Category: Uncategorized

Big Green Egg Gasket Replacement

As I’ve said before, my current setup is a large Big Green Egg. Now I do most of my cooking low & slow but if you cook on a ceramic cooker, then you know that one of things that you can do with this type of cooker is super-high temp searing for steaks and the like. However, one of the dangers in doing this is the potential to melt the felt gasket that creates the seal between the upper and lower half of the BGE.

There are other scenarios that cause the gasket to tear or otherwise need replacement. This can happen when the lids feezes shut or becomes fused together as the egg cools off. In any event, you invariably learn about this condition immediately before your next cook. Imagine opening the lid to prepare Christmas Eve dinner and tearing your gasket off half way around the lid. That’s exactly what happend to my brother and fellow Big Green Egg owner last week.

Undaunted, he tried to line it up as best he could and soldier on with a couple of 7+ lb. briskets. He called me in a panic that he couldn’t keep the temp below 275°. The egg was leaking so badly at the tear, that it was acting as a vent and drawing more air through the cooker and keeping the temps up. We agreed that all he could do was keep the vents closed as much as possible to try to maintain the desired temp and hope for the best.

A shot of the BGE with gasket removedWell, I’m happy to report that his Christmas Eve dinner was a succes. And, the next day he purchased a new gasket and replaced the old one in ~10 minutes. Replacement is pretty easy, but here are a couple of tips:

Remove old gasket completely
Use a putty knife or something similar to remove all the residual glue & gasket bits.
The new gasket comes as one long piece, so you’ll need to dry fit it and cut each half to length. Measure twice, cut once.
Close the lid and let the adhesive cure.
Avoid high temp cooks for the first several cooks after gasket replacement.

Additionally, here are a couple of tips to help avoid the issue altogether.

Keep the gasket clear of excess BBQ sauce, etc. as much as possible
If there’s a threat of freezing temps, put parchment or wax paper between the top & bottom halves of the egg. This will help keep them freezing shut.

Hope you didn’t have any near misses for your holiday cook!

Cheers,
Braddog

DIY BBQ Sauce

If you’ve ever been bitten by the BBQ bug, you’ve probably tried to make your own BBQ sauce or rub. I know I have. But what I’ve found over time is that I never create anything quite as good as I can buy, and the ingredients tend to get pretty expensive. So I’ve pretty much resigned myself to enjoying the sauces and rubs that I can buy.

However my brother recently shared his BBQ sauce recipe with me and while it starts with a bottle of commercially available sauce, he adds his own style to it with the following recipe.

Start off with your favorite BBQ sauce. I like the Sweet Baby Ray’s sweet BBQ in the 40 oz bottle
12 oz can of Coke
2 tblspn of chili powder
2 tblspn of Lawry’s seasoning
salt and pepper to taste
Mix together
You can acquire a 40oz. squeeze bottle at your local discount store.

I gotta admit, this was pretty tasty and I’ll be using it on pulled pork in the next week or so. Give it a shot and I think you’ll find you can personalize a sauce to your own taste.

Cheers,
Braddog

What Fuels Your Fire?

If you’re shopping for a bbq pit, part of your decision making process will be to determine what type of fuel you’ll use to fire the pit. You basically have 3 options to consider and each have pros & cons.

Hardwood – Many folks believe that it’s not really BBQ if it isn’t cooked over wood coals. I don’t personally subscribe to that line of thinking, but maybe that’s because my experience with a stick burner was really awful. I had an offset cooker that I tried to burn wood in and I just never could get it right. One of the things to consider about using hardwood is whether you have a consistent source for fuel and do you have a place to burn it to coals prior to shoveling it into your cooker.
Propane – Sometimes called Lazy-Q, many gas powered cookers are pretty close to “set it and forget it”. I’ve cooked on a propane smoker with great results. However, one of the things that alwasy concerns me a little bit is leaving a roaring burner of propane overnight. Propane, like everything else has gotten a little more expensive as well.
Charcoal – This fuel type could be divided into a couple of categories; briquettes & lump. Either way, this fuel is readily availble and still surprisingly affordable. I won’t get into the debate of briquettes vs. lump here, but suffice to say that I’m a lump charcoal guy.

So leave me a comment and tell me, what fuels your fire?

Cheers,
Braddog

BBQ Beef on the Big Green Egg

I personally enjoy pulled pork about as well as any BBQ. But now and then

I need something different. So, about a year ago I started doing this recipe that really turns out some tasty pulled beef. Here’s the recipe:

I buy a package of chuck roast from Sam’s. There are two in a package, usually totalling ~8 lbs. or so.
I hit them with a good dose of Dizzy Pig’s Raising the Steaks or something similar.
Setup up your cooker for indirect cooking and stabilize the temperature at 250 degrees. On the Big Green Egg, this means use the platesetter with the drip pan under the cooking grate.
BBQ Beef off of the Big Green EggPut the chuckies on over a drip pan and let them cook until they reach an internal temperature of ~160 degrees.
Once they reach 160 degrees, put them into a foil pan, add a can of beer (I sometimes use apple juice instead), cover the pan with with aluminum foil, and put them back on the cooker.
When they reach 190 degrees, they should be tender enough to pull like a pork butt. Insert a fork and give it a twist. If it twists easily, they’re done.Drain the beer, pull them apart (discarding the fatty parts), and add sauce.
I like to put the sauced beef back on the cooker uncovered for another hour or so.
Serve it up on hamburger buns and enjoy!

Total cook time for this is about 5-6 hrs. I love having this in the fridge for sandwhiches. If you haven’t tried BBQ or pulled beef, you should definitely give it a shot.

Cheers,
Braddog

Review: Dizzy Pig BBQ Rub

Over the past couple of years, I’ve read lots of comments about the products from Dizzy Pig BBQ. Now I always thought to myself, “How good could it be?”. I’ve been through a number of grocery store rubs & grill seasonings and they all seem to be pretty much the same. So it was with low expectations that I placed my first order with the folks at Dizzy Pig.

However, to say they exceeded my expectations is an understatement. They have a variety of products targeted at different foods. I ordered a gift pack of 3 of their products. When the package arrived, I was pleasantly surprised to find a sample of many of their other products. Here’s a rundown of my first order.

Dizzy Pig’s Dizzy Dust (available in regular or coarse grind) – This is a great all around rub that works well on pork, chicken or beef. I really like it on pork butt or ribs.
Shakin’ The Tree – This rub is very versatile. It has become my standard rub for chicken, but I’ve also used it as an accent to everything from fish to jalapeno poppers.
Raisin’ the Steaks – As the name implies, this is great for beef. I like this on steaks and brisket. It’s sort of a variation on a Montreal Seasoning.

Dizzy Pig makes a number of other rubs that I haven’t tried yet, but if these three are any indication of what I can expect you can bet I’ll be placing another order soon. You should do the same.

Cheers,
Braddog

The Kamado Style Grill

For centuries, people have cooked in clay vessels. Evidence of clay cooking vessels have been found all over the world. From the tandoor cooker in India to the mushikamodo in Japan, it’s believed that these are the precursors to today’s kamado style cooker.

Kamados became popular in the US after World War II. Today, there are a number of companies making kamado style cookers using ceramic and refractory materials in their construction. Big Green Egg, Kamado, California Kamado, Primo, Grill Dome all make a kamado style cooker.

There are many advantages to this style of cooker:

Temperature Control – once the ceramic material comes up to temp, it retains the heat for hours and doesn’t require a large fire to maintain that temp.
Low Fuel Consumption – as stated above, since the ceramic is radiating retained heat, only a small fire is needed for low temperature smoking.
Moisture – this style of cooker does not require a pan for water or other liquids. The ceramic retains the moisture in the cooking chamber and produces moist & flavorful results
Grill or Smoke – Of course you can cook indirect on lots of grills, but few afford you the ability to smoke or grill equally well.

Of course there are some drawbacks to any product, and the kamado style cooker is no exception.

Capacity – Although you can add additional cooking grates higher into the dome, there’s no getting around the fact that capacity can be an issue if you often cook for large groups.
Portability – These things are heavy. As such, they’re not great for tailgating, camping etc.

As I mentioned in a previous post, my current setup for BBQ is a large Big Green Egg. Personally, I find that the advantages to a ceramic cooker grossly outweigh the disadvantages. Having said that, I do find myself wondering what my next cooker will be. I think I’ll always have a BGE, but I could see adding something to my arsenal for larger cooks. A Stumps maybe….or an FEC-100? Stay tuned!

Cheers,
Braddog

What’s the Rub?

In BBQ circles, you’ll hear lots of talk about “rubs”. So, I thought I’d take a minute to level set what a rub is. Simply put, it’s a combination of spices applied to the outside of a piece of meat that result in the crispy outer crust that is often found on BBQ. The name is derived from the method of application. Usually the rub is applied by vigorously rubbing into all the nooks and crannies of piece of meat you plan to BBQ.

Rubs can be as simple as salt and pepper, or very complex as found in commercially available rubs. Generally speaking, rubs are comprised of 1/3 salt, 1/3 sugar, 1/3 other seasoning to taste depending on the cut of meat that you’re applying it to. If you want to try your hand at making a rub, keep these proportions in mind.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be writing reviews of some of the rubs that I’ve used over the past year or so. I’ll also share a couple of basic rubs that I’ve used with success.

Cheers,

Braddog

Cold Weather Smoking

How versatile a BBQ chef are you? I got to find out this holiday weekend. My brother-in-law asked me to “make some magic” (his words not mine) with his CharBroil H20 smoker. Now it’s been a good long while since I’ve cooked on one of these but we set out to give it a shot.

It was a cold and windy 25 degrees in Pittsburgh and I knew that keeping the temps up with this thin-walled smoker would be an issue. I decided to forego the water in the water pan and instead filled it with some small gravel in hopes that it would hold more heat than water.

We started a full pan of charcoal and realized that we’d need to keep pouring the coals to it and keep it out of the wind to keep the temps up in a good cooking range. Unfortunately, my BIL didn’t have a chimney starter but was able to fashion one out of a piece of stove pipe he had in the garage. This worked out better than I had hoped.

In the end, we were able to serve up 3 dozen ABT’s, 3 lbs of chicken wings, and a couple of salmon fillets. They were very tasty and I’d say that in spite of a cooker with a few limitations, we proved that you can cook decent food if you’re patient.

So don’t let this cold weather stop you. Get out there and get cooking!

Cheers,
Braddog

The Best Texas BBQ

I’m a Midwesterner, born and raised. But I have a preference for Southern things, including my taste in BBQ.

Now I’ve been to Texas on business a number of times, but I’ve never been there as a tourist. So I can’t comment first hand on “Texas BBQ” but by all accounts beef is king and the best BBQ joints are hole in the wall joints scattered about the hill country.

I ran across this article the confirms where you’re likely to find the best BBQ in Texas and I thought it was worth sharing. I hope you enjoy it.

By Meat Alone
The best Texas BBQ in the world.
by Calvin Trillin

Cheers,
Braddog

ABT’s or Jalapeno Poppers

When I started reading BBQ forums a few years ago, I stumbled upon an appetizer that seems to be very popular with the BBQ crowd. They’re called Atomic Buffalo Turds or ABT’s. It’s basically a BBQer’s version of stuffed jalapeno poppers prepared on the smoker. For the longest time, I didn’t even attempt the recipe because my family doesn’t enjoy foods that are too spicy or hot. That is, until this summer. I started with sweet peppers and eventually tried jalapenos and all I can say is that I’m sorry I waited so long start cooking these.
Here’s the recipe.

clean 18 jalapenos by cutting off the stem and slicing them lengthwise
remove the seeds and ribs from inside the peppers (the more of these you leave in the pepper, the hotter the ABT will be)
cut a package of regular bacon in half
18 peppers and a package of bacon cut in half roughly equals the same number of pepper halves and bacon pieces.
fill each jalapeno boat with cream cheese and wrap with a half slice of bacon (note: some folks like to put a Little Smokey sausage in each popper or some pulled pork but we like ’em plain)
pin the ends of the bacon together by inserting a toothpick through them and into the pepper
I like to dust them with a BBQ rub before putting them on the cooker
you can cook these direct or indirect but you want to keep the temps below 300 degrees
they’re done when the bacon is crisp.

Note: I recommend using rubber gloves when handling the jalapenos. If you don’t have rubber gloves, just remember to keep your hands away from your face (or any other sensitive area if you know what I mean)

Try them, you won’t regret it. Heck, I’m gonna cook up a whole batch for Thanksgiving! 🙂

Cheers,
Braddog