surasak's pub n' grill....

[man with no head]

Decided for a change in cuisine, here's my Italian-style pasta with calamari in a red wine sauce:



Sauce is made from: red wine, sugar, salt, garlic, olive oil, tomatoes, onions sauteed and reduced (after the onions and garlic are sweated first). The calamari are cleaned and sliced prior to cooking and boiled for about 30 seconds to avoid making them rubbery.

[man with no head]

Time for some redneck food, yee-haw!

First up is collard greens. These ancient ancestors of today's cabbage are tough and chewy, but, cooking for about 2 hours makes them soft and edible. Simply remove the spiny stems, roll up, cut into slices, and put into a pot where you have rendered some bacon fat. Cook until tender.

[man with no head]

Collard greens wouldn't be complete without some Texas Tenderloin (aka chicken fried steak). These cuts of meat from the bottom round (aka the rear legs of the cow) are so tough you could repair tire punctures with it, however, repeated stabbing of the meat cuts the connective tissue up and tenderizes the meat (otherwise known as 'cubing'). Simply drop in flour, drop in beaten egg, coat with flour again, and fry in a pan. When finished the pan drippings can be used to make gravy. Add some flour and chicken stock, boil, reduce, and add some milk and keep cooking until thickened. Yee-haw!

[kingwilly]

^ hmmm - looks good!

[man with no head]

Had some leftover pork shoulder and decided to see if I could make BBQ pork in the oven. Making proper BBQ is a slow process: the faster you make it the worse it will taste. This is because unlike roasting what you want to do here is bring the meat up to temperature slowly and hold it for many hours at that temperature until the fat, collogen, and connective tissues render (this is why ribs and shoulder cuts make good BBQ). Essentially you bring the meat up to about 170-185F/76-80C degrees and hold it there for anywhere from 6-8 hours depending on the weight of the meat. This is high enough to kill bacteria and slowly break down the fat and other tissues without actually cooking the meat like a standard roasting procedure would do (that uses temps double the magnitude to cook meat quickly). When done the meat should literally fall apart to the touch (known as 'fork tender'). A common term used here is 'pulled pork' because you literally use two forks to pull it apart.

Ingredients: apple cider vinegar, cayenne pepper, hickory smoke flavoring. Sauce: ketchup, Coke, worcestershire sauce.



Method: put pork in a plastic bag, add apple cider vinegar to cover, remove as much air as possible, set in refrigerator overnight. The pork will turn from pink to gray as the process nears completion. Take out about one hour prior to cooking to let adjust to room temp (shorter time if it's warm or hot outside). Set oven to about 225F/110C and let bring to temperature. Open a bottle of beer, mix with equal amount of water, put in saucepan and bring to boil. Put in a pan in the bottom of the oven and let adjust to oven temp. Remove pork from bag, baste with some hickory smoke flavoring, dust with cayenne pepper (or rub with fresh peppers) and set on a roasting rack in a second pan. Put inside oven and let go for about 1 hour. Open oven, put a layer of aluminum foil over the pork and let cook for 4-8 hours more depending on the weight. When it's done the meat should literally pull apart easily with a fork.



Remove from oven, let cool to room temperature, then use your hands or several forks to pull the meat apart. Mix an equal amount of ketchup and Coke and bring to boil in a sauce pan. Let reduce to half of original amount, then, add some worcestershire or steak sauce to taste. Use to dip the pork into, or, put the pork on some sandwiches and spread some sauce on the pork.

The photos here show about 1 pound of pork; ideally you should use a pork shoulder of about 6-8 pounds to make it worth the time.

I decided to make a bunch of pork BBQ last night and here are the results. I picked up an 8 pound pork shoulder and brined it with about 2 cups of apple cider vinegar. Following the steps above I put it in the oven for about 8 hours and this is the result: if cooked properly the meat should literally fall off the bone:



We call this 'pulled pork' in the South for good reason: you literally 'pull' it apart and off the bone using two forks as shown. It's not hard to do this since the meat has been slow cooked for a long time. The fat and other connective tissues have weakened making it easy to shred. If you cook the pork properly the bone should be clean when done.



The left-over bone and drippings I will save to make some soup in a few days. Nothing to waste here. But for now it's some BBQ sandwiches. What you see in the bowl here is about 4 pounds of shredded pork which will make good eats for the next week or so.



A little Tabasco sauce, some pork, and some bread. In North Carolina people like to put spicy cole slaw on the sandwich as well; to me that's rude and I never eat my pork with slaw like that.

[man with no head]

While waiting for pork to cook I decided to make some beef stew.

Simple, really. Cube your meat, season, brown, put in pot with a few cups of water (along with any juices in the pan from browning). Cut up your favorite veggies and put in (harder ones in first since they take longer, then, softer ones about halfway through). I season my broth with salt, pepper, and some hot sauce. Takes about 2-3 hours.

[man with no head]

Yum, yum, T-Bone steak. Got a good deal today (1/2 off just this weekend) so picked up a few. Marinade with salt, garlic, pepper, brush with oil, broil for about 10 minutes, done.





See who knows about their meat: what is the remaining portion called that is still attached to the bone?

[daveboy]

Sk excuse my ignorance but could you explain what broiling is pls

[man with no head]

Grilling is when you cook something using heat underneath (like gai yang).

Broiling is when the heat source is on the top. If you look inside your oven you might have a heating element on the top. That's the broiler. Normally you crank up the temperature, set the oven to broil, and place what you want to cook about 3-6 inches/7-15cm from the element. This allows you to cook something like a steak very quickly as it sears the meat (keeping it juicy). By dusting the steak with salt and then brushing with oil it makes it get a crispy outside while the inside is still pinkish-red depending on how long you cook it. I cooked it for 10 minutes (turning over at about 5 minutes).

[man with no head]

Another interesting fact about the T-Bone: that little hunk of meat that I cut off is the most expensive meat from the steer. Know what it's called?

[lom]

Know what it's called?

Filet

[man with no head]

Yep, therein lies the problem for the butcher: one cannot get T-Bones, filets (if it's uncut and sold separate from the bone it's called a tenderloin), and New York Strips from the same cow because the T-Bone is simply a loin cut sliced to retain a portion of both (hence the cost of a T-Bone being nearly $10 a pound here). $5 a pound? You bet I bought quite a few.

[Propagator]

Grilling is when you cook something using heat underneath

Unfortunately this is where the differant usage of language comes in. Here in the UK grilling is normally associated with cooking by using heat from above.

[stroller]

Being neither English nor American, I always have a dictionary at my side:

broil
v. broiled, broil·ing, broils

1. To cook by direct radiant heat, as over a grill or under an electric element.
2. To expose to great heat.

grilling

n : cooking by direct exposure to radiant heat (as over a fire or under a grill) [syn: broil, broiling]

[man with no head]

The culinary distinction here in the U.S. is this:

If the item is suspended over the heat such that the juices fall down onto the heat source (thus making smoke which flavors the item) then it's grilling (grilling meaning what I think is usually called elsewhere a barbeque grill). If it's broiling then the item's juices simply fall into a pan and don't end up getting burned up by direct contact with the heat source (thus losing some flavor at the expense of speed).

With grilling either direct or indirect heat can be used....sometimes you don't want the direct heat so you move the item away to a cooler part of the grilling surface (especially if you want to slowly cook something). The whole idea with broiling, however, is to have nearly direct contact with the element (so you can char the surface of what you're cooking without necessarily cooking the inside of it). The distinction as noted is that broiling won't add flavors to the meat; grilling will due to the juices falling on the hot coal.

[Lily]

We never use 'broiling'. I think that is an American invention.

We use 'grilling' whether it is on a barbeque or under a gorilla although we do usually say 'barbequed' when cooked on the barby.

[MeMock]

How do you take a photo whilst cutting meat with two hands?

[man with no head]

Timer on the camera.

With regards to BBQ here in the U.S. it refers to something cooked slowly (i.e. low temperature for many hours....like the pulled pork I showed a page or two ago...in reality it should be done over a smoldering hickory fire).

[stroller]

^
Almost the opposite of how I understood it.
What you describe I'd call a roast.

[MeMock]

Timer on the camera.

yeah but where is the camera? Under your chin? strapped to your head?

[man with no head]

^
Almost the opposite of how I understood it.
What you describe I'd call a roast.

A roast is at high temperature. That's how it differs from BBQ here.

Roast = high temp, about 325-400F or so. Better for quality cuts of meat.

BBQ requires a temp. of about 200-225F and is designed for your scrappier meat since it has a bunch of collagen in it (the slow cooking relaxes the collagen and makes it soft so the meat falls apart). What you're really doing is converting the collagen to gelatin.

BBQ is quite misused here because people think slapping some chicken over a fire and brushing store-bought sauce on it makes it BBQ. That's roasted. True BBQ always has a smoke flavor from the smoldering fire (you never use a flame or heavy coals). This is caused by soaking the wood in water before putting it on the heat source.

MeMock, the camera is on a tripod.

[MeMock]

yeah but is it on a 3 legged tripod or a 4 legged one?

Ok - that one was a joke.

btw - I love your cooking thread.

[man with no head]

If you're looking for a quick way to spice up a wok-based dish try some of this:



In Chinese this oil is called 'hong you' (which should be pronounced like hong yow - similar to row) and is made by steeping chilis in soybean oil then bottling the results. Fucking hell, as Gordon would say, this shit's like chemical warfare. You definately will need good ventilation if you use this; simply use in place of the oil you'd normally use for stir-frying for an extra spicy kick to your meal.

[man with no head]

You can make yourself easily: using a ratio of 1:5 for chili to oil (100g chilis to 500g oil as an example) heat some oil until it's almost smoking then let cool for about 10-20 mins. Put the dried chilies or chili flakes in a jar, pour the oil on top, stir once or twice, then put in a cool place for a few days. The red oil from the chilis will mix with the cooking oil to make what's in the bottle above.

[man with no head]

Mmmm, special this week on New Zealand blue shell mussels. Just slice some ginger, garlic, jalapenos and whip together some fish sauce, sugar, lime juice and put on top (the shells make convenient serving containers for the sauce). Broil for a few minutes and serve.