Archive for the 'Big Green Egg' Category

I made a boston butt — pork shoulder — yesterday (well, technically, the last two days since it was cooked for nearly 18 hours) and I tried something a little different.

I configured the Egg with the original grilling grid and the riser grid that I built. I placed a pizza stone on the bottom grid.

Then, I dropped the two hunks of pork meat in an aluminum pan on the top grid. Instead of starting with a dry pan, I left all the juices that had run out of the pork after in the pan. Quite a bit of juice comes out after it has been dry rubbed.

The theory was that the pork would partially braise in the liquid, generating an excellent flavor and varying the texture between the top and the bottom of the meat.

Worked beautifully. The end result was very moist and had a delicious smoky, almost candy like, flavor throughout.

And that got me to thinking. How can I further maximize the flavor?

I’m going to smoke the next butt in my cast iron dutch oven without the lid. I think I’ll add some onions and garlic to the pot prior to smoking. Maybe a little bit of red wine, too.

Should be interesting. I’ll make sure to cook a couple of additional backup butts the regular way, just in case.

The 35 lbs of boston button turned out near perfect! Juicy, smoky, and delicious. Accompanied by a wonderful homemade bbq sauce, some excellent microbrew, homemade biscuits and an amazing coleslaw with peanuts in it made for an ideal birthday meal!

My hacked up riser grill worked great.

Not surprisingly, the butts on the bottom level cooked a little bit faster than the ones on the top. I wouldn’t say they were overcooked, but they were not quite as moist as the ones on the upper level.

Interesting, too, given that I pulled the bottom butts out a few hours before the top. So, either sitting in tightly wrapped foil dried them out a bit or the top butts simply cooked at a slower, more appropriate, rate.

However, all four boston butts were absolutely delicious. They were hard to pull from the grill as they really wanted to simply fall apart. Incredibly juicy and yummy.

What looks like a hard crust in the photo at the left is actually very tender. Poking at it with a finger causes pork fat juices to ooze from the meat.

The next time I do this, I’m going to figure out some way to ensure that all the butts are cooked via indirect heat. I’m thinking of taking another grilling grid and cutting a pizza stone to cover most of it.

Tomorrow is my birthday. 37 years. 37 raises an obvious question. Does 37 lbs of boston butt fit on the Big Green Egg? Or, because that was all they had, does 35 lbs of boston butt fit on my large BGE? I know I can do a single butt well. Can I do 4 well?

The answer is: YES! But not without a bit of egg-gineering in the process.

I picked up an 18.5″ cooking grid from Home Depot, along with 3 foot long, 3/8″ threaded rods and a handful of nuts and washers. I chopped the foot long rods down to 8″ and bolted ‘em to the grid in tripod position.

Once the BGE was up to temperature, I put two boston butts on the original cooking grid and placed the second cooking grid, with two more boston butts, over the top. From there, it is just a matter of wiring everything into the Stoker and not messing with the damned thing again.

The lid just barely closes.

Click on through for the full details….

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The Stoker is a really well engineered device. Any BBQ’ing hacker type will appreciate the implementation.

My setup is as follows:

- Egg with one Grid Probe to monitor cooking temperature (probe wire wrapped in aluminum to prevent heat damage in case of flare up)

- One or two meat probes (or three, if needed) to monitor internal temperature(s) of food item

- One 5 CFM fan controlled by the Stoker

- Ethernet cable between an AirPort Express and the Stoker. While the Stoker has a fairly easy to use menuing system, it has a built in web server that offers up a much better GUI for monitoring and adjusting the cook.

Now, that sounds like a lot of potential “get the right wire in the right hole” problems. It isn’t. The Stoker uses a single wire serial network to connect to each external device. As such, it has 5 1/4″ stereo plugs on the unit and you can plug any device into any plug. Each device has a unique identifier and the Stoker will recognize any device no matter where it is plugged in.

This has a number of advantages:

(1) Obviously, you don’t have to worry about connecting things incorrectly.

(2) The “network” is stupid simple. To build an extender or to connect more devices is just a matter of adding more 1/4″ stereo plugs in parallel. Soon, my Stoker will be hidden away in a utility closet with a few feet of cheap cable leading to a breakout box of 1/4″ jacks.

(3) Expansion is trivial; just add more plugs. I think the Stoker can handle up to 32 devices. In other words, I can control more than one grilling device with a single stoker.

(4) The Stoker pushes data from analog to digital very quickly. Data tends to be more accurate because there is less analog stuff to get out of whack. Likewise, this increases flexibility.

The serial bus, the ethernet port, the menuing system, and the web GUI implies that the Stoker is not just a simple analog controller. And it isn’t.

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As I had previously mentioned, I picked up a Stoker BBQ Controller from Rock’s BBQ.

Yesterday (Saturday), I grabbed an 8.5 pound boston butt (pork shoulder), with a goal of cooking my first pulled pork.

Nailed it. Right out of the park. Going to make this again and again. Was absolutely delicious. Two mistakes: I futzed too much causing myself undue stress and I only made one. There was a couple of points where I thought a fisticuffs might break out over that plate of pork.

First, I rubbed it down with something close to Alton Brown’s rib rub. I figured I would start with a known good quantity and go from there, letting the pork marinate in a sealed freezer bag in the fridge for at least 5 or 6 hours before cooking.

I originally used this rub to make some incredibly yummy smoked pork ribs. When doing the ribs, I wrote:

Hence my fear. Here is a food for which no amount of temperature probes or timers is going to help. Beyond controlling the cooking temperature, there are very few variables beyond initial preparation. Since cooking with the BGE is all about not peeking or opening the egg, there is the potential for many hours of imagining all the ways this could go wrong.

Now, a boston butt is, quite possibly, even more nerve racking. First, a good, pork pulling quality, butt requires somewhere beyond 15 hours of cook time. And the temperature needs to be a relatively low 210 degrees or so and it needs to be stable. Unlike ribs, there is a sizable chunk of meat on the pork shoulder and the internal temperature really does matter.

Enter the Stoker. With the stoker, I can sleep through the overnight portion of the cook with confidence that the Egg will maintain whatever temperature I desire. Since the Egg is an extremely efficient consumer of fuel, it won’t need to be reloaded during the cook.

Late Saturday afternoon, I preheated the Big Green Egg to about 225 degrees using lump charcoal and big chunks of maple as fuel. Once the temperature stabilized, I dropped the boston butt in an aluminum pan (to keep the drippings off the coals), inserted a probe and shoved it in the Egg.

The Stoker was set to maintain a target temperature of 215 degrees. I would like to say that I left well enough alone and didn’t mess with the temperature after that. But I didn’t. I fretted and worried, getting up several times in the night to screw with the temperature — typically thinking I should set it a little lower because I wasn’t truly using indirect cooking.

Silly me. I set the temperature too low before going to sleep at 1am. At 7am, the temperature was crashing and I actually had to use the electric charcoal starter to heat things up. The temperature never got below 140 and the internal temp of the meat stayed above 150 the entire time. At that point, I set the temperature to 210 and forced myself to go do something else.

Now, an aside: Pulled pork isn’t carved. It is quite literally pulled apart with a couple of forks. It is that tender when done right. The cut of meat — the boston butt (a map of all cuts) — is from the front shoulder(s) of the pig and contains lots of connective tissues. And that tissue is the key. Once the internal temperature of the pork reaches around 160 to 170 degrees, the connective tissue breaks down, turning into a gelatin like substance.

It may take a few hours for the tissue to fully break down, during which the internal temperature will rise very slowly (and seem pretty much completely stable when using an inaccurate thermometer — the Stoker shows tenths of a degree, so I could watch the slow climb). As soon as the temperature rises quickly past the 180s, the pork is done.

If you cook it in too hot of a fire, the moisture produced by the breakdown of the connective tissue will boil off and the result will be dry meat (or, at least, a layer of dry meat). Hence, the need to cook slowly over a low fire, possibly even indirectly if dryness is a worry.

Fortunately, the BGE does a wonderful job of keeping moisture in the cooking environment and in the meat. While I worried like hell that not cooking over a pan of water would be a problem, I needn’t have worried and further research indicates that the pan of water does little for moisture and seems to mostly benefit a stable cooking temperature.

In the Egg, I have no problem maintaining a stable temperature manually — it is extremely good at maintaining a temperature — and the Stoker means that it’ll definitely remain stable, even while I sleep or leave the house and regardless of whether the coals shift during the cook, a primary cause in temperature changes.

At about 1:30pm the internal temperature had hit about 190 degrees. So, I removed the pork from the egg and immediately wrapped it tightly in foil, then in a beach tall, and then dropped the whole thing in a cooler to keep until dinner (at about 4pm). As long as the internal temperature doesn’t fall below about 140 degrees, the meat will stay in prime shape. Supposedly, this kind of wrap will keep it warm for many hours. Keeping it whole until serving time is much better than pulling it and letting the meat potentially dry out.

Yes — that picture on the right is a boston butt that has been hot smoked for over 19 hours. Though it looks like it might be dry, it wasn’t and I knew — at the least — it was quite thoroughly edible upon removal from the drip pan. Why? Because I had a damned hard time pulling it out in one piece! Fortunately, a couple of hunks stuck to the bottom of the pan for me to sample. And they were delicious!!

The rest of the butt was divine. Near perfect. It had a deep smoke ring with a nice crust of slightly salty and very smoky meat surrounding incredibly tender, juicy, meat in the center.

Near perfect? Yes. I can do better. First, I can not stress so much through the cook. The Stoker and Egg will take care of maintaining a rock solid cooking temperature (configured correctly, the temperature will shift only a few degrees away from the target temp throughout the cook) and there is a rather large window of the internal temp being Just Right.

Secondly, I’m going to do the next Butt for slightly longer. This will drive the smoke ring deeper and — even at 19 hours — the internal tissue could have spent a little longer at the breakdown temperature.

Finally, I’ll do no less than three butts in the future! Gotta avoid the fights! Fortunately, boston butts are cheap. I cooked about an 8 or 9 pound all natural boston butt and it cost only about $8.50. And you really don’t need an egg to cook a boston butt. I could be done perfectly well in an oven. Or you could use a cardboard box and an electric hot plate!

After going through the effort of harvesting a Turkey for the first time, I wasn’t going to just throw the damned thing in an oven!

Oh, no. While harvesting the bird, I gave it a name. “Smoky”. Why? Because that was exactly what I was planning on serving for thanksgiving dinner; smoked turkey cooked by way of the Big Green Egg.

Now, I have smoked a turkey before and it was delicious. I wanted to do better.

So, I started by brining the bird overnight using Alton Brown’s Honey Smoked Turkey Brine.

Once brined, I oiled the bird and placed it atop a Foster’s oil can beer that had its top cut off, 1/3rd of the beer removed, and garlic/onions/hot peppers thrown in.

This was placed in an aluminum tray (to catch the juices for gravy making purposes) and the entire thing was placed into the Big Green Egg that was preheated to exactly 220 degrees.

Exactly? Yes. Exactly. You might notice a few wires in that photo. That is because I recently purchased a Stoker BBQ controller. It included 3 food probes, a cooking grid probe, fan, and computer controller that can be programmed to maintain a particular temperature within the Egg.

The device is amazing. I used it earlier in the week to do a 17 hour cook of a pork leg. The Stoker maintained temperature within a few degrees of 210 for all 17 hours without a problem. Awesome.

The best part is that the Stoker will happily grab an IP address via DHCP if you plug an ethernet cable between it and your home net. You can subsequently control target temperatures, high/low alarms, food alarms and other parameters remotely. Full review in a future post. Cool device.

So, armed with a fully wired turkey in an equally wired egg, I cooked the turkey starting at about 200 degrees (ramped down from the initial 220 quickly) to 400 degrees from about 9am until 4pm. I used lump charcoal and big chunks of maple wood that had been soaked in red wine as fuel and smoke source.

Throughout the cook, I glazed the bird with a mixture of honey, dried peppers, finely ground coffee, fresh pears, fresh apples, fresh oranges, salt pepper, and dried rosemary. This mixture was puréed until it produced a thick goop at which point it was brushed onto the turkey several times throughout the cook.

Damn. The end product was nothing short of amazing. Juicy to the core. Smokey throughout. Breast meat like steaks. Just plain awesome. Thankfully, it was a 26 pound bird to start with so I have lots of leftovers.

Some of the leftovers were used by my mom to make amazing smoked turkey soup. Recipe captured and to be posted shortly. The rest will be used to make smoked turkey jerky.

Update: After more than a year of Big Green Egg ownership, I have learned a few things. Article corrected, updated, and otherwise edited. Thanks to MacDude (Jeff Hoover) for reminding me to go back and look at this.

As anyone who reads this weblog knows, I’m having an absolute blast with my Big Green Egg. A number of folks have expressed interest in purchasing an Egg and were curious what suggestions I might have. So, here goes…

The Big Green Egg is effectively a ceramic oven with a firebox below the cooking surface. It has top and bottom vents, both of which can be adjusted to control both temperature, humidity and smoke concentrations.

The big advantage to a ceramic cooker vs. a gas or metal kettle grill is that you have amazing control over the temperature while burning fuel surprisingly efficiently. The ceramic acts as a heat ballast and the BGE is both super efficient and extremely temperature stable. Because of the design, it also tends to use burn less fuel, drawing less air and, hence, loses less moisture during the cooking process. While this also means less smoke production, the smoke tends to stay in the cooking area longer and at lower temperatures.

Kamado also makes similar cookers; more expensive but likely worth it if tiles are your thing (the amazon reviews are very negative, but not exactly a huge sample size). If I had known about the Kamado prior to getting the BGE, I would still go with the BGE for reasons of practicality. The Kamado is beautiful, no doubt, but the BGE is simply much more practical when dropped into a table. Primo makes ceramic cookers with a very similar design to the BGE. I like the oval shape, but I don’t like that their marketing materials imply competitor’s do not have certain features or capabilities that they clearly do.

The BGE comes in several sizes. I have a large BGE that features a 18″ cooking surface, stands 30 inches high, 21 inches wide and weighs around 140 lbs (yes. 140 lbs. It is hard to move). The large and extra large eggs have spring assisted lid lifters. While it can kill you if you don’t follow the assembly instructions, it ensures smooth operation while in use.

To give an idea of how large of a grilling surface 18″ really is, the large egg just fits a 21 lbs turkey standing upright. It could fit a larger bird that isn’t propped on a can of Fosters, but not much larger. I have successfully cooked 40 lbs of pork butt and a 27+ pound turkey, but it was cramped. It is also large enough to handle a whole 8.5 lbs salmon with head and tail removed.

The key to success with a BGE is patience and never opening the lid during cooking unless you have to apply a baste or adjust something. Seriously. You should never have to open it to check for “done” unless visual inspection is the only way to tell. A properly tuned BGE will happily maintain a particular temperature for hours as long as you don’t open the lid. As soon as you open the lid, the inrush of air will cause the fire to rapidly change profile, typically getting a lot hotter and changing the burn pattern such that you are going to have to retune the vents to whatever temperature you need.

Or get a Stoker. Which brings us to the list of the accessories you will need….

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Yeah — another BGE recipe. A number of folks have indicated that they like reading these as they spark culinary ideas of their own. As well, this recipe is quite simple and could easily be adapted for a regular grill (gas or otherwise) or oven…

This weekend’s Big Green Egg adventure was a whole Salmon. In the last Salmon episode, I mentioned that I wanted to try cooking the salmon open faced to maximize the smoke exposure and ensure that the salmon cooks more evenly. My concern being that the salmon would dry out too much.

I needn’t have worried. The key was in the preparation. The salmon was large enough that cooking it open face would cover the grill. And, of course, transferring a salmon covered in goodies to a hot grill is rife with spillage potential.

The key is to pull the grilling grid out of the egg, clean it, then prep the salmon directly on the grid. Once prepped and the egg is hot, the salmon on grid can be easily dropped into the egg. Helps to have a grid lifter.

After yanking all the bones out of the salmon and splitting it into two halves, I flipped it to skin side up and applied salt and oil to the skin. Then, back over it went for the toppings to be applied.

I then sautéed onions and oyster mushrooms in about 3/4ths of a stick of butter. The result was poured over the top of the salmon. On top of that went sliced heirloom tomatoes and fresh dill. I then tossed some salt, pepper, and budapest paprika over everything.

The Egg was preheated to about 225 degrees, with a generous helping of hickory chips and fresh apricot branches on top of the coals. Lots and lots of smoke is was being produced.

The prepped salmon (already on the grill) was then placed into the egg. It was slow roasted until the internal temperature in the thickest part of the meat hit 130 degrees. I then pulled the salmon out of the egg, grill and all, and let it sit for 10 minutes underneath a tent of foil.

The end result was amazing. Just incredible. I’m amazed that I was able to produce such a result given my lack of culinary training or background.

Every bit as succulent and tasty as the first two salmon, but cooking it open faced led to a much more intensely smoky flavor. Because of the egg’s engineering and the amount of moisture in the salmon, butter, and veggies, there appears to be no risk of the salmon drying out during cooking.

Update: Stefan wrote in with a suggestion to lay off the paprika. Actually, I have been. I never use regular paprika, opting for either home made chile powder or certain kinds of very finely ground dried peppers. In this case, I used what my family calls “Budapest Paprika”. It is a fine ground dried pepper that my parents grow. It has a wonderful flavor; not spicy at all as it is more sweet with an almost tropical fruit flavored overtone.

In celebration of Easter, this weekend’s Big Green Egg experiment will be a leg of lamb. I have infused the lamb with puréed rosemary, garlic, and red wine using a very large hypodermic needle. It’ll sit for a bit and then on to the Big Green Egg it will go for at least a few hours of grilling at low temperatures.

This should be interesting.

Update: OK. Yeah. “Interesting” does not do it justice.

I ended up cooking the lamb on the BGE for almost 3 hours. It started at 330 degrees over a bed of mesquite charcoal with hickory chips and a big chunk of rosemary sitting on the coals. From there, I dropped the temperature to 200 degrees and let it slow cook for nearly 2 hours. As the internal temperature closed in to 100 degrees, I dropped the egg’s temperature to around 170-180 degrees to slow the cooking down a bit such that the lamb would be ready when our guests arrived (and not before).

The end result was the juiciest, most tender, smoky lamb I have ever had. The garlic/rosemary/wine infusion imparted an amazing flavor and color to the meat near the bone while the rosemary/hickory smoke gave an intense flavor to the outer meat.

Next up on the BGE?

Fresh wild pacific salmon stuffed with crab, butter, a touch of lemon, dill, and a bit of lightly cooked asparagus. It’ll sit on the BGE for at least 2 hours or until it gets to 120 degrees internal temp, whichever comes first.

Forgot the dill, damnit. Maybe I’ll make a dill sauce. Actually, Knotmaster Ben (he tied the truss) made a Mustard/Dill sauce that was most very yummy.

Update: Absolutely brilliant. Used hickory chips to provide smoke. The crab/salmon bits that were exposed to smoke were divine. The asparagus actually cooked into the salmon such that each spear was coated in the most wonderful, buttery, salmon meat.

The next step is to figure out how to do something similar, but with the salmon completely open face. This should vastly increase the smoke exposure, but has a risk of either drying out the salmon or overcooking the veggies and/or crab on top. I’m thinking that a tub of liquid next to the salmon would solve that problem.