Labor Day Grilling Plans?
 

Start With This Book "Steak: One Man's Search for the World's Tastiest Piece of Beef"

Steak is king. Steak is what other meat wishes it could be. When a person thinks of meat, the picture that forms in his mind is a steak. It can be cooked, crosshatched from the grill and lying in its own juice in a pose suggestive of unmatched succulence, or it can be raw, blood- colored and framed by white fat, the steak that sleeping bulldogs in vintage cartoons dream of.

He debunks the notion that more marbling equals better-tasting steak, taking down Japan's overhyped Kobe beef in the process, a meat so overly fatty that he "craved undressed salad" to revive his taste buds. Grass-fed beef, all the rage with environmental and health advocates, may be more environmentally sound, but as the author finds out, it sometimes tastes like "an old, atrophied, abscessed organ left in the trunk of a car sitting in a Miami parking lot for two weeks in July."

Yumm-oh!

I'll prolly just do brats. "Four more minutes Turkish!"

- Peter.

While steaks are nice, I'll be doing a few racks of ribs this year.

I purchased a rather large charcoal grill with all the bells and whistles, earlier this year. So far it has treated us VERY well, and I decided to lose the old gas grill. We'll be having 2 other families over, and I'll be grilling a ton of the ribs. Earlier this year, around the 4th of July, we had 8 full racks of ribs on this grill, as well as 10 ears of corn.

The secret to good grilling is to use only natural charcoal, and no lighter fluids. This way, only the taste of good hardwood smoke and your food is all you taste.

and starting the fire about an hour before you think you need to start it.

It always seems the fire is perfect about when I am done.

My newphew is down here from NYC for the week enjoying the beach. He's interested in smokin, so he bought a smoker after horsing around with an old homemade converted gas grill for a few years. ;)
So, tonight it's gonna be smoked salmon, (a little less salt this time, please:o) and Saturday it'll be smoked briskette. :cool:

Using a charcoal "chimney" and a couple sheets of newspaper, it takes about 30 minutes to get the charcoal covered in white ash and rocket hot. So typically, I'll get the steaks out of the fridge and on to a clean plate in the kitchen; head outside, clean the grill and start the chimney and by the time the coals are ready, the steak is at room temp and ready for seasoning and grilling.

I'm completely out of steaks from our production and won't have any more until late October at best. Consequently, I'll be mesquite smoking a few racks of pork spareribs in my ginormous smoker (a piece of 18" drill casing that's 5' 6" long, mounted on automobile wheels and you pull behind a ranch buggy to a suitable cooking/drinking location).

May also do a brisket at the same time...I have several in the freezer from our production and hopefully, there's one in there that will be good enough. The last brisket I did was a complete waste of time, I should have corned it instead...there's just not enough fat on these younger grass-fed animals to make a really nice brisket for the smoker.

Spam...

It's because (1)that idiot hasn't tasted our GFB and (2)the Bozo didn't bother to learn how to properly cook GFB.

You absolutely CANNOT grill a grass-fed steak the same way you'd cook a high choice grade ribeye. Traditional high heat cooking techniques will ruin grass-fed meat and make it unpalatable. On cuts, (not ground) you must use indirect heat when grilling this beef. For example, it takes me almost 20 minutes to cook a large sirloin (ours are dinner plate sized and 1 1/2" thick). When it comes off the grill, it's tasty and the inside is warm, pink and juicy. The flesh is firm but not tough. Put that same piece of beef over a hot flame and it's going to be tough as a boot.

Before you go thermonuclear on the author . . . Check Out His Steak Comparison Report in Slate

Never have I witnessed a piece of meat so move grown men (and women). Every taster but one instantly proclaimed the grass-fed steak the winner, commending it for its "beautiful," "fabu," and "extra juicy" flavor that "bursts out on every bite." The lone holdout, who preferred the Niman Ranch steak, agreed that this steak tasted the best, but found it a tad chewy. That said, another taster wrote, "I'm willing to give up some tenderness for this kind of flavor."

Thermonuclear is way too hot for GFB.

It's so hot here that we grill every day, I don't use my stove in the summer. This weekend is no different than any other. I have a nice whole pork loin I'm going to stuff and grill for Sunday when I am required to feed some "guests" who were invited by my wife. Hopefully they will not tarry past their welcome. If they do, they'll end up milking goats and cleaning pens. :)

Natural Charcoal, Electric starter (the chimneys work well too).
2 very old weber grills, one bought about 1990.
One bought at the weber dent sale in the early 70s.

Beer Can Chicken, actually 3.
Corn on the Cob.

going to hang out with some other german car friends saturday

Tri tip cooked on a bed of oak coals covered with thick oak bark just before you put on the meat. I haven't used charcoal in more than ten years, and I don't think I could go back- it just doesn't taste right. Cook for one beer, then flip and cook for two beers, repeat as necessary!