BRFoodies Thanksgiving Jive Turkey

Thanksgiving, one of the very best holiday meals predicated upon great meat; foul or poricine. The premise of this blog has morphed over time, but the basic idea of being a place for me to track my favorite methods and recipes is rock solid. Time to talk some turkey! (Credit for the photo above goes to Kelly Spell- thanks for letting me steal this from Facebook )

A group of my friends (going by the self assigned moniker of @BRFoodies- see also the Tumblr blog) decided to beat the staid, stuffy, family traditional Thanksgiving by doing one of our own. We would take on courses in pairs and serve small (yeah right) portions while watching the Louisiana State University and Mississippi State University football game.

I took on the turkey. I’d been toying with the idea of cooking turkey sous vide ever since I watched this video and it’s sequel from Grant Achatz. Chef Achatz (you might have heard about this award winning chef and his battle with tongue cancer) just says screw the hassle of Butterball buttons, foil over the breast, carving complexity, and Aunt Millie’s gripes about how you cooked your bird. I agree. Thanksgiving should be about good friends, family, great food, booze, and football. I’ve seen too much T-day drama. I once saw a frustrated man slam dunk, a turkey carcass in dishwater out of frustration about criticism over his carving technique. I’ve seen people resort to buying turduckens to throw unfamiliar guests off kilter so they would be less able to complain. That kind of hassle is for the birds.

I’ve cooked chicken breasts sous vide before, but never a whole chicken. I picked up a chicken from a local grocery store, then disassembled it into breasts, legs, and wings. Bagging the chicken into my new favorite sous vide bags, Ziploc Vacuum Freezer bags, I added some butter, poultry seasoning, and some beer. Plopping the bags into a pot with water at 165F for about an hour and a half, I was able to produce a decent result. Even more exciting was the idea that I should smoke the bird before hand. Several times I’ve smoked turkeys for thanksgiving and really enjoyed it. Foul is an easy match for apple wood. So onto the grill for an hour’s smoking and then into the bag. Because I’d now dispatched several chickens, I also added some rendered chicken fat to the sous vide bags. If one was so inclined, it could almost be called a confit. This made for an awfully tasty chicken.

My attention now turned to brining. Grilling, smoking, or even roasting foul of any kind can dry the meat. We’ve all had chalky turkey breast. The kind of turkey that requires gravy and a mouthful of water to lubricate your throat enough to eat safely. Brining works by osmosis, that dreaded high school biology term, salt pulls more water into the muscle fibers. More water in the meat before cooking means more water in the meat afterwards. Brining can also help impart flavors to the meat. Again, I love paring apple and chicken or turkey. Soy sauce, beer, orange juce are also possible brine liquids. I'd be careful of liquids with lots of acid as you wouldn't want to cook the meat like is done with ceviche. Pork and beef can also be brined. Plenty of people also believe that brining makes a difference when cooking competition ribs. Cooks Illustrated does a great job describing brining methods, they also make the important point that not all kosher salt measures the same. I brined two chickens in water, apple juice, and unrefined sugar from a sugar mill in New Iberia Parish following the measurements Cooks Ilustrated suggests. I smoked both chickens for about two hours before placing them in a cooler for later. My friend Jay D. Ducote (you really should check out his blog) finished cooking them on his truly awe inspiring drum/keg grill and smoker for the famed Ford Family Tailgate before the LSU Western Kentucky game. I thought they were pretty damned tasty. They also come out a gorgeous lacquered brown.

These two important processes tackled I bought the turkey a week before our feast and waited for it to thaw (18 pounds of turkey, please come by and help me eat it all. I have so many leftovers). I decided to smoke the turkey first to impart that great apple wood flavor and then sous vide the turkey to give it some more flavor from the chicken fat, more apple juice/cider and beer. While the turkey thawed I picked up another turkey thigh to try the sous vide to see how much time it would require. I managed to fall asleep on the couch as it cooked, so it was in the bath for something like four hours. Way too long. Fortunately when sous vide-ing something this doesn’t make a difference, so long as the temperature doesn’t rise too far, the item cooked can’t be overcooked. The problem; however, was that the skin was, well, rubbery and unappetizing. If you’ve watched the You Tube videos of Chef Achetz mentioned earlier you’ll know that he pan fried each of the cuts before serving to make the skin golden and more crisp. I did this and was able to get the skin more to my liking. I also tried using my little crème brule blow torch (‘cause who doesn’t invent excuses to play with a blow torch) and found that the skin does turn, but not before fat explodes out from under the epidermis.

The day of reckoning arrived Friday. I began late that afternoon by preparing the brine, making sure to boil the liquid to be sure that the salt and sugar were completely dissolved. I then cooled off the brine, dumped it and the turkey into a kitchen garbage bag, and put that into a cooler with ice. It is important to keep the turkey cold, just as if you were storing it anywhere else uncooked. Saturday morning came around and I prepared my Weber kettle grill for smoking. I’ve talked briefly about this before, but I wanted to show you a picture of my setup. The pan below the grate (those are wood chips soaking before I get things going) is generally used to catch fat and hold water. The water’s purpose is twofold; to evaporate keeping the meat from drying out (alongside the brining) and to help moderate the temperature in the grill. The water boils off slowly taking extra energy from the fire, but if the fire goes out, it releases heat already stored. The foil covered bricks reflect heat back to the fire, and their mass helps moderate the temperature, and most importantly they help keep my coals in place. The thing sticking out of the grill lid vent is a candy thermometer I use to monitor the temperature inside the grill.

After smoking the turkey for about an hour and a half I pulled it off the grill and disassembled the bird for sous vide. I put the breasts in their own bags, then paired the wings and thighs in two other bags along with about a tablespoon of butter, a tablespoon and a half of chicken fat, an ice cube of apple cider, and a quarter cup of apple juice, beer and, cider mix that I’d made earlier. I could have frozen the mixture if I’d thought about it before hand. The advantage of freezing the liquids is that it makes pulling vacuum on the sous vide bags easier. As you use the Ziploc hand pump, or some home use vacuum bag machines, liquids can come out of the bag and into the pump. This makes a mess and can foul the pump. As the bag heats up, the frozen liquids thaw, it just means that the bath takes a little longer to come to temperature. Speaking of temperature, the new FDA suggested cooking temperature for all parts of the turkey and for chicken is 165 Fahrenheit (oddly enough, Fahenheit is also the name of a Chinese boy band- look it up). My sous vide set-up is VERY rudimentary (shown here used to cook some chicken). Anyone with a stove, a really good candy thermometer or oven remote thermometer and a freezer bag can do this. I have a pot of water on the stove and I check the temperature every so often with a decent remote oven thermometer I got as a gift a while ago. If the bath is too cool, I turn up the burner a bit and wait. If it is too hot, I add ice cubes to the bath. There are much nicer ways to do this, sous vide appliances can range from $300, immersion circulators like those seen on TV cooking shows are easily $1,000, and there are DIY kits that you can get for less than $200. I let the turkey bathe for about three hours before I pulled it out. I let it rest for a fifteen minutes while I set up my frying pan. I then placed each piece into the pan to brown the skin as much as I could.

Think that was enough steps? Was that easier than the standard roast turkey? Yeah, way too complicated. But I will say this: it was nice to have a smoked turkey that wasn’t dry. It tasted delicious. I’d sous vide another turkey again. I’d smoke a turkey again. But not unless someone very special asks nicely with some sort of bribe am I likely to do that again. It was a stunt. A show-off. Something to wow my foodie friends and a way for me to flex my cooking muscles. Which, along with the good friends, football, and booze, was all part of BRFoodiesThanksgiving anyhow.

Late in my chili, Thanksgiving

1- I'm behind in my chili making. I know. I have plans to rectify that this weekend. My plans to serve chili this last week to a captive audience at work fell through because my roofer had an opening Tuesday. This leads to-

2- Nobody hates Satsumas. My father-in-law gave us a large box-full of the citrus last weekend. I ate a good few before Tuesday when I gave most of the rest to the roofing crew. A goodwill gesture. They disappeared within minutes. I'm looking forward to more when we visit next month. If you've never eaten one you're missing out. Satsumas, or Mikans, are incredibly easy to peel by hand and to me they taste like tangerine lifesavers- except better and like real citrus. I could eat a bushel without stopping. We also ended up with ten grapefruits. Those also usually turn out really well. I have yet to try one, so we'll see.

3. Thanksgiving is just around the corner. I'm not going to cook much at all this year, so my comments on T-day will have to be limited to tastings. The last 2 years I've used a Weber Grill recipe for BBQ turkey. The bird is brined first and I believe that step makes all the difference. Using the BBQ and some smoke from apple wood makes for an incredible flavor. It takes some time but it is well worth the effort.

I did once suggest to my parents that we try a Turducken or Tur-duck-hen. My folks used to catch a lot of flack from the family traditionalists who had nothing better to do than to critique the way everything was prepared and served. The idea was to throw the lot of them off guard. They wouldn't have a clue what it was supposed to taste like, how to cook it, how to serve it, or even how to properly eat it. Screw 'em. It worked to a degree. The item came stuffed with an awful green onion stuffing and the turducken came out dry. To my credit- no one gripped in the usual ways. My folks were spared from the needling that some of our stuffier kin would have heaped upon them.

Fried Turkey is something I'd like to try to make. I've had it a few times since moving to Louisiana and it has always been great. I'm really turned off by the Cajun Injector- think really large gauge syringe and horrible flavored marinade the color of burnt umber. From what I've heard the trick is to stab the Turkey like you're trying to kill Freddie Kruger- a thousand times over. Eeeww. No thanks. Please just season the fowl well and fry. The skin is really great. The investment in a decent burner and stand also serve well for boiling seafood- shrimp, crabs, and crawfish. Just a few months longer until crawfish season starts again.

Hopefully I'll have another post on chili this weekend or early next week.

Hoover's 3rd Annual BBQ Competition

It's taken me a while to recover from last weekend. Hoover's Third Annual Barbecue Contest was another success. The number of entrants and people attending increased and the weather co-operated fantastically. There were something like 9 people up for Ribs and about as many for the "Anything But" category.

I packed up the Weber two coolers of beer, cokes, ribs, and melons and set up shop in the side yard late Saturday morning. Three guys who compete on the BBQ circuit were already cooking on some really impressive smokers. My cooking method was very much similar to the one I've tried in the past. This time the big change was that I added about 1/8 cup Cattleman's sauce to the cider and rub before placing the marinade on the grill to warm it up. This turned out pretty nicely. The taste of the ribs turned out quite well. The problem was the texture. My ribs were chewy. Eaten individually I think they would have stood up to the competition much better. However, the rules state that the ribs must be served in pairs. They were not easily separated.

My presentation was unique. I mentioned the melons earlier. I also used a bunch of cilantro to add some green. I don't believe that it survived transportation very well, nor was it as appetizing as I had hoped. I was really impressed by the presentations I saw from the guys on the circuit- pillowy billowing lettuce gently held the ribs in place. Really nice stuff.

The dogs have come out winners in all of this of course. They have been taking care of the bones. I still have four ribs left to finish off. I think those will be lunch tomorrow. I really am happy with the way they taste. Next year with a little more practice I should perform even better.

I learned that I placed second from last. A step up from last year when I turned in ribs that needed to finish cooking. Ew. I was relatively pleased with the outcome. The competition was more sophisticated and practiced. I am sure that next year will be even more difficult. I am looking forward to it.

Thanks Hoover- great job. You and your wife hosted a heck of a party.

Genesis 2.21 through 24 Basted and Smoked

It's rib time. For the last 2 years now I've participated in a friend's rib cook off. Each year the field becomes more difficult and the contest more sophisticated. Last year I bowled over the judges with my presentation- nice leafy greens, sauce in a green pepper in the center of the take-out container, and slices of star fruit. However, I turned in ribs that weren't quite done yet. No dice there. Eww. I am working on reducing the cook time so that I can be more certain that the ribs will be thoroughly cooked when presented for judging.

Sunday afternoon I gave two cooking methods a shot. The first was to "brine" the a rack of ribs in 7-Up with a small quantity of salt prior to application of my rub. The second was a plain method- just rub. I did not remove the membrane on the backside of either rack of ribs. I skipped this just to keep it simple for the trial run.

My grill set up is pretty simple and hasn't changed at all for bbq cooking. I cook with a 22" Weber kettle. No "El Cheapo Brinkman", no fabo 55 Gallon drum set up. I use an aluminum roasting pan to hold steaming fluid for the meat, to catch drippings, and help regulate heat. The pan sits under the meat and takes up about 2/3rds of the coal grate. I had used foil or part of another roasting pan to help hold coals in place on the other 1/3rd of the coal grate. There are fancy methods to do this including the BBQ Baffle (not an endorsement from me- a nice site and interesting product that I cannot vouch for). The "How it Works" link on the site has a fairly accurate depiction of my standard set up. I clip a candy thermometer in the vent on the cover, leaving the vent completely open. I hold the vent at the bottom of the grill just barely open to regulate air flow into the grill. I'll have to take some photos the next time I do this.

I had been placing the racks in a rib holder with the membrane side facing the coals for a long time, several hours. I'd spritz cider vinegar and apple cider on the ribs every so often to "baste" them. Flip places of the racks and flop them 180 so that the membrane faced away from the coals and continue to spritz. Last year I used this method until the last hour of cooking when I'd wrap each rack in aluminum foil (from now on I'm using element symbols instead of full names) and place a cup of beer in each packet of foil. I believe my mistake is that so much of the heat that hits the packet goes into warming the cup of fluid that none really went into cooking the ribs. That is how I ended up blowing so much time and came out with undercooked meat.

This time around I placed each rack directly over the coals for about 10 minutes a side before placing them in the rack. Only when the ribs were placed in the rack did I place Hickory on the fire for smoke. The last hour or so of cooking I went to the foil packet method. I used more 7-Up with O.J. (I didn't have cider on hand at the time) and some cider vinegar as the steaming fluid. (I only just came to the conclusion that the packet method wasted time and energy). I had to leave the rib on longer than I anticipated to bring them to 160F.

Each rack turned out quite nicely. The meat had chew to it, not fall of the bone, some work had to be done to get to the protein. I like that. It can be impressive when the meat just slides off the rib, but I like texture, something in my mouth that feels like meat. I do not believe there was enough of a smoke ring on either rack. I will have to place the Hickory on the fire earlier. So there is more work to be done.

Next time my goal is to have the Hickory on on the fire as I "sear" off each rack and then to work towards a better smoke ring. I will warm the steaming fluid in grill prior to placing the racks into packets, and will further evaluate the whole 7-Up vs. Cider Vinegar idea. I may also try two fires- the first for smoking and the second without the Al roasting pan and more coals in the center of the grill to improve the braising? step.

7-Up vs. Cider Vinegar:
Cider vinegar is acidic, acetic acid, which helps to break down the protein. This is the same thing that goes on in a ceviche. If left too long the acid will "cook" the meat. I was also hoping that it would help impart an apple cider flavor to the meat. 7-Up is also acidic and has a lot of sugar to help sweeten up the meat. Somehow I have in my mind that because it is carbonated that it would better penetrate the meat. I've not looked this up or tried to prove or disprove that it works. I had heard about boiling ribs in 7-Up before grilling, for many of the same reasons.

I have another rack in the fridge and was hoping to have tried this earlier this evening, but other duties called. I had to mow the front yard. We'll try Friday as the cook off is Saturday. Cutting it close!



http://www.bbqbaffle.com/index.asp