Smoking the brisket…

Smoking the brisket…

A couple of weeks ago I passed the Low n Slow stand at the regular Temple Quay street food market, alas I was on my way to a three hour meeting and I didn’t think it would be fair to my colleagues to have what sounded like a delicious barbecue box filling the meeting room with food smells. So this week, not having a meeting, I checked the Twitter and saw that Low n Slow were going to be at the Temple Quay Market.

I went with the “ultimate combo” barbecue box, consisting of 12 hour pulled pork, 9 hour beef brisket, burnt ends, served with salad, coleslaw, pickles, a POW ball and homemade sauce. So what are POW balls? Well according to the menu by the stall they are tasty bacon wrapped meatballs with bbq glaze.

This was a wonderful combination of flavours and textures.

The beef brisket was beautifully tender and delicious. The smoke was subtle and didn’t overpower the dish. The crispiness of the burnt ends contrasted well with the tender brisket.

The pulled pork was very tasty and as for the POW ball, this was nice. Like a festive pigs in blanket but bigger, smokier with a subtle sweet taste.

This kind of meal starts to make me think if a proper smoker style barbecue would be a nice thing to have. Well until I make a decision about that, I will continue to visit the Low and Slow stall.

Barbecued Chicken

barbecuing over charcoal

I have done this method of barbecuing a whole chicken a few times now and each time, the end result has been delicious tender moist chicken full of smokey and chargrilled flavours.

The first part of the process is to spatchcock the chicken. I don’t have a pair of poultry shears so I usually use a big cook’s knife to cut out the backbone. I also don’t use skewers to secure the legs or keep it flat, but you just have to be more careful when turning the chicken.

I usually marinade the chicken, lemon and parsley (with some diced onion) I find works well. Adding some white wine adds more depth of flavour.

As for the barbecue, the key here is to avoid cooking the chicken over a direct heat. After lighting the charcoal, once the flames have died down, and they are covered in grey ash you can start to cook. However the first thing you need to do is to move the coals to the sides of the barbecue leaving the middle empty, the chicken will be placed over this empty zone. Moving the coals can be tricky as they will be really hot, but the aim is to create a circle of hot coals around a clear area. This will allow the chicken to be cooked via in-direct heat without overcooking or burning.

The chicken is placed down on the grill carcass side down. I then use a wok lid to cover the chicken. This creates an oven effect and helps to stop the chicken drying out. You could of course if you have one use the lid on your barbecue.

barbecuing over charcoal

Turn the chicken after 15-20 minutes and cook the skin side. Take care when turning the chicken, especially if you like me didn’t use skewers. Add any remaining marinade to baste the chicken. Re-cover with the wok lid.

Check the chicken is cooked and then remove from the barbecue.

We served it with salad and some crispy fried (well actually roasted) potatoes. No I don’t add any barbecue sauce!

Another time I am thinking of using a similar method to cook beef or pork.

Whole Chicken Barbecued

Whole Chicken Barbecue

Cooking a whole chicken on a barbecue is not a simple process, you can have undercooked on the inside and burnt and charred on the outside. I used this process to cook a whole chicken.

The first thing I did was prepare the chicken by spatchcocking and then marinated with lemon juice, lime juice, garlic, parsley and some olive oil.

Though you can cook a spatchcocked chicken directly on the barbecue, it can be quite challenging to ensure that the chicken is properly cooked, through, without burning or overcooking the outside. Part of the issue is that it is difficult to control the temperature of the barbecue unlike a normal grill. The key process is to recreate some aspects of a “normal” oven as opposed to the usual way of using a barbecue as a grill.

After the coals have reached cooking temperature, move them to the sides of the barbecue, so that when the spatchcocked chicken is placed on the grill, it is not over direct heat.

The chicken I placed it “inside” down with the skin side on top. The chicken was then covered, I used a wok lid, but this is where a kettle barbecue comes into its own.

The end result was a properly cooked chicken, which was moist and succulent and full of flavour.

Grilled Beef Skirt

Grilled Beef Skirt

I bought some beef skirt a while ago, in the main to make a pie or a stew. In the end it went into the freezer.

With the recent warm weather and using the barbecue a lot more I decided to try something different.

I took the beef skirt and placed it on a bed of root vegetables in a roasting tray and put it in a medium oven for about 80-90 minutes. The plan was that as this cut of beef wasn’t suitable for quick cooking on the barbecue, I would slow roast it first, before finishing it off on the barbecue.

The beef was cooked for about ten minutes on each side on the barbecue. The end result was then left to rest for a further ten minutes.

I then sliced it thinly and served it with salad and pitta bread.

I was pleasantly surprised, some great flavours and as I hoped it was also very tender and delicious.

Cooking over hot coals

Coals

It was a beautiful sunny weekend and like many other people we decided to cook outdoors on the barbecue.

I was asked the other day why I liked to cook over hot coals, as it can be quite a time consuming process.

First and foremost I like the taste of grilled food, especially over a smokey barbecue. It’s one of the reasons I have a charcoal based barbecue and not a gas one. Gas barbecues are great for controlled outdoor cooking, but they are not the same experience that you get when cooking over coal.

I also find the whole process quite therapeutic, a relaxing activity in its own right.

A Wonderful Staff BBQ

Spit Roasted Lamb

The catering students and staff at Gloucestershire College did an outstanding event last week. Every year the college staff get together in an annual barbecue. Now for a lot of people a big event like this means well done burgers, cheap sausages and if you’re lucky a chicken drumstick, still raw in the middle…

Well this staff event was totally different. There were three food stands. The first wasn’t really a barbecue, but was paella. This was a really well cooked paella with huge kings prawns. This was really nice and very tasty, even if it was a but messy shelling the prawns. There was a vegetarian alternative for those that didn’t want to eat fish. I should say (for regular readers of the blog) that it appeared they had stirred their paella…

The barbecue stand had a nice choice of vegetarian kebabs, satay chicken and barbecued pork ribs. The ribs were perfect, the meat fell off the bone and was beautifully tender. So good you could use a knife and fork, so need to get sticky fingers. I didn’t try the chicken as when I arrived at the stand they had run out and were cooking a new batch. The vegetarian kebab was perfectly cooked and the halloumi cheese that was on there alongside the vegetables was delicious.

My favourite stand though was the Moroccan lamb wrap. They had spit roasted a whole lamb and this was served in a wrap with houmous, yoghurt, sliced courgette and chilli. Absolutely delicious. For those that didn’t eat lamb there was a really nice looking butternut squash alternative.

This was outstanding high quality food for a superb event. It was an extra special event this year as our Principal is retiring.

Cooking Chicken over Charcoal

Cooking Chicken over Charcoal

We don’t seem to get much nice weather these days, seems to be ever rarer when it’s a bank holiday. So it was a pleasant surprise to not only have a dry sunny day and on bank holiday monday.

So while the roads clogged up with traffic we decided to light the barbecue.

We went with some simple burgers and sausages, but I also really liked barbecued chicken.

I took some wings, legs and thighs and made a marinade of garlic, parsley, white wine, vinegar and olive oil. The chicken was left to marinade for an hour or so.

The wings I cooked over charcoal with mesquite wood chips, whilst the rest of the chicken was cooked more slowly over plain charcoal.

The wings cooked reasonably quickly and were delicious, they had lovely crispy skin, but were still tender and moist.

The legs and thighs, which were cooked for longer, despite not having the mesquite had a deep smokey flavour.

I served the chicken with a range of salads.

Dinner, wasn’t that good…

Despite a reputation, I don’t spend that much time travelling and staying away from home. However the other day I found myself in the Holiday Inn Express in Burnley. I hadn’t done my homework so I wasn’t sure what was available in the local area and it was quite late (due to big problems on the M6) as a result I decided that the “easy” solution would be to eat in the hotel. When I saw the menu my initial thought was to go and find somewhere else… however it was late so I took the plunge.

It was very apparent that most of the menu items would be prepared in the microwave, so I went with the special, which was a double BBQ burger with salad and chips.

a double BBQ burger with salad and chips

Please note that the menu said BBQ and not barbecue or barbeque. What it consisted of was two meat patties in a burger roll with onion rings and a BBQ sauce. It was served with some lettuce (no way could this be described as a salad) and chips. It was priced at £9.99 which was cheaper than many of the main menu options. When I looked at the menu, it was a combination of the choice and the price which made me think about going somewhere else.

The chips were typical mass catering chips, pre-cooked slightly and cooked to order. They were crisp on the outside and fluffy on the inside. There is a huge difference between the freshly cooked chips you get in a fish and chip shop and those that are cooked in places like pubs and hotels. The main difference is that with the chips I got that they are partly pre-cooked before been frozen. So when they cook them they fry much quicker than if they cooked them from freshly cut potatoes. I am aware that some places use these chips, cook them, and then reheat them in the fryer when the order comes in. As a result they are fried three times, which increases the fat content as well as making them more crunchy and less fluffy. It may be just me, but when I have a burger I prefer having smaller fries over chunky chips.

The less said about the lettuce, probably the better.

The burger was a real disappointment, I wasn’t convinced the burgers had even been grilled, they looked and tasted like they had been microwaved. The BBQ sauce was sticky and over sweetened.

Overall the meal was a real disappointment, but I wasn’t expecting anything special. The one thing it will make me do is do more research and find places in advance, so I don’t have to rely on this kind of place in the future.

Barbecued Chicken

I’ve not done a barbecue for ages, my last proper barbecue went a bit rusty one winter and I never got round to replacing it. I did buy a disposable barbecue at some point, but it was so long ago I couldn’t remember when I bought it. Remembering that I had it, I decided I would cook some barbecued chicken thighs. I wasn’t entirely confident that the disposable barbecue would work and as I was cooking chicken and without any way of adjusting the heat (as the grill was fixed) I thought I would need to try a slightly different cooking method than I had done in previous years.

The first thing I did was poach the thighs in a pan of simmering stock for about 15 minutes, I did to ensure that the chicken was virtually cooked before placing it on the barbecue. It can be very easy over hot charcoal to have the outside of chicken well cooked and the inside raw. Poaching allowed me to ensure that the chicken was cooked, stayed moist, added flavour and importantly when grilled on the barbecue would brown and take on the smoke flavour. You could “bake” the chicken in the oven first, rather than poaching, but this would take longer and if the chicken browned in the over wouldn’t then be on the barbecue long enough to get that really nice barbcue smokey flavour.

After poaching the chicken, I drained it, let it dry and then tossed it in some olive oil. At this stage I could have added some lemon juice (if I had any lemons) and maybe some mixed herbs (if I had something other than just parsley). In the end I went with just olive oil and a bit of black pepper.

Things didn’t go entirely to plan, the instructions said light the touch paper and it would be ready to cook in about 20 minutes. The reality was that it took closer to 35 for half of the coals to turn grey and I was really glad that I had poached the chicken as I don’t think it would have cooked the chicken properly if I had started off with raw. As a result I only had half of the grill to use, but I wasn’t cooking a huge quantity of chicken so it wasn’t too bad. It would have been nice to spread the chicken out to ensure that the smoke added more flavour, but better some then none.

Serving the chicken with a range of salad and some crispy roast potatoes, as I bit into the barbecued chicken, it bought back a range of memories of eating similar food in a range of places and countries.

Time to get a new, proper, barbecue methinks.

BBQ Chicken

BBQ Chicken

Needing lunch and has I had just done a small shop, decided to go to the Sainsburys Cafe. They had a special offer on some of their meals reduced to £2.50 so I went with the BBQ Chicken, even though I think they should spell it barbecue rather than BBQ!

Lunch

It consisted of half a “roast” chicken, BBQ sauce, in my serving a smattering of coleslaw and a choice of chips or seasoned wedges. It wasn’t bad, and certainly not bad value at £2.50. The chicken was well cooked, so the leg meat was quite moist and tender, but the breast meat felt a little dry. I did think that there was too much BBQ sauce and not enough coleslaw. The chips were crisp and fluffy on the inside. Overall for a supermarket cafe meal, not too bad, but certainly nothing to write home about.