Barbecue All Year Long! Cookbook.
Ray lampe is Dr. BBQ. Truck Driver turned Author and BBQ afficianado from the Northern Illinois area. My only experience of ever rubbing elbows with the stars would have to be Ray Lampe. I have met him a few times and he is the best ambassador for BBQ that the hobby could have.
On to the book. Well for starters it is a good read. I've said it before that even a cook book should be a good read. This one does not dissapoint on that level. It is filled with stories and tidbits of information that are fun to read.
The concept of the book, Barbecue All Year Long!, breaks down the book into seasons. It then further breaks down the seasons into holidays and events. Each holiday or event has a list of recipes. The recipes covered are far from just grilling or BBQ recipes for meat. There are lots of sides and desserts to go along with them. There is even an occasional cocktail thrown in for good measure. I have tried many of the recipes and have yet to be dissapointed by any of them.
After all those "seasons", Ray talks a little about the tools and gear that he finds useful. He then gives up a bunch of seasoning and marinade recipes to finish it off.
What really rounds out the book in my opinion is the photos. They are taken from all around the country at various competitions and such. I even recognise a few people in there. I saw Jim Minion twice with a hat that I had made and sent to him. Chris Lilly whom I have not met, but lots of fellow BBQ-brethren have, several faces that I have met at various competitions around the area, and oh, that's me on page 297 standing behind Phil Rizzardi when we cooked against Ray in Long Island. So there we have it, my 15 minutes of fame.
Get the book you won't regret it. You can order this one or his others, here.
Showing posts with label BBQ. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BBQ. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Book review: Sauces, Rubs, and Marinades by Steve Reichlen
Thought I would give a book review for the heck of it. Sauces, Rubs, and Marinades is one of the first BBQ books I bought when I started to get real serious into BBQ. I had wanted to make my own BBQ sauce and this looked like a step in the right direction. It has been some time since I first bought it, but I can remember clearly sitting down to look at it and ended up reading the thing from cover to cover. I'll tell you one thing, there aren't too many cookbooks that you can say that about. You can do that with Steve's books as well as Ray's (Dr. BBQ) books as well. I think that any good cookbook worth it's salt (pun intended) should be similar in nature. I finally came across a basic bbq sauce that sounded like your traditional BBQ sauce. I checked over the list, and ended up going to the grocery store the next morning to get what I was lacking. These days that would rarely happen, but at the time I didn't have as full a stocked pantry as I do now.
OK, I'm back home with everything and make the small batch size that the recipe was for. Fantastic! This is what I have been looking for! It was excellent! I immediately multiplied the batch size by 10 and went back to the store for more ingredients. This was around the end of November I believe as I was also trying my hand at smoking cheese as well (something that could only be done on my cooking equipment when it was cold). I made a couple of large batches and canned the whole mess. Everyone in the neighborhood got BBQ sauce and smoked cheese that year for Christmas.
The recipe was called sweet and smokey BBQ sauce. I have since changed it up quite a bit and the version I now make is something pretty much my own, but would not have known where to start without this book and the vast amount of information in it. There are lots of other good starters as well. Flipping through it just now I see some things that I bookmarked and never got around to trying, but will probably do so shortly. I have my eye on the pineapple garlic glaze.
Pick it up if you get a chance. You'll be glad you did. http://www.barbecuebible.com/
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
BBQ and Grilling
Since this is my very first blog post, I am going to set out to clarify the difference between BBQ and grilling. They are terms that I will probably use quite a bit, but are NOT interchangeable. Not in my vocabulary. I have looked them both up many times in my life and will give my condensed version here for a definition.
BBQ- The cooking of food, typically meat, at low temperatures over an indirect fire either of wood, charcoal,or gas.
Grilling- The cooking of food, typically meat, at high temperatures over a direct fire either of wood, charcoal, or gas.
Now that that is settled, we can go on. I prefer doing BBQ , but love to grill as well. It's just a matter of how much time I have to dedicate to supper that night. For the most part, I reserve BBQing for the weekends during the summer, and grilling is for weeknights during the summer and most of the time during the winter months. Grilling is NOT a season, it is a year long event. I'll admit though that I will typically resort to the gas grill for those winter evening cooks, otherwise it is a good old Weber kettle.
Now that the winter weather is finally showing signs of breaking, I will post some pictures of my gear as I get outside and get the time to clean everything up for summer use. Besides the grills mentioned above, my backyard sports a very nice BBQ pit made by Dave Klose from Texas. He makes a quality pit that will last more than a lifetime. I also have an FEC100 made by cookshack that is in the kitchen in the back of our deli, and a spicewine cooker that we bought for possible on-site catering gigs. We haven't put the spicewine through it's paces yet, but I have used one before and they are a fantastic pit as well.
OK, that is the basics for outside. I have a pretty nice indoor kitchen as well, but nothing as nice as the one we have at the deli, that's for sure. I'll spend a day talking about that kitchen as well and posting a few pictures.
What I will be talking about on a regular basis? Well, I don't really know for sure myself, but rest assured there will be some BBQ and/or grilling talk. I will probably throw lots of other food adventures into the mix I am sure. I roast my own coffee beans and may have some info in there about that coming down the road. I have also just started to make my own wine, and that may crop up once in a while. I also don't know how often I will be posting. For now, it will come as often as I feel like spending a bit of time writing.
Don't expect to get any healthy eating tips here. You will have a hard time finding them. You never know though, they may just crop up unexpectedly.
My cooking background? Well, let's see, I would have to say it comes from both my mother and my father. Not sure why, but I always gravitated toward the kitchen and mom was always more than willing to share her cooking expertise if she wasn't too busy. I believe my first foray into baking was probably a sour cream coffee cake that mom had a recipe for and I know I made that quite a bit. It didn't stop there. Pancakes were one of my favorite things to eat, and I know those were made lots of times after I got it right (story about that later down the road). I just always liked being in the kitchen and it shows.
We always loved it when it was grilling time. Dad was of course the grill master of the house as is the way of most households across America. I picked up all of the basics from him and more. But besides the grilling, he also gave me my first peak into BBQ and smoking. We had a walk-in smokehouse on the small farm that I grew up on. I don't remember a whole lot about it, but I do remember some of the smoked fish that was produced out of it. Oh man was that some good stuff. The smell of sweet smoke was present in that building looooong after it was turned into a tool shed. So, my dad was where I got the smoke thing from.
I eventually started doing this stuff on my own and wound up finding a nest of chuckle-heads on the internet called the bbq-brethren. They have become a second family to me and a crutch for my addiction called BBQ.
More info before I close for today. I also dabble in competition BBQ and will probably post about those during the year. I haven't hit the formula completely solid yet, but have done well in every category at least once. Just can't put them all together at the same time. Oh well, that will come eventually. If not, it is still fun and I will do it as often as my schedule and finances allow.
BBQ- The cooking of food, typically meat, at low temperatures over an indirect fire either of wood, charcoal,or gas.
Grilling- The cooking of food, typically meat, at high temperatures over a direct fire either of wood, charcoal, or gas.
Now that that is settled, we can go on. I prefer doing BBQ , but love to grill as well. It's just a matter of how much time I have to dedicate to supper that night. For the most part, I reserve BBQing for the weekends during the summer, and grilling is for weeknights during the summer and most of the time during the winter months. Grilling is NOT a season, it is a year long event. I'll admit though that I will typically resort to the gas grill for those winter evening cooks, otherwise it is a good old Weber kettle.
Now that the winter weather is finally showing signs of breaking, I will post some pictures of my gear as I get outside and get the time to clean everything up for summer use. Besides the grills mentioned above, my backyard sports a very nice BBQ pit made by Dave Klose from Texas. He makes a quality pit that will last more than a lifetime. I also have an FEC100 made by cookshack that is in the kitchen in the back of our deli, and a spicewine cooker that we bought for possible on-site catering gigs. We haven't put the spicewine through it's paces yet, but I have used one before and they are a fantastic pit as well.
OK, that is the basics for outside. I have a pretty nice indoor kitchen as well, but nothing as nice as the one we have at the deli, that's for sure. I'll spend a day talking about that kitchen as well and posting a few pictures.
What I will be talking about on a regular basis? Well, I don't really know for sure myself, but rest assured there will be some BBQ and/or grilling talk. I will probably throw lots of other food adventures into the mix I am sure. I roast my own coffee beans and may have some info in there about that coming down the road. I have also just started to make my own wine, and that may crop up once in a while. I also don't know how often I will be posting. For now, it will come as often as I feel like spending a bit of time writing.
Don't expect to get any healthy eating tips here. You will have a hard time finding them. You never know though, they may just crop up unexpectedly.
My cooking background? Well, let's see, I would have to say it comes from both my mother and my father. Not sure why, but I always gravitated toward the kitchen and mom was always more than willing to share her cooking expertise if she wasn't too busy. I believe my first foray into baking was probably a sour cream coffee cake that mom had a recipe for and I know I made that quite a bit. It didn't stop there. Pancakes were one of my favorite things to eat, and I know those were made lots of times after I got it right (story about that later down the road). I just always liked being in the kitchen and it shows.
We always loved it when it was grilling time. Dad was of course the grill master of the house as is the way of most households across America. I picked up all of the basics from him and more. But besides the grilling, he also gave me my first peak into BBQ and smoking. We had a walk-in smokehouse on the small farm that I grew up on. I don't remember a whole lot about it, but I do remember some of the smoked fish that was produced out of it. Oh man was that some good stuff. The smell of sweet smoke was present in that building looooong after it was turned into a tool shed. So, my dad was where I got the smoke thing from.
I eventually started doing this stuff on my own and wound up finding a nest of chuckle-heads on the internet called the bbq-brethren. They have become a second family to me and a crutch for my addiction called BBQ.
More info before I close for today. I also dabble in competition BBQ and will probably post about those during the year. I haven't hit the formula completely solid yet, but have done well in every category at least once. Just can't put them all together at the same time. Oh well, that will come eventually. If not, it is still fun and I will do it as often as my schedule and finances allow.
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