BBQgeek

Beef 101

Holy Cow!   I've been dry-aging this post for so long that I'm ashamed to admit it.  During college spring break sometime in April of 2009, I was treated to a seminar on beef cultivation and harvesting at UGA, sponsored by the Georgia Beef Council.  Shortly after attending the event, I posted the photo album you can view in the left gutter of my blog.  Somehow, I've managed to put off writing the actual article for far too long.  That's just what happens when you don't have an editor.  In just a single day of hands-on education at UGA, I learned more about beef than I ever hoped or expected.  Since so much time has passed, I'm going to skip the blow-by-blow blogging and distill things down to some very useful facts and Internet links that you can use to educate yourself on beef cultivation, harvesting, and grading,  Continue reading Beef 101 here...

Smoked Garlic

I usually like to start my posts with a nice bit of food porn -  a sexy photo meant to entice you, the reader, to read the entire article.  Sadly, in the case of the great smoked garlic debacle of 2009, I have nothing to offer.  I did take some pictures of my experiment,  but the ultimate outcome led me to go with stark text instead.  I have never heard of smoked garlic.  A reader from Amsterdam had sent me a note about my smoked chicken salad recipe.  When I went to check out his blog, Vegetarian Duck,  I noticed a post that made reference to a few heads of smoke garlic that someone had given him.  I immediately began some furious googling to see what I had been missing all these years.  It sounded like a marriage made in heaven - smoke and garlic.  However, there was a surprising lack of information out there on the Internets.  Most everything I found was very European in origin.  It seems that smoked garlic is readily available in street kiosks all over France but in very few other locations.   I even went so far as to call all my BBQ and chef buddies and ask them if they had ever heard of smoked garlic.  Not one single American had ever heard of such a thing. 

 So, I threw caution to the wind.  I went and bought a couple pounds of garlic and threw them on the smoker at 225 degrees.  3 hours later I had some very stinky and soft garlic.  After peeling the skins and making a nice compound butter from the garlic, I spread it on some toasted baguette.  What did I taste?  Garlic.  I tasted nothing but garlic.  There was no hint or suggestion of smoke.  Hell yes, the outside of the garlic was brown and stank of hickory, but somehow it did not translate to the actual cloves themselves.  After some more googling, I discovered that quite a few people had run into the same quandary.  Perhaps I needed to go for a day long cold smoke.  Perhaps I needed to strip the cloves down naked before I introduced them to the hickory smoke.  Perhaps I'll pursue this experiment another day.  For now, I'm a little bummed out.  What should have been a simple endeavor turned out to be a little bit of a Waterloo.  If you are out there on the Hyperweb reading this now and you know where I went wrong, I beg you to let me know where my mistakes took place.  Please.

As one final note, please don't blame my friend over at Vegetarian Duck for my mistakes.  He runs a hell of a good blog and I think he's the bee's knees.  I'm pretty sure this smoked garlic stuff is some sort of French conspiracy because they are jealous they didn't invent BBQ.

Smoked Chicken Salad Recipe

Chicken salad is one of those things that divides people and families like the Hatfield's and McCoy's.  Lite mayo or heavy mayo.  Bare bones or jacked up with grapes, nuts, and other sissy ingredients.  After many, many years monkeying around with my recipe, I finally landed on a preparation that I felt separated me from the pack.  How many times have you run across a smoked chicken salad?  Read on if you want to learn how to take your chicken salad to the next level.  Continue reading Smoked Chicken Salad recipe here...

Pigs and Peaches 2009 - Kennesaw, GA

Smokin J's competition team's entry in the brisket category - Pigs and Peaches 2009

It was a hot and sweaty afternoon today at the Pigs and Peaches BBQ competition in Kennesaw, GA.  After 10 years, the Pigs and Peaches competition has become a major draw.  This year seemed more crowded than I can ever recall.  Many professional teams were represented including Myron Mixon's Jack's Old South team, Jeff Rittman's Smokin' J's, and celebrity appearances by The Chef and the Fatman.  There was also a strong vendor presence including Williamson Brothers BBQ, Big Shanty Smokehouse, and Zeigler's BBQ.  I strongly urge you to take a walk through the photo album I created today that is visible to you in the left hand margin of my home page.  There were a really interesting mix of teams and cookers on display today.  Enjoy.

The First Annual Atlanta BBQ Festival - September 12, 2009

Bob Herndon, president of the Atlanta BBQ Club, has organized the first annual Atlanta BBQ Festival to be held at  Turner Field on September 12, 2009.  The festival will include a professional BBQ cookoff, a open, backyard BBQ cookoff, live music, and BBQ vendors (including Five Star BBQ).  For the BBQgeek, the ATL BBQ festival is a great step forward in establishing Atlanta as a viable stop on the competition circuit.  In the past, the best you could hope for in Atlanta was a chili cookoff to be held at Stone Mountain or on a military airstrip.  We in Atlanta are definitely moving in the right direction with this event.  I strongly urge you to come out and support Bob's efforts to put Atlanta on the map.

More Patak Meats Fun

I recently received a great email from a reader named Garvey that had picked up on my original Patak Meats post. Apparently Garvey currently lives in Charlotte, but occasionally has to pass through Atlanta.  When his travels bring him this way, he packs a cooler with him and visits Patak.  The photo to the left is his receipt from a recent visit.  $152!  I've never gotten any higher than $60.  Garvey says he "grew up near Chicago (no slouch in the sausage category) and am of Eastern European descent (Hungarian, Slovak, maybe Rusyn, too) and have even been back to the "motherland," and Patak's is by far the best I've ever had."  This is such a typical thing to experience with Patak.  Every time I visit there, people are wheeling boxes of meat out on carts.  People stand in line with coolers in hand (it makes a nice seat when the line is long).   And everyone seems to speak some Eastern European language in addition to English.

Garvey asked a interesting question about Patak's liverwurst and spoilage.  Since Patak does a fresh style liverwurst, it does not hold long.  In fact, I can tell a difference within just hours once you expose it to air.  When I discussed this with one of the ladies at the meat counter, she explained the best method is to poke a little hole in the tube and squeeze it out.  Since the iron content is so high in the liverwurst, it oxidizes and spoils very quickly.  The less air exposure the better.  Generally, you only have 3 days to consume their liverwurst once you have opened it.  I have only found this fresh "deli" style liverwurst in one other place here in the South.  I think it is much more common in the Northeast. 

Thanks to Garvey for the photos and the inspiration for the post.