Hot Off The Grill !

[mraynrand]

you should add that to the Wiki page.

Also, add Stubb's https://www.stubbsbbq.com.

[Patler]

Mrs Patler likes it when I spatchcock the bird.

[Radagast]

Sauers, a local Richmond company, makes as a part of their product line, a very good Bar-B-Que sauce. I don't know the range of it's distribution, but if you can find it in your local grocery store, I recommend to all to give it a try. It is a great sauce/marinate (especially with chicken). I like to combine Sauers Barbecue sauce, 1 to 1, with another thicker sauce like Krafts Original or Sweet Baby Rays or even a Bourbon flavored barbeque sauce. I prefer to marinate my chicken with the combination sauce for not less than 90 minutes (overnight if time permits), before grilling. This sauce combination is a product of decades of careful consideration and has been proven to be a favorite at cookouts with family and friends.

[mraynrand]

Mrs Patler likes it when I spatchcock the bird.

watch your language, mister.

[hoosier]

Pre-spatchcock, chickens were noticeably smaller and but they were juicier. Consider this variety from 1977.

[Radagast]

To begin with, to Spatchcck a bird is to cut it down the back in order to "butterfly" it. Then the entire bird can be grilled without a rotisserie.

.

Next, I don't understand and never will "get" the fascination that some have with the most bloody or the most strange or the grossest possible images. If being offensive to others is the end goal, then I must ask how one derives enjoyment from such things. Isn't the world sick enough without adding zombies and entrails at every turn?

Finally, now is a great time of the year to grill seafood. If you know a great grilling method/s for seafood, please post your recipe, technique, and/or super side dish for seafood. Such things as Bacon Wrapped Sea Scallops or Crab Stuffed Flounder or Spiced Steamed Shrimp are a few great melt in your mouth specialities. Grilled Catfish or Tuna are some more great grilling treats.

What's on your grill ?

[Radagast]

What's on your grill ?

[Radagast]

The best way ever to eat pork. A whole hog/pig pickin is a special treat indeed !

[Radagast]

Will your grill look this fine on the Labor Day Holiday ?

[3irty1]

I've recently been playing with making my own bratwurst. For those who've never ground or cased sausage, there's not much to be intimidated by. Each time I tinker the results get better but even my first batch was good eating.

For special equipment you need a grinder and a stuffer. These can be the same device with a tube added to the end of a the grinder. The most popular version of this is a Kitchenaid attachment but I would advise against it. The kitchenaid attachment is plastic, slow, expensive for what it is, and you need a KitchenAid. These days dedicated motorized grinders with a stuffing attachment are cheap, powerful, and have cast aluminum and stainless components. I have some $60 amazon rig that is much better than the KitchenAid attachment. If you must have a KitchenAid attachment, look for an ebay older metal one made by hobart or a 3rd party one with aluminum/stainless construction.

My recipe is still in the works but I'm zeroing in on the platonic brat. I say "platonic" instead of "best" because with a comfort food the goal isn't to make the most delicious brat, it's to make the most bratwursty brat; the fact that brats are delicious is besides the point. In other words I don't put pineapple on pizza and I think that people who do, and still call the result pizza, shouldn't have rights.

God's idea of a brat:
5 lbs of pork shoulder. By eyeball test this should be 30-40% fat. You may need to buy fat at the butcher to achieve this ratio.
1.5 oz salt
0.5 oz white pepper
0.25 oz ground ginger
0.25 oz ground nutmeg (buy whole nutmeg and grind with a microplane it makes a difference)
2 eggs
1 c cream
hand full of hog casings
beer to taste

Cut pork and fat into inch size cubes. Put cut pork into the freezer. For the rest of this recipe you'll want your meat to be cold enough to hurt your hands without being frozen solid. If at any point before going into the casing the mixture is not cold enough to hurt your hands, put it in the freezer and drink a beer. Its also a good idea to start soaking your casings in warm water before you start grinding. And its a good idea to get a second pair of hands. IMO sausage making is a two person job even if one person is just there to laugh at all the situational sausage jokes. When pork is sufficiently cold, grind it using a medium die. Now fold in the seasonings, cream, and eggs. Put the mixture through the grinder on medium again. Now it's time to stuff. For me that means adding a tube after the grinding die on my grinder. Previously I thought I could kill two birds with one stone by adding the stuffing tube before the second grind but I do not recommend this. Stuffing is a slower process and the result is that the sausage spends too much time near the knives and die being ground into an emulsified paste even with a medium or large die size. What I do now is disassemble the grinder and put the knife on backwards so it's not shearing against the die. This makes my rig effectively just a motorized stuffer. Soaked casings go on the stuffer tube, leave 6" to tie but don't tie yet. At the beginning of this process there is plenty of air that will be trapped in the casing if you were to tie immediately. There is a technique to feeding the sausage into the stuffer without introducing extra air. The trick is to push it through in short steady strokes. I've found that it is best to stuff the whole casing, twist sections to form links, and THEN tie off the ends. After a few hours in the fridge the twists can be cut and will stay together. Alternatively you can cook the whole rope at once and cut them afterwards. Now you have brats! Oh, and to clean your grinder put bread through it. It should wipe everything pretty darn clean. Any remaining bread can be dissolved by soaking.

Compared to store bought brats, these naturally cased brats will be harder to cook. Pressure inside builds quickly and the casings will want to burst. Also compared to store bought brats, they casing will brown very quickly. The best technique I've found to grill these brats is to use low, maybe even indirect heat on the grill and create an environment more like an oven. Open the lid once in a while and brush each link with beer. This technique was the genesis of the uber-Wisconsin practice of boiling brats in beer btw. Germans typically fry their brats in a pan with butter so to adapt them to the heat of a grill, a pot of beer was placed on the grill to constantly brush/dunk each link to keep them from bursting. When synthetic cases came about that hold up better to the grill, the process morphed into precooking your brats in beer to replicate the old flavor and then grilling them briefly just for color. If completely unburdened by tradition and completely secure in one's masculinity, you might even try roasting these on a sheet pan in the oven at 350. It'd probably come out nice.

[mraynrand]

In other words I don't put pineapple on pizza and I think that people who do, and still call the result pizza, shouldn't have rights.

Lock me up! Lock me up!

[Radagast]

3irt1, your post was great. It takes a true artist to make your own sausage.

You brought up a favorite of mine. In fact, my brother and I have already planned to enjoy Brats with Sauerkraut and Krispy Fries on Sept 5th as the Packers play the Bears. Did I forget to mention the Ice Cold Beer. We always Ice down the beer in a cooler on the patio (close at hand).

[Radagast]

Beef Brisket Baby !

[hoosier]

I've recently been playing with making my own bratwurst. For those who've never ground or cased sausage, there's not much to be intimidated by. Each time I tinker the results get better but even my first batch was good eating.

For special equipment you need a grinder and a stuffer. These can be the same device with a tube added to the end of a the grinder. The most popular version of this is a Kitchenaid attachment but I would advise against it. The kitchenaid attachment is plastic, slow, expensive for what it is, and you need a KitchenAid. These days dedicated motorized grinders with a stuffing attachment are cheap, powerful, and have cast aluminum and stainless components. I have some $60 amazon rig that is much better than the KitchenAid attachment. If you must have a KitchenAid attachment, look for an ebay older metal one made by hobart or a 3rd party one with aluminum/stainless construction.

My recipe is still in the works but I'm zeroing in on the platonic brat. I say "platonic" instead of "best" because with a comfort food the goal isn't to make the most delicious brat, it's to make the most bratwursty brat; the fact that brats are delicious is besides the point. In other words I don't put pineapple on pizza and I think that people who do, and still call the result pizza, shouldn't have rights.

God's idea of a brat:
5 lbs of pork shoulder. By eyeball test this should be 30-40% fat. You may need to buy fat at the butcher to achieve this ratio.
1.5 oz salt
0.5 oz white pepper
0.25 oz ground ginger
0.25 oz ground nutmeg (buy whole nutmeg and grind with a microplane it makes a difference)
2 eggs
1 c cream
hand full of hog casings
beer to taste

Cut pork and fat into inch size cubes. Put cut pork into the freezer. For the rest of this recipe you'll want your meat to be cold enough to hurt your hands without being frozen solid. If at any point before going into the casing the mixture is not cold enough to hurt your hands, put it in the freezer and drink a beer. Its also a good idea to start soaking your casings in warm water before you start grinding. And its a good idea to get a second pair of hands. IMO sausage making is a two person job even if one person is just there to laugh at all the situational sausage jokes. When pork is sufficiently cold, grind it using a medium die. Now fold in the seasonings, cream, and eggs. Put the mixture through the grinder on medium again. Now it's time to stuff. For me that means adding a tube after the grinding die on my grinder. Previously I thought I could kill two birds with one stone by adding the stuffing tube before the second grind but I do not recommend this. Stuffing is a slower process and the result is that the sausage spends too much time near the knives and die being ground into an emulsified paste even with a medium or large die size. What I do now is disassemble the grinder and put the knife on backwards so it's not shearing against the die. This makes my rig effectively just a motorized stuffer. Soaked casings go on the stuffer tube, leave 6" to tie but don't tie yet. At the beginning of this process there is plenty of air that will be trapped in the casing if you were to tie immediately. There is a technique to feeding the sausage into the stuffer without introducing extra air. The trick is to push it through in short steady strokes. I've found that it is best to stuff the whole casing, twist sections to form links, and THEN tie off the ends. After a few hours in the fridge the twists can be cut and will stay together. Alternatively you can cook the whole rope at once and cut them afterwards. Now you have brats! Oh, and to clean your grinder put bread through it. It should wipe everything pretty darn clean. Any remaining bread can be dissolved by soaking.

Compared to store bought brats, these naturally cased brats will be harder to cook. Pressure inside builds quickly and the casings will want to burst. Also compared to store bought brats, they casing will brown very quickly. The best technique I've found to grill these brats is to use low, maybe even indirect heat on the grill and create an environment more like an oven. Open the lid once in a while and brush each link with beer. This technique was the genesis of the uber-Wisconsin practice of boiling brats in beer btw. Germans typically fry their brats in a pan with butter so to adapt them to the heat of a grill, a pot of beer was placed on the grill to constantly brush/dunk each link to keep them from bursting. When synthetic cases came about that hold up better to the grill, the process morphed into precooking your brats in beer to replicate the old flavor and then grilling them briefly just for color. If completely unburdened by tradition and completely secure in one's masculinity, you might even try roasting these on a sheet pan in the oven at 350. It'd probably come out nice.

This is the key for me. I admire your initiative but the whole enterprise just sounds so goddamned complicated, messy, and time consuming. I guess if I didn't have to work 10 hours and then come home to kids running amok, I might be able to envision something like this. But there would have to be a payoff. Is the taste of the well done homemade brat significantly better than a good brat from the local butchers?

[Radagast]

3irty1

Hoosier colors his post with his own tough struggles. While I fully empathise with hooser, what he fails to see is the challenge and the final rewards of producing your own sausage (or jellies or canning your own vegetables or etc.). He may not have ever felt the satisfaction derived from "doing it yourself".

My family grew, canned, and enjoyed our own vegetables, pickles, jellies/jams, etc. So I was truly impressed once to witness someone making his own Deer Hamburger. He used a hand meat grinder to mix approx. 50% Deer meat with fairly fatty beef cuts (as deer meat can be too lean). We grilled up some for dinner that night and it was the Bomb. Wow that was special.

In the same way, creating your own fare is special. Like hooser, I too must buy my sausage or brats at the local grocer. Yet anyone that can create their own deserves a SALUTE !