Rob's Rants

HF Blaster Gun

It was time for a big tent sale at Harbor Freight tools and I made a trip today. Picked up a few things, including a really good (and cheap) sand blasting gun. I used it to prep the surface of my New Braunfels smoker for painting. I liked it enough to give it its own page.

Give my Harbor Freight page, and especially the review table, a good read if you’re interested in tools.

I just finished hosting the 8th annual Carnivore’s Carnival, the annual summer BBQ party that I throw at my house. I’ve been perfecting my BBQ for far longer, but eight years ago my wife and I decided that we should take this love of mine to a new level. It’s one thing to cook great BBQ in manageable portions for you and your family and close friends. It’s another level of undertaking to do it for 50 or 60 people on a tight schedule. As a first step towards competition, I think this endeavor teaches valuable skills. Like timing different types of food which cook at different temperatures, and handling industrial-size quantities of meat, rubs, and sauce.

This year everything turned out better than ever, judging buy the comments from the guests. The timing for just about everything worked out perfectly, except or some uncooperative chicken that took longer than expected. I used every tool in my BBQ arsenal – my Bradley electric smoker, my New Braunfels Black Diamond smoker, and even my grill.

Anyway, after eight years, I have developed some solid rules about BBQ that I will pass on here. I hope they will be of value to anyone just starting out.

1. The timing and the technique matter most. The rub, sauce, and type of wood are secondary flavors. You can put the world’s best rub on a shoulder; if you over cook it, under cook it, or over smoke it, it will still taste horrible. Practice the timing again and again. Worry about the rub later (or try my recipe).
2. Nothing beats a real wood or at least charcoal (hardwood charcoal) fire. I love my Bradley electric smoker, and my gas grill turns out some good BBQ, but the bark and smoke ring formed on a shoulder smoked over wood for 15 to 18 hours cannot be duplicated any other way.
3. For regular, normal, everyday people (particularly northerners) the sauce matters. It may be heresy to those of us who appreciate smoke flavor and the chew of a memphis-stye dry-rubbed rib, but if pleasing your guests is important, give them some good tasting sauce.
4. Buy a thermometer for the pit and one for the meat. Use them. Trust your instruments. Until you get really, really good, they will also help you understand what the bones are telling you about doneness when they start to loosen up.
5. Get some shelter. BBQ requires time. Neither you or your pit will benefit from being stuck out in inclement weather. Moving from sun to shade can change the temp of my New Braunfels pit by 50 degrees. That matters. Consistent shelter will make for consistent BBQ. I use a 10′ x 10′ EZ-Up Express II shelter with walls I can zip closed as needed.
6. You can never have too many real towels to clean and cook with. Forget paper towels – they rip too easily. A stack of heavy duty towels will clean anything and you can use them to grab hot pans too.

There you have it. Six simple rules I’ve learned the hard way so you don’t have to. Good luck.

I’ve been preparing for my upcoming annual summer BBQ party, the Carnivore’s Carnival. According to e-Vite, we can expect about 35 to 40 grown-ups and another 20 kids.

21 lbs. of rubbed butt!

I typically prepare 21 lbs. of pulled pork and four racks of ribs, along with a couple dozen burgers and dogs and some assorted chicken and sausage. There are sides of course (I make a bacon-infused, cracklin’ cornbread for example). My wife is in charge of vegetables and salads …

Anyway, over the last year I’ve fine-tuned my recipes, among them my rub. As I mentioned in my BBQ guide post, most people won’t tell you their “secret” rub recipe. I’m not most people. So here is my updated and current favorit rub for shoulder, ribs, and chicken.

• 8 parts Turbinado sugar
• 3 parts kosher salt
• 2 parts dark chili powder
• 1 part sweet paprika
• 1 part cumin
• 1 part coarse ground black pepper
• 1/2 part garlic powder
• 1/2 part onion powder

I prefer the turbinado sugar over processed brown sugar for one main reason: it comes in crystal form and doesn’t clump and form a brick like fine ground brown sugar. So it’s much easier to use outside in the humid weather where I typically barbeque. I usually mix up my rub a few cups at a time and apply with a dredge with large holes that I picked up on eBay.

I apply the rub after giving the meat a light coat of maple syrup (grade B) and a dusting of Lawry’s Seasoned Salt. I feel that the Lawry’s dissolves very quickly due to the fine grain and along with the maple suryp, penetrates the meat to season it. The coarser rub sits on the outside and does a little seasoning of the meat, but mostly forms the basis of the beautiful bark on the outside of the shoulder after smoking.

I start smoking the shoulder tomorrow.

Back on July 23^rd the MBTA finally delivered on one of its promises to Commuter Rail riders and instituted an electronic parking payment system. Called ParkMobile, the system is provided by a company called ParkMobile USA based in Atlanta. Using either an iPhone app, a text message, or a phone call, a user can pay for parking over the phone without having to fold a bunch of dollar bills or find a handful of coins to shove through the slots in Commuter Rail parking lots. I wrote about what a pain in the ass this is several months ago and even suggested a business opportunity for someone to alleviate this pain for commuters.

But it looks like the ParkMobile system goes a long way towards fixing the problem. I signed up and started using it the first day it was available, though not without some learning curve. What you need to do is tell them the license plate number of your car, the lot (they call it the zone), and the space number of your car each day. Then they deduct the $4 for parking and that’s it.

My basic review and impressions after two weeks are this: the iPhone app is pretty bad but usable, the customer service is responsive, and the system as a whole is much easier and more convenient than the old manual way.

I’ve used only the iPhone app, so I can’t comment about the text messaging or the phone methods. The app is pretty crude as far as apps go, and it’s slow as a dog, because it appears to need constant communication with the home server for every screen refresh. But, it eventually does what it needs to do. The one major bug I found is that the app doesn’t allow you to remove old license plate numbers once they’re saved, which caused me my first problem using the system (you can remove it via the website, but that’s not the easiest process either). When I first set up the app, I accidentally put a 7 in my license plate number where a 2 should have been. I couldn’t delete the incorrect plate, so I simply entered the correct version too. The next morning, I set up my parking with, you guessed it, the wrong plate number. I realized this almost immediately and then realized a major flaw in the system – you can’t undo a parking transaction either. So, I created another transaction with the correct plate number, and the same space number. When I got to work, I went to the ParkMobile website and sent an e-mail to their support address (there was no phone number). I received a response within a couple of hours and after a little information exchange, they issued a credit, though they said they needed to send it to my house. Strange that they couldn’t credit the credit card that the parking is charged to. But they were responsive nonetheless.

One benefit occurred to me on a day when I was rushing and put down the wrong space number for my car (I entered 48 when my car was actually in 49). I realized this while I was on the train, but decided to take my chances. And when I got back to the station – no fine envelope. My guess is that the parking police get a list of license plates and were able to figure out that I paid and just screwed up the space number. That’s an advantage over the old system for sure. If you put your bills in the wrong slot, you’re out of luck and you’ll get a fine.

So overall I’m very happy that the MBTA finally did something about their 19^th century parking system and gave us a modern option. I for one won’t be using the slots again – ever.

Thanks MBTA. It’s about time!

The Final Product

I’m preparing for my 8^th annual summer BBQ party, the “Carnivore’s Carnival.” I normally spend two full days barbequeing meat for this party  including three full pork shoulders for pulled pork and four racks of spare ribs. This involves sitting and tending a fire for over 18 hours on at least one day, followed by another six hours on the next day. So this year I figured, since I’d be sitting and tending smokers, I’d do some bacon at the same time in my electric smoker.

I went to my favorite market in Boston, Savenors on Charles St. and picked up five pounds of pork belly for bacon. When I saw the $4.99 per pound price though I thought something was wrong. I know I’m paying city prices in Boston and all, and I was getting locally raised (in Vermont) organic pork, but still, I thought that was expensive.

Then I found this article by Curt Thacker in the Wall Street Journal online:

Pork Bellies Rise, Bacon Lovers Pay

… Prices for fresh pork bellies, from which bacon is made, are at an all-time high of $1.35 a pound, 53% higher than they were a year ago.

… The decision by North American swine producers to cut their losses by trimming their herds back in 2008 and 2009 is now feeding into cost pressures …

So that explains it. Also, Savenors sells its belly with the skin already removed, so that means more meat for the dollar too. But still, $5 per pound for what used to be ultra-cheap meat. Oh well, such is the price of quality homemade food.

Anyway, I have two pieces of belly curing in the refrigerator now following my recipe from my Makin’ Bakin 2 post. Only on one of them I added ground black pepper to make pepper bacon. I’ll give them 14 days to cure and then smoke them up. I can’t wait.

Taking on the tradition of Kovászos Uborka.

My father was Hungarian. Like many Hungarians in America, he came in 1956 without much. But he did remember a few recipies from his youth. One of them was for a half-sour dill pickle fermented in the sun. Making them every year was a project and involved a lot of stuff boiling on the stove and many one gallon jars which would sit outside in the sun for days at a time. There are many varieties of such ‘sun pickles’ in the world, and they are common to many eastern European cultures.

I don’t remember the exact proportions of his recipe, and he died a few years ago, but I remember the basic ingredients he used:

• a salt-water brine
• white vinegar
• black peppercorns
• bay leaves
• fresh dill
• garlic
• rye bread

There is considerable debate about how these kind of fermented pickles can be made. Among the questions:

• Is the vinegar necessary? What does it do?
• Should the jars be sealed during fermentation?
• Why use the bread? Is it needed?

I looked for recipes online and found a lot. A pretty authentic one it seems is on Chew.hu. It doesn’t use vinegar but seems to advocate fermenting with the jars open. Another recipe from the Orange County Hungarians is similar, without vinegar and fermenting in open jars, and with a lot of garlic. Another recipe for Hungarian Summer Pickles on About.com does use vinegar and ferments in a capped jar. Someone called June Meyers has a recipe on Bigoven.com that also uses vinegar and an open jar.

After my research, I’ve thought about a few things and here is what I’ve decided to do for my recipe (the first jar of cucumbers and the dill came from my garden – I supplemented a couple jars from a local farm).

Vinegar

The vinegar is designed for two purposes. One, it does impart a flavor or tang to the final pickle. Although most of the tang ultimately comes from lactic acid produced during the fermentation, the vinegar adds a bit of extra kick. But primarily, the vinegar seems to be used as a hedge against alkaline water (pH greater than 7) allowing the growth of harmful bacteria. It’s generally assumed that a lower pH will lead to a safer brine. So I’ll use a little vinegar in mine.

Bread

Many recipes allude to the bread being used to introduce yeast to the brine. But that’s ridiculous - bread is baked and contains no live yeast – at least no more than is present on any other object. My theory is that the bread actually introduces complex carbohydrates and starches to the brine, giving the yeast naturally present something to chew on. So I will use bread.

Open or Closed

Some people believe that an open jar is necessary for safety – allowing the brine to remain oxygenated will prevent the growth of botulism. I’m not sure that is a real issue – the salinity and low pH (since I’m using vinegar) should be enough. More importantly, an open or at least loose cap will allow the brine to escape when the jar heats up in the sun. So I’ll use a loose lid on a 1 quart Ball wide mouth jar.

The Recipe

In the end, here is what I am trying.

For each one quart jar, you’ll need about 2 cups of brine due to the volume taken up by cucumbers.. So, for each quart of brine needed:

• 2 T salt (3 T kosher salt)
• 3 T white vinegar

Dissolve these in 1 quart water.

Slice the ends off of pickling cucumbers, and cut slits lengthwise, leaving about 1/8″ uncut. You will have quartered the cucumber, except the ends are slightly attached. This helps the brine reach the inside of each cucumber. Pack the cucumbers in the jar.

Add:

• 1 hot pepper (or red pepper flakes to taste)
• 12 peppercorns
• 1 clove garlic (peeled)
• A bunch of dill

Pour the brine almost to the top. Pack one piece of bread into the top of the jar and top off the brine liquid. Loosely cap the jar and place in the sun for three days. (I take the jars in at night so animals don’t get to them.)

They will get cloudy – and you can let them go for more than three days if you like a softer, more sour pickle. I like mine with a little crispness. Refill the brine level as necessary each day.

The Verdict

They turned out exactly as I remembered. I always thought that my father’s pickles tasted a little bitter, which I attributed to all the garlic he put in the jars, but I had the same problem with mine and I used much less garlic. Now I believe it might be the vinegar.

For the next batch, I think I will cut the vinegar in half and maybe add a bit of sugar to the brine. Not enough to turn them into Koolickles, but enough to take the bitter edge off.

Let me know in the comments if you try this.