LET IT SNOW, LET IT SNOW, LET IT SNOW!!! And let's grill some chicken!!

I have a fresh blanket of about 7 inches of snow on the ground outside. And when it snows the GrillinFool is grilling. Oh, sure we did the whole sledding thing with the baby boy. His first time on a sled. So here we have some gratuitous cute baby pictures. Here we have the future pitmaster in his snow gear just waiting to get in his sled:
He's all excited about the sled:


Ready to make his first descent:

I don't think he quite appreciates the simple joy of sledding just yet:


Now back to the grilling. This is probably one of the easiest meals one can make. Basically the recipe is chicken marinaded in garlic, shallots, Italian dressing and black pepper and then indirect for about 90 minutes. It's really that simple. I spent more time taking pictures than I did prepping the meal.


One does not have to use shallots but a shallot is perfect for this meal as not that much is needed. You could use onion but you will have a lot left over even with a small onion. So here we have an ear of garlic and a couple of shallots:


I wound up only using one of the shallots and the equivalent of about 5 cloves of garlic - 3 normal sized cloves and 4 smaller ones. Here we have the pealed garlic cloves:


I started chopping this garlic up when I realized I had something that would make the process so much quicker:


I don't want to spend the evening inside chopping garlic instead of enjoying the snow fall. That's when I remembered I had a coffee grinder in the cabinet that I never used it for anything but grinding up herbs and spices. It made quick work of the garlic:


Alas, this was the last voyage of the USS coffee/herb/garlic grinder. I barely got it to work as the lack of use over the years required me to slam down on the top of it to get it to spin. Looks like I need to both get a new grinder and actually use it more!!!

With the garlic chopped and no more grinder I had to chop the shallot by hand which you see here with the garlic, chicken and the rest of the ingredients:


I got what was called the best of the chicken. I had no idea that meant 3 legs, 3 thighs and 3 breasts. I've never seen chicken packaged like this. I really didn't need that much chicken this meal and didn't have the room for all of it so I put a leg, thigh and breast into another plastic bag with some of that amazing Pesto I talked about in the Lamb threads as you can see here:


The pesto chicken went into the freezer hence the label in permanent marker. This bag was going on the grill in 60 minutes:


To give you an idea of the grilling conditions I took a shot of the thermometer from inside:



And once outside I took some video as well of the conditions which was cold, snowy and windy:



Grabbed myself a beverage, in this case a Goose Island 312 Lager. Love this stuff:


Had a rough time getting the chimney started so I had to pretty much stand over it, add more paper 3 times and blow on it a lot to keep it going. So it took about 35 minutes to get the fire lit but I got it going

After about 60 minutes in the marinade I got the chicken out, salted it with coarse salt and then spooned over the chicken a little of the marinade concoction. The chicken is ready for the grill:


Here is the chicken on the grill:


Notice a few things in the above photo. First, two zone cooking. Coals on one side and chicken on the other for standard indirect grilling. Second, no piece of chicken is touching any other piece of chicken. If two pieces are touching they will insulate each other and increase cooking time for those two pieces. Also note the proximity of each cut of meat to the heat. The thighs are the closest to the heat despite the breasts being much bigger. The reason I do that is because the thighs have more fat in them and thus will not dry out as fast as the breasts. As for the breasts you will notice that the fatter part of the breast is closest to the heat. The skinnier part is farther away so that the skinny end doesn't dry out. Finally the legs are the farthest away and the fat part of the meat is closer to the heat than the other end. All of this will help the chicken cook evenly and be done all at the same time and look like this in about 90 minutes:


If you notice the two pics above that I did not move a single piece of chicken. I put the chicken on the grill and didn't move a single piece until I pulled the chicken off the grill. I never flipped a piece or repositioned it any way in order for it to cook more evenly. The beauty of laying the chicken out correctly in the first place and cooking indirect is that it makes this meal just that easy to make. I told you it was easy.

But let's back up a bit and look at what happened between the time I put the chicken on the grill and the above pic. First off, the first 30 minutes were rough. Couldn't get the temp up to 200. I had the lid set so the top vent was over the meat which drew the smoke from the chunk of apricot (big black chunk in the middle of the grill above the chicken) over the meat. When I switched it so the vent was over the coals it allowed more air to get to the coals and the heat jumped to about 280 which was just fine. And the smoke filled the the chamber anyway and gave some great smoke flavor to the chicken.

Had it been a typical summer evening I would've braised the chicken a couple times with the marinade but I didn't want to drop the temp down on the chicken anymore than what I did every time I opened the lid in 30 degree weather that was 8 degrees with windchill.

And of course there were more beverages to be had. I don't know how you chill your beer but I went with what nature offered me After a couple 312's I switched to a local product to save money and besides my taste buds were pretty much numb after a couple of beers anyway:


Ever seen a snow bagel?


Here we have the GrillinFool tending to the BBQ:


We also had some more sledding. Here is one of the casuaties of the sledding:


Here's an idea of how much snow we got:


If you look at the indentions in the snow in the pick above the snow below the indentions was how much snow we had at about 5:00 p.m. I took this pic about 2 hours later. And then you can see how much snow we had at 9:00 p.m.:


Here is my charcoal lighter at 5:00 and yes I go a little overboard in lighting my grill:


And here is that same lighter at 9:00 p.m.:


OK, enough of me reveling in the snow fall, back to the food. Another 20 minutes or so on the grill and here we have the chicken ready for to eat:


And along with my wife's whole wheat veggie pasta dinner is served:


Took an extra 20-30 minutes due to the weather but the chicken was fantastic. The legs and thighs were done and the breast was still juicy according to the wife.

10 minutes of prep time, 2 hours of cook time, a couple of beers, some sledding, and great chicken in the end...

Click here for the rest of the process

My rarest steak to date on this site

That hunk of beef may still be mooing. This is for all you folks out there that order a steak with the hooves and horns knocked off and warmed up a bit. This is one of those glorious steaks...


While I was preparing my chili last Thursday I was also getting this beautiful piece of meat ready to be grilled on Tuesday night:


A picture from that side doesn't really do the steak justice in terms of thickness. The shot above shows the nice marbling but doesn't really give this credit it's due. This one does a better job:



I marinaded this guy in Worchestershire, garlic, black pepper, a little coke and some pepper oil to kick up the heat a bit:


Pepper oil? Take some dried peppers, put them in an oil bottle, add oil, put someplace dark, in a couple of months you have a nice spicy oil. Sadly the oil had little impact on the flavor of the steak. Just decided to try something new. Sometimes when you take a swing you hit a homerun. Sometimes you hit a single. Sometimes you swing and miss. No big deal.

The steak is ready for the fridge and an all night soak in that marinade:


The next day I pulled it out of the fridge, rinsed off the marinade, let it come up to room temp and then added some coarse salt and black pepper:


While my coals were heating up outside I got a proper beverage to enjoy with the meal. 91 point wine for $12 is a great deal as this bottle was really good:


BTW, for those of you wondering where I got the name GrillinFool, well maybe because on a Tuesday night in January I was outside grilling when the temp was this (not to mention windchill and it was pretty windy):


As for the grilling proces, here is a video of the process. Considering how dark my videos have been in the past I decided to try to do something about it. I got all kinds of fancy by holding a mag light under my arm, filming, and cooking all at the same time. The mag light lighting method is not the best method. I need to come up with something else for this. Maybe a portable shop light. But here is the video and it helps show the process from start to finish:



Here is the steak brought in to rest. Nice cross hatch:



Click here for the rest of the process

How NOT to Smoke Ribs

While I tout my grilling prowess on this site quite a bit I am also human and I do screw up from time to time. This is one such case back in November of 2008...


As the weather got colder the local grocery store was blowing out their ribs. I bought a couple packs of spares and threw them in the freezer. A few weeks later it was to be a warm Saturday so I thawed the ribs out on Friday, pulled the membrane from the back and marinaded them in Apple Cider, garlic, black pepper and some Worcestershire Sauce in a ziplock. Here they are going into the fridge for the evening:
And the next day we have the ribs laid out and ready for a rub:

You can see some rib tips that will be what I call chef's prerogative during the smoking process.

Here are the rub ingredients:

Normally I do a paprika/garlic/brown sugar (or turbinado sugar) rub. I decided to change it up a bit here and experiment with Cumin, Curry, Chili Powder, Turbinado Sugar (or Sugar in the Raw), Ground Cinnamon, Granulated Garlic and Crushed Red Pepper Flakes. As usual I never add salt to my rubs. I add a pinch of coarse salt to each side of the ribs independent of the rub and then apply the rub as you see here:

I made enough rub to slather the meat and more for later when I cover them with syrup and more rub before putting them in foil to create a nice bark.

While I prepared the rub I had my charcoal in a chimney getting hot. No need to haul out the big horizontal smoker for two slabs so I just used my Weber with Charcoal Bins on each side to keep the temp down and cook/smoke the meat indirectly:


Then I put my grill grate on that has flip up ends which makes it MUCH easier to add fuel and smoke wood throughout the grilling process which for this session was planned to be a 6 hour process - 3 hours smoking, 2 hours foiled with syrup or honey and more rub, and 1 more hour with no smoke just to harden that amazing bark:

I shut the lid and let the temp come down as displayed on my remote thermometer:

I was looking for anywhere between 200 and 225 on this so 217 will work just fine.

For this session I used a rib rack that holds 5 slabs. One note about rib racks, a quick spritz with some Pam prior to putting the ribs on will make clean up a lot easier. Here are the ribs nestled in the rack with a couple of apple chunks in each charcoal bin:

I placed the lid on the grill and opened the vents to allow the smoke to escape. This raised the temp to 223 with more oxygen hitting the fire:

And here we have an absolutely beautiful sight with the smoke billowing out of the grill:

So far so good. I came back about an hour later and the temp had dropped below 200. I added some more coals and another couple blocks of wood and opened the vents to get the temp back up. And this is where it went south for this smoking session. While waiting for the temp to come up I went inside to get a refill of my beer and then got distracted by something. About an hour later I went back out to check the grill. To my horror here's what I saw:


I had no idea how long it had been at 288 or if it had been hotter for a while. I opened the lid and the wood was on fire rather than smoking. I had a bark already, but not one I wanted. I decided to forgo the last hour of smoking to try to salvage the ribs and foiled them after only 2 hours. Despite over cooking them right away I went through the process I had planned on originally just a little earlier and the rest of the steps got shorter. So I took one slab and put it bone side down on some foil:

Then I slathered the meat with syrup:

Then I applied more rub. In this case I was hoping the rub would mask the rub the was burnt:

Then put the other slab on top of the first slab, again, boneside down and repeated the process:

Meat pulling away from the bones is normally a good thing. After 5 hours. Not 2 hours. Here we have the second slab slathered in syrup and more rub:

After about an hour in the foil I pulled them and put them back in the rib rack to firm up the bark. If I were just to serve them at this point the rub would be a gritty, greasy mess. So back on the heat for a little while to firm up the bark.

In the end the ribs were ruined. This is not how the ribs should look:

And here they are sliced:


The ribs were fall off the bone and the ribs in the middle of the slabs weren't bad. The ones on each end of the slabs were inedible.



What I would do differently:

1. I don't own a green egg. I can't walk away from the grill for that long. If the temp had dropped I could've easily recovered from that by just increasing the cook time but the temp spiking is a fatal error that is pretty tough to recover from.
2. I probably should've just slathered them with syup and skipped the extra rub. That way I wouldn't have had to put the ribs back on the heat at the end to firm up the bark. The last thing those ribs needed was more heat.

Nobody is perfect. Especially the GrillinFool. I'm just glad I got those ribs on sale. Paying full price would've really pissed me off for neglecting them while on the grill.

Click here for the rest of the process