I purchased Low and Slow when I saw it sitting in my neighborhood costco.  There are few books that draw me in and cookbooks on BBQ can do it with just a great tagline like “Everything you know about BBQ is wrong”.  There was another book I read that was like this The Book Of General Ignorance and I learned quite a bit from that book so after flipping through Low and Slow I took it home with me.

Learning BBQ for me has been a journey.  One that started with baby back ribs and has taken me from a trashcan smoker through a Walmart electric smoker I returned because it didn’t work well (they don’t sell it anymore or I would have linked to it) to Smoking on my gas grill to a $50 craigslist purchase of a used offset smoker.  There are certain arts which have become lost in this age of McDonald’s and Whole Foods and Mac and cheese.  If you are able to make anything (and I mean anything) you are revered these days and everyone looks at you like if there is an apocalypse and they are choosing teams you would get picked a lot sooner because you can cook.  My brother and I make our own bratwurst, I brew my own beer, he makes his own salsa, among many other edible projects.  Homemade is a treat that people love and with my brother and his cabinet smoker and edible treats as inspiration, I expanded into the world of BBQ.

I love ribs and used to only get them once a year, when the Naperville Exchange Club hosts its Ribfest event.  You could always count on qualitry and variety and there really is no comparable way to have ribs.  If going to a restaurant for their ribs is like visiting a vineyard to try their wine, Ribfest is like having all those vintners bring their wares to one place to compete for your wagging tongues.  This year I sampled 8 vendors and based on their smokey flavor, fall off the bone quality and slab quality Texas Outlaws was the best for 2009.

But I digress, this is supposed to be a post about making ribs, and I am doing pretty good at avoiding the topic.

The first time I made ribs they were amazing.  The second time they were jut as good.  After that I have gotten progressively worse at making them and no cookbook has been able to rescue me thus far. Everything else I have gotten better at, from burgers, to chicken, to any other grilled or BBQ fare, but the ribs remain a mystery.

Low and Slow is a 5 lesson approach to attain BBQ glory and after reading all the preface about don’t use briquettes and don’t skip chapters…I used briquettes (just as the firestarter…hey I will not just throw them out but I WILL NOT BUY ANY MORE) and I read Lesson 1 about chicken and lesson two about fire control before skipping to lesson 3 about Ribs.  Its possible the author of Low and Slow (Gary Wiviott) will see that I linked to his cookbook with this post, read it, and be dismayed that I didn’t follow his plan exactly.  If you are reading this Gary, please know that I fully intend on completing your course in the fashion you lay out in the book, I just had a hankering for some ribs and could not wait through that much chicken to get to it.

The book is clever in the way it tailors recipes exactly to three types of cookers, the Weber Bullet, The aforementioned offset smoker, and a standard weber grill.  These tailored recipes are intended to teach you about how your smoker cooks, and after you master how your cooker cooks it is up to you to tailor other recipes for your cooker.

I made ribs, used Raichlen’s basic BBQ rub on them, used applewood splits and turned out some decent ribs on my first try.  I say decent because on this go round I learned that the fire can reach its way out of my firebox and burn some bark onto your ribs.  I plan on doing some more BBQ this weekend or next week and trying again, maybe some more ribs or back to lesson 1 for the chicken.  Either way if you want to learn BBQ this book is a good read and it basically hammers home that in order to be great at something practice and repetition is the key.  If you want to be great at cooking BBQ you have to cook a lot of BBQ.

I think I am fine with doing just that.

I was at Costco a few days back and saw these in the freezer case.  Now I will admit I generally avoid the frozen pre-packaged anythings (with the exception of the quick and cheapo burgers since some days you just want a BBQ burger with no prep time) but these Salmon burgers caught my eye.

Costco – Trident® Wild Alaskan Salmon Burgers

I picked up a bag for $12 I believe, and I put two on the grill last night.  They were…interesting.  I like salmon, but I have never had a salmon burger.  I was confused on even how to eat it becuase salmon generally is not served on a bun…ever?  So I put the burger on a bun because thats what burger means to me…”put on bun to eat”.  With a hamburger you put cheese on it, do you put cheese on a salmon burger?  With a fish filet you put tartar sauce on it and a burger you put ketchup…what do you put on a salmon burger?  All these questions led me to just put it on a bun plain and dig in.  It tasted like salmon, but on bread.  I will say that it was kind of confusing for my palate, that whole salmon on a bun thing.

I ate it but it wasn’t very satisfying…I can imagine it would be great if I had a condiment to put on top or if I had used my coal BBQ and given it some smoke instead of my gas grill (it was raining and I was tired).

So my review on these is if you are adventurous with condiments try them out and tell me what I should or shouldn’t put on the rest of these when I cook them…otherwise I think I will just cook them and eat them on a plate like a salmon pattie.

Beef jerky is one of those foods that’s fairly high on the ‘manly’ scale. It’s up there with steak and bacon and whiskey and sausage and beer. Though beef jerky is a little different, almost isolated in it’s own category. I think part of this is because it’s generally always consumed by itself; never part of a larger creation. Until now.

This is still a work in progress, but I felt I had to share this current iteration, plus I finally remembered to take photos of this wonderful creation. I got the basic idea from Men in Apron’s Unholy Chicken, chicken roll wrapped in bacon with cheesy filling. However the idea of integrating beef jerky into the piece was my own. I’m calling it Jack’s Chicken because of the use of Jack’s Links beef jerky as well as colby-jack cheese. In the future I think it may be appropriate to also integrate some Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey into the spice rub for the chicken. Though I did not do that for this version.

What you’ll need:
• one large chicken breast
• 3-4 slices of bacon
• one vacuum sealed strip of Jack’s Links beef jerky, Get the kind that’s vacuum sealed as these tend to be a bit juicier, I got the peppered steak flavor
• 1-2 jalapeno peppers
• a bit of diced garlic
• shredded cheese, I used colby jack, pepper jack would also be appropriate
• spices:
  • cumin
  • ground chipotle
  • paprika
  • ground rosemary
  • oregano
  • basil

You may want to light your charcoal grill before starting, if you’re using gas then no worries.

Start by dicing the beef jerky and the jalapeno peppers. Fry the beef jerky in a good amount of oil and butter over high heat for a few minutes before adding the peppers. You want to make sure the jerky is fairly well cooked and has absorbed some of the butter and oil and softened up a bit. Turn the heat down to medium-low and add in the garlic and peppers. Fry them until they’re fairly tender.

Either while your jerky is cooking or right after, take your chicken breast, layer it between two sheets of plastic wrap and hammer it out flat, try to avoid creating holes if possible. Then remove the plastic wrap and sprinkle the chicken with the spices listed above (eventually this will become the Jack Daniel’s spice rub). Place your jerky and jalapenos on one side and sprinkle the cheese over the top.

Get ready to roll. I use toothpicks to hold things in place. Roll the chicken up with the jerky, peppers and cheese inside. You can see in the previous photo that a portion of my chicken broke away, I ended up using that piece to seal a hole that developed during the roll-up. Once you have your chicken rolled up you can wrap it in bacon. I use the same toothpicks that are holding the chicken to hold the bacon, adding extras if necessary.

Now grill it! Grill it over hot coals turning it often for 10 to 15 minutes. Some of the cheese may leak out and you’ll get flare ups from the bacon grease. The constant turning helps it from becoming too blackened on a particular side. You also want to be absolutely sure that the chicken is cooked all the way through. Use a meat thermometer if you’re unsure: 170°F is when chicken is done.

Now eat and enjoy. Check back for a better spice rub that incorporates Jack Daniel’s. Additionally, I don’t think this will be the last time I experiment with using beef jerky as an ingredient.