dinosaur ribs.

Plate short ribs—sometimes called plate ribs short and sweet—(the NAMP 123 series) are the biggest meatiest beef ribs, usually sold in 3-bone portions. A single rib can tip the scales at 1 to 2-1/2 pounds and will comfortably serve 2 to 3 people. They come from the plate primal behind the forequarters and near the belly of the steer.

Smaller, but still meaty, are chuck short ribs (NAMP 130 series), common in most supermarkets. They consist of ribs 1 through 5 under the neck of the animal and are usually 3 to 4 inches long. A well-marbled rectangle of meat rests on top of a wide bone; they are also available boneless. You can buy and cook them whole. When crosscut into thin strips or butterflied, they may be labeled “Korean-style short ribs” or “flanken.” (Argentineans know them as “tira de asado.” )

Though the aforementioned ribs have different characteristics, all make excellent candidates for the grill or smoker.

Back ribs respond well to indirect grilling, but will shrink considerably during the cook—much more than pork ribs. Buy a whole bone-in prime rib roast, then ask the butcher to trim off the rack of bones, leaving more meat attached than usual. You’ll have two great grilling experiences for the price of one. 

Plate short ribs are similar to brisket in that their meat is striated with flavorful fat and collagen. As a consequence, they need to be cooked to a temperature of at least 190 degrees for maximum succulence. Low and slow is the way to go. 

The Oxford English Dictionary cites the first recorded use of the word in the English language in 1697 by the British buccaneer William Dampier. While the standard modern English spelling of the word is barbecue, local variations like barbeque and truncations such as bar-b-q or bbq may also be found. In the southeastern United States, the word barbecue is used predominantly as a noun referring to roast pork, while in the southwestern states; cuts of beef are often cooked.

There is no definitive history about how the word “barbecue” originated – or why it’s sometimes used as a noun, verb, or adjective. Some say the Spaniards get the credit for the word, derived from their “barbacoa” which is an American-Indian word for the framework of green wood on which foods were placed for cooking over hot coals. Others think the French were responsible, offering the explanation that when the Caribbean pirates arrived on our Southern shores, they cooked animals on a spit-like devise that ran from “whiskers to tail” or “de barbe a` queue.”

Woods commonly selected for their flavor include mesquite, hickory, maple, guava, kiawe, cherry, pecan, apple and oak. Woods to avoid include conifers. These contain resins and tars, which impart undesirable resinous and chemical flavors.

Barbecues have been a White House tradition since Thomas Jefferson. Lyndon B. Johnson, the 36th president of the United States, hosted the first barbecue at the White House that featured Texas-style barbecued ribs.

The most popular holidays for barbecuing are, in order, July 4th (71 percent), Memorial Day (57 percent), and Labor Day (55 percent).

The most popular foods for cooking on the grill are, in order: burgers (85 percent), steak (80 percent), hot dogs (79 percent) and chicken (73 percent).

May 16th is National Barbecue Day.

The most popular barbecue utensils are long-handled tongs (77 percent), followed by forks (64 percent), long handled spatulas (59 percent), and then grill cleaning brushes (63 percent).

Ellsworth B. A. Zwoyer of Pennsylvania patented a design for charcoal briquettes in 1897. After World War I, the Zwoyer Fuel Company built charcoal briquette manufacturing plants in the United States with plants in Buffalo, NY and Fall River, MA.

Check out the July issue of NJ Monthly. We’re featured in the Smokin’ BBQ Guide!

In June of every year, we honor fathers. The first Mother's Day was celebrated in 1914, but a holiday honoring fathers did not become official until 1966, when President Lyndon Johnson declared that the third Sunday in June would be Father's Day. President Richard Nixon made this proclamation permanent in 1972. But this doesn't mean that the holiday was not celebrated before this time.

The idea for Father's Day is attributed to Sonora Dodd, who was raised by her father after her mother's death during childbirth. While listening to a sermon at church on Mother's Day, she thought about all her father had done for her and her siblings and decided fathers should have a day, too. Because Dodd's father was born in June, she encouraged churches in her area, Spokane, Wash., to honor fathers that month. The first Father's Day was celebrated in Spokane in 1910.

Over the years, the idea spread, and people lobbied Congress to establish the holiday. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson, who had signed a proclamation establishing Mother's Day, approved the idea, but never signed a proclamation for it. In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge made it a national event to "establish more intimate relations between fathers and their children and to impress upon fathers the full measure of their obligations."

Who says you can’t drink wine with barbecue?

Nick Passmore, contributor at Forbe’s Magazine suggests to keep is simple. You want a wine with enough heft to work with a chicken leg slathered in a sweet and spicy BBQ sauce or a well-charred steak. Something big and beefy, not too dry, certainly not too austere, and above all easy to drink.

19 Crimes 2012 $12, South Eastern Australia

The name refers to Australia’s convict settlement history, but there’s nothing criminal about this upstanding citizen at a bargain price. Just a gnat’s whisker north of dry, so it’s ideal with chicken or ribs in a sweet BBQ sauce especially when you serve it chilled.

Alamos Selection Malbec 2012 $20, Mendoza, Argentina

Smooth, jammy, rich, succulent and ideal for ribs with a charred red sauce, especially for guys whose tastes run to big, robust reds. Another wine that works well when lightly chilled.

Campo Viejo Tempranillo 2012 $12, Rioja, Spain

Juicy and packed with bright cherry and vanilla flavors along with a real Rioja earthiness.

Southern Living has 20 yummy recipes for barbecue side dishes, including Candied Jalapeños

Watermelon, Mâche, and Pecan Salad, and Zucchini, Squash, and Corn Casserole

This spring semester, Harvard Engineering Professor Kit Parker, a teaching assistant, and 16 engineering students went on a quest to build a scientifically optimized smoker.

It was in Memphis, Tennessee, that Kit Parker first began to think about teaching a class on American barbecue at Harvard. The engineering professor was wandering through a barbecue competition, studying the smokers where entrants had marinated their meat in smoke for hours on end. And he noticed something distinctly odd. “They were the most godawful contraptions you've ever seen.” The junkyard of cobbled-together smoking chambers, of all shapes and sizes and materials, told Parker something important. No one really knew how to build a perfect one yet.

Barbecue, of course, is a word that has two uses in our modern vernacular: a verb meaning to slap some meat on the grill and slather it with sauce, and a noun referring to slow-smoked meat, a staple of southern US states including Tennessee and Texas, where Parker grew up. Aficionados of the latter develop a practical knowledge of the complicated series of chemical reactions that produce the melt-in-your-mouth texture, the crusty exterior, or bark, and the particular flavors of barbecue. 

To begin their research, the team purchased one of the most popular smokers on the market, called the Big Green Egg, and smoked brisket through the brutal Boston winter, gathering data that allowed them to build computer models of the movement of air and heat in the smoker and of the brisket itself as it cooked. Then they drew up plans for a device that would provide consistent heating regardless of the user's skill in loading fuel, and do it in rain, snow, or shine. It would need to have an hourglass waist, where they would mount fans to spread the heat out evenly around the meat. And it would need to be ceramic, to retain enough heat. Of course, none of them had built such a thing before. “We had 45 days left in the class,” Parker recalls, “and we had to learn how to do ceramics engineering.” The students shaped the smoker out of 300lbs (120kg) of clay, a kind of black Dalek (see below), built an app that controls the fans and temperature remotely, and began testing again.

Their device has a few interesting features, in addition to its hourglass figure. It generates turbulence around the meat, so smoke is constantly bombarding it, a process that may impart more flavor. It can be controlled at a distance with the phone app, which will also send updates throughout the smoking process to salivating friends. And it has attracted interest from companies looking to get into the smoker business. The class was sponsored by Williams Sonoma. At a recent test on the sunny quad with a media audience, representatives from the firm that sells Cuisinart grills were there.

Did they produce a smoker that's better than the Big Green Egg? That can fool-proof and standardize the smoking process? Parker says their data so far suggest that it heats more consistently than the Egg, showing about the same temperature curve each time they run it. The answer will be clearer with more trials – so far, they have run their smoker only four times. 

People around the world have discovered incredible and diverse ways to cook pig.

Karen tells her story on Globetrotter Diaries, on learning to roast a pig with her friends, Mike and Ofelia.

From choosing the method:

To cooking:

To eating:

Read all about it here:

http://globetrotterdiaries.com/recipes/a-beginners-guide-to-roasting-a-whole-pig