Outsider's Almanac » Grilling

Veal Tongue Tacos

brian — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 19:05:42 +0000

It’s been a while, I know. I’ve been living a life. Or burning one down. Or stumbling on the head of those two opposing excuses, really.

This is the 4th year I won’t be going to Burning Man. It’s crazy, I’ve been not going almost half as many years as I attended. And what’s crazier, I still couldn’t give an origamist’s paper shit about going back. Who knows, maybe someday, but right now I much prefer scrambling my mental effects in the comfort of my own back yard, with my own tasteful music. And air conditioning about 3 body-lengths from any fire I may start. Oh yes, and the no hippie rule we have at the house really pays dividends.

But whatever, rote individualism aside, I met and made friends with some of the most hilarious, intelligent and amazing people in the world during my over-stayed tenure with the Man. And I’m happy to say I still keep in touch with almost all of them. So, in celebration of that, I’m heading out to the Worthington compound for the weekend to play with explosives and man-handle some seratonin. It’s been too long since I’ve chased mortality into that corner of the woods and far too long since I’ve indulged in the Quartermaster’s tutelage on zen debauchery. This will be fun indeed.

So, in honor of glories past – and most likely some kind of cirrhosis future – I’m going to make some Lengua Tacos to sustain ourselves on the night that we burn our black powder-stuffed effigy. I picked the veal tongue up at Gepperth’s a few weeks ago during their 50% off freezer sale and I’ve been itching for a reason to cook this yummy stuff.

And what better place to tongue kiss a baby cow then at the scene of so many other wonderful crimes against nature, eh?

Skoal!

The Season of the Goat: Farm to Table Goat & The Joy of Open Pit, Whole Beast BBQ

brian — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 17:41:45 +0000

Earlier this season I put a fire pit in my back yard. Actually, that was the first thing I put in my backyard. A firepit, surrounded by dirt on all sides. Eventually we got around to putting in some grass and some stone work to gussy it up a bit, but the first effort was to install the pit.

I was anxious to get that firepit in the ground for two reasons. The first and obvious was so that we could enjoy our evenings around a fire. There’s nothing like getting drunk on good rye with your wife and your dog while a fire bends the night. The second reason we added the pit was to experiment with open pit BBQ.

A few weeks ago we made the acquaintance of our next door neighbor who happens to be the sous-chef at a tasty Catalonian restaurant in Chicago. His passions tend toward urban gardening, the cured meats and, as luck would have it, the farm to table movement. It wasn’t long before we were talking about my fire pit and making plans for our first foray into whole animal BBQ. This past week, those plans took flight. Zack, our fearless neighbor and chef, was able to secure an organically fed kid goat for a reasonable cost from a local farm. We were already having friends over to do some sensory training with the kit from Siebel, so I figured this was a perfect opportunity to jump right in on this baby goat.

Let’s be clear about this, there is nothing that can compare to having a whole animal in your house which you work with, over days, to prepare and then cook. Nothing. I am now completely spoiled on cooking. And by cooking I mean, procuring, preparing, transforming and devouring the full carcass of a creature that once drew the same air that I breathe and was compelled by many of the same instinctual drives that I find myself chasing, whatever the interface.

I can say definitively that I have never felt closer to my food then this past week and by that lame abstraction of “closer” I can only explain it as almost having a crush on my meal. Seriously. As I would work on the animal I would get excited butterflies not dissimilar to those you get when you are first falling in love with a significant other. When I was away from it I would think about it in the way you think about a new found lover, your head all busy with bugs chirping away, filling you with that electric surge of compulsion, excitement. My eyes would well as I stared across my yard to watch applewood smoke drifted across it’s tanning meat.

The act of bringing an animal into your house and the violence of cleaning, cooking and eating it are an intimacy that really can only be paralleled by sex. How about that? Now I’ve never formally fucked a goat – per say – but, should I, I honestly couldn’t imagine it bringing me as close to this animal as last weeks activities did. Which isn’t to say this was some sanctimonious circle jerk where we wept over the goat by candlelight or put it in a dress and implored it to godliness in it’s next life (do I protest too much?), but there is a certain inescapable connection that occurs when one mammal of flesh and muscle and hair and bone uses their own still vibrant hands and some well crafted tools to physically dismember and eat another mammal. It seems to me that it would be impossible for any self-conscious being to see the parallels between itself and the creature it was indulging in and not be affected by that. Frankly, you’d have to be kind of retarded to not have this ignite your nervous system in some of several ways.

So, yes, deboning it was intense. Cracking the ribs apart, carving each bit of bone and lardo out, discovering the different structural elements inside the animal. This was incredible – and the au jus we made was brain bending (I’ll discuss this in a minute) – but, in retrospect, I wouldn’t debone an animal before putting it on the spit again. By deboning it and rolling and trussing it like a big pork tenderloin, essentially, I felt like there were too many different kinds of cuts in any one bite. When it was ready and rested we cut the goat in cross-section slices and this gave you a loafed piece of goat that would have the cracklin/jerky like texture of the outside, some ham like pieces of delicious smoked meat, some fat and then some other just straight tender chunks of goat. To eat this you needed to pick your pieces apart and eat them separately which took a minute or two to figure out and by then you were almost done with your food. While distracting on the initial round of eating, this has been a good revelation for left overs as I just pre-cut my piece, chop it up good and make a smoked goat sandwich that could raise the dead (smoked goat, au jus, apple slices, arugula, a fried egg, and goat cheddar cheese on toasted grain bread, anyone? I’ve also mixed my goat/au jus with fresh blueberries and goat cheese for a pretty remarkable combination as well).

Like I mentioned above, the au jus was insane. Essentially, we made a goat demi-glace that was cooked down over about 2 days. We took all our bones from the goat, put it in the broiler at 500* for about an hour (we stopped only because the house was filling with smoke and the alarms were going off), added our cellery, carrots, onions and garlic and filled with water and a shitload of fresh rosemary and parsley, letting simmer for about 24 hours. After a little over 24 hours I strained out the bones, etc so I just had liquid. I then made a fond – 1 can of carmelized tomato paste deglazed with red wine – and added that to our stock. I then cooked that down over another 24 hours. I pulled the fat off the top and strained it again before putting it in the fridge. When it was time to serve it, I heated it back up and put in about 3/4 a stick of butter. If you could taste this demi-glace you would believe in Sorcery.

For the rub, we made a sala (pronounced sal-ay) which was about 10oz of peppercorns, 10 lemon rinds, and a cubic fuckton of fresh rosemary. There was a large amount of salt in there as well. We ground it all up in a food processor and rubbed it on the inside of the critter. Once it was trussed up, we rubbed it on the outside as well. This was a powerful rub, probably too powerful for some, but the spice from the peppercorns really brought the muskiness of the goat into it’s own. I’ve always felt the muskiness of goat was almost intractable, more a sensation then a flavor, almost like it was a fogginess that hovered around your face and brain than it was a flavor that sat on your tongue. The sala only made this more pronounced. If you were willing to submit to this rather odd sensual experience it was pretty remarkable. It was truly unlike anything I’ve ever had before.

Cooking the goat was the easiest experience I’ve ever had in preparing meat outdoors. I got a 4′ 5/16″ stainless rod from a friend and we ran that down the center of the animal. We then wrapped it in chicken wire and raised it above the fire pit by about another foot. There was about 2.5-3′ ultimately between the fire and the animal. I rotated every 30 minutes for about 4 hours and it was cooked. For heat I started with 3 chimneys of charcoal and then rested one log of applewood on top of that. The applewood was soaked for about an hour or so in water to keep it’s flaming to a minimum. I had to replace the log about every hour and added about 15 brickettes of dry charcoal about every 30 minutes. Twice I added a new chimney and I probably only needed to do that once. Once the goat was over 170* we pulled it off and let it rest for about 45 minutes. Sliced it and we were onto culinary bliss. One trick I picked up while researching for this is that 325* (the temperature you presumably want your fire at for a spit) is measured by holding your hand about 2′ above the flame. You should be able to hold it there for at least 8 seconds but no more than 12 seconds. Remember that.

We also kept the head and cooked that in the oven. The head had some sala on it as well and did just fine for itself in a turkey pan in the oven at 210* for about 6 hours. It probably could have come out a couple hours earlier, but that’s ok. Eating the head was kind of the coupe de gras of this whole experience, if at no other time were you aware that you were dining on an animal, you became keenly aware of this intimacy as you held its staring skull in your hands and pulled meat from it’s face with your teeth.

The meat on the cheeks was a bit over cooked so we cracked the jaw off to get at the inside. Inside the meat was very tender. But what we really wanted was the brains.

I wasn’t quite sure how to get at the brains, so I spent a good ten minutes or so physically tearing apart the skull, which, my compliments to the designer, is well made enough to keep a gorilla about 6 times the size of the goat from really penetrating it’s inner sanctum with much ease or grace. I finally noticed there was a soft spot on the top of the skull which, it being a kid, made a lot of sense. We were then able to stick a knife into the soft spot and pull out the rich, creamy, iron-flavored brains for those adventurous eaters to taste.

This was a trip for sure and there was certainly some monkeys dancing around the skull for a few minutes before Beth bravely jumped in. But, once Beth made the leap, the rest of us followed.

The white, mousse-like pudding that draped across the knife was, not more than a week ago, the central processor for this animal whose head I held in my hands and whose body had given myself and my friends so much delicious pleasure that evening. That sank in like a magnet. In a very real, but very strange way, I felt like I was finally a citizen of the material world.

Pritchett chewed on the spinal cord that swung from the skull like a long limp pecker. Then he and Sean enjoyed themselves an eyeball each as well. We later cooked up the heart and the surprisingly large liver on the grill. The heart was quite good, beefy with just a slight liver muskiness which could probably be attributed to it sitting in the same milk as the liver for a couple days.

We enjoyed several different saisons with the meal which paired nicely with the goat; Stillwater’s White Sage Saison, The Bruery’s Saison and Brooklyn’s peppery delicious Sorachi Ace. As the evening disintegrated and the guests left, I sat around the table late into the morning with Matt, my brother-in-law and Zack the Chef toasting a rare Hansen’s Lambic, raising our glasses to a great evening, a tasty beast, and a harem of lunatics unparalleled in the world of indulging in life and, it should be said, properly preparing death.

Stone Gets Your Goat Tuesday June 21 @ 7p

brian — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 16:10:05 +0000

The Summer Solstice is making its way across our eliptical paths and any self-respecting evil doer will want to celebrate this passage by indulging themselves in the ritual slaying and consuming of a horned goat on this, our longest day of the year. And who better to provide that little spoon full of sugar for this celebration of lasciviousness and livery than Stone Brewery? Short of Lemmy or maybe a younger, less soberish Keith Richards, no one.

Come join Bar on Buena and Stone brewing as we stew, curry, smoke and braise a goat for your culinary edification! Featuring, on draft, Stone’s Russian Imperial Stout, Stone’s Smoked Porter aged in bourbon barrels, Stone IPA and the Arrogant Bastard! And possibly a surprise or two…

Rightio, let’s eat some cloven hoofed critters!

Render Me Some Lard, Bubba!

brian — Wed, 04 May 2011 18:26:28 +0000

I got this goofy new puppy the other day and everything I’m reading insists that she’s gonna love some bacon and cottage cheese in her food. Clearly a girl after my own heart. I had a good amount of back fat just sitting pretty in my freezer so I thought I’d render my fluffy lady some lard for her dinners and make me and my less fluffy lady some pork cracklin that we could cut up into big, fatty lines and snort just like all the other cool kids are doing these days.

It was all quite good and easy, although I think next time I’ll wear some kind of protective helmet and hazmat suit as this pork likes to pop and send boiling oil shrapnel across the kitchen whenever a human gets within spitting distance. But despite the hazards of creating the lard, there’s apparently plenty of health benefits to this swiney effluvia.

Here’s what you do:

Take your back fat and cut it up into 1/4″ squares.
Put it in a crock pot or La Creuset or something similar.
Add in around a half cup of water.
Cover it and put it on the lowest heat.
Stir every few minutes.

Within 45 minutes you’ll start to here it popping which means you’re in good shape and within another hour or two all that delicious lard will be browning up your pot while the crispy crackling will be hanging out on the bottom.

Apparently another way to do this, and one that sounds much easier, is to put your ingrendients in a dutch oven (like the La Creuset) and put it in the oven at 200*. Let is stay in there over night and in the morning you’ll have your lard and your cracklin. This seems much easier and less embattled, I’m going this way next time.

Great Vienna Sausage Recipe

brian — Tue, 03 May 2011 17:20:04 +0000

I’ve been experimenting with a bunch of different sausages. My favorite as of late are these Vienna sausages. Tender and plenty juicy and flavorful, when you put these on the grill and crisp up the natural casings they have that mandatory snap that you want in any good sausage, especially a Vienna.

Here’s the recipe:

1lb beef
1lb pork
1/2lb veal shoulder
1/2lb pork fat
1/4 cup + 1 tblspn flour
2 tspn corriander
3 tspn salt
1 tspn paprika
1 tspn sugar
1/2 tspn cayenne
1/2 tspn mace
2 tblspn minced onion
3 cloves garlic
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup ice water

Grind your meat with fine blade. Mix in other ingredients. Freeze for 30 minutes. Grind fine again. Freeze 30 minutes. Grind fine again. Freeze 30 minutes. Stuff into natural casing. Parboil gently for 45 minutes. Then add to the grill to crisp up the skin.

Awesome!

U.S. Meat Contaminated with Resistant Bacteria

brian — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 17:32:22 +0000

In more, isn’t the world sick of being a bummer all the time news:

Meat in the U.S. may be widely contaminated with strains of drug-resistant bacteria, researchers reported Friday.

Nearly half of all meat and poultry sampled in a new study contained drug-resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus, the type of bacteria that most commonly causes staph infections. Such infections can take many forms, from a minor rash to pneumonia or sepsis. But the findings are less about direct threats to humans than they are about the risks of using antibiotics in agriculture.

Read the whole article.

Veal Kielbasa Recipe

brian — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 12:54:07 +0000

Here’s a recipe for fresh Kielbasa that is delicious. You can also turn it into smoked Kielbasa by smoking it at around 180* for about 2 hours and then cool in ice water for 30 minutes, dry and store in the fridge.

6′ hog casing
3lbs pork butt
1lb beef chuck
1lb veal shoulder
3/4lb pork fat
2 tblspn paprika
1 tblspn black pepper
1 tblspn turmeric
2 1/2 tspn coarse salt
2 tspn marjoram
2 tspn summer savory
1/2 tspn allspice
6 cloves garlic

Grind your meat, mix in your spices and stuff. Dry in the fridge for 24 hours, flip once to make sure both sides get dry. Use over the next few days or freeze for up to a couple of months.

Hit a Local Chicago Butcher and Let The Grilling Begin

matt — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 19:45:55 +0000

As I walked out of work last Wednesday I felt something that I wasn’t sure I would ever feel again, something so entirely foreign and pleasant I was certain I was hallucinating. It was warmth. Where I would usually rush manically, head down and cursing, to my car. I now crossed in a slow walk, something nearing a meander. I actually looked around, took in the day and stopped for a moment to enjoy the heat of the sun as it crawled up the back of my neck. It was hard to imagine but for the first time in what seems like an eternity I wasn’t cold. The combination of a particularly freezing and brutal winter and my apartment resembling a set piece from Dr. Zhivago had led me to accept the fact that I would never again be warm.
It was a revelation and believe me when I tell you that it took every bit of power in my feeble mind not to throw this detox off the deep end and head right home to crack a cold one and fire up the BBQ. Instead I ate a rice cake and went to the gym. Sad, I know, but I was comforted in the thought that this was simply the first in a long string of perfect days. That soon the honey time will come to Chicago and with it a swaying slow play of summer dresses, cold drinks, long nights and delicious cuts of meat.
You’ll forgive me if the current detox has me fixating on the last item of the list. Time was in this town when every neighborhood had a butcher shop and everyone a relationship with their butcher. While that time may be over it’s not completely dead and gone. Thanks in large part to the increased interest in locally and sustainably raised meat and poultry Chicago is seeing something of a butcher shop renaissance. One of the most notable of the new breed of butcher shops is The Butcher and Larder located at 1026 N. Milwaukee just south of Division. Here’s what a recent blurb from Time out Chicago had to say:

“Somebody comes in and says, ‘I want to buy a chicken.’ ” Rob Levitt, the former chef of Mado who’s opening a butcher shop with his wife, Allie, plays through the ideal scenario of what should happen next. “The butcher’s happy to truss it for them.” Someone comes in and wants a fresh ham? “We’ll be exclusively whole-animal butchering”— pigs and lambs will come from Slagel Farm just southwest of the city—“so I can just cut it off the animal and sell it to you.” And for those in the market for something besides raw meat, the Levitts round out the shop with a “larder” of pâtés, terrines, corned beef, pastrami and the like, plus a few cult dessert items (such as “Migas” bark and shortbread) from pastry chef Allie. Fans of the Levitts’ cooking at Mado will find solace in sandwich and charcuterie offerings, monthly BYOB supper clubs, and a familiar face behind the counter: “Butchering is really what I’m happiest doing,” says Rob.

While The Butcher and Larder is certainly one of the more intriguing it is not by any means the only specialty meat store in the city. A recently published article in Chicago Magazine does a nice job of breaking down some of the many options in the area. The one I’m most excited to check out is Chicago Game and Gourmet. Check out the products page if you want to be have a BBQGASM. Only issue is that they’re wholesalers but there are a few different ways to work around that problem. I’ll let you know what I find out.
New butchers are all fine and well but no matter what new comes to town I’ll always have one favorite Butcher and his name is Abdullah.

If you vacation in Hotlanta this summer check out Abdullah’s BBQ and Chinese restaurant.

Truth is that no matter your flavor there are increasingly delicious ways to enjoy a long hot Chicago summer, get out there and do it.

Make Your Own Dumb Brats & Watch the Bears Stomp ‘Sconny

brian — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 17:49:56 +0000

I got news yesterday that I’m going to the Bears game on Sunday with my pops.

Aside from this being pretty freaking sweet in the immediate heat of the moment, it’s also kind of a lovely, heart-warming story, too. You see, in 1986, when the Bears last won the Super Bowl, and I was just a young fat, freckled and excitable kid, my dad scored tickets to the final game of the NFC play offs between the L.A. Rams and the Bears. Unfortunately, through years of self-abuse, I’ve pretty much eradicated the entire experience from the cavernous hollows of my memories with two fair exceptions:

It was bloody cold out.
Some obligatory, sausage-stuffed and drunk fucker behind us hollered at one point when the announcer let the stadium know there was a flag on the field: “Hey, they’re playing L.A. there’s all kinds of fags on the field!”

Heh, heh. That shit is gold.

So, yeah, not only am I going to witness an ancient rivalry of amphetamine-fueled mutants beating the frozen piss out of one another, but I’m also enjoying a kind of experiential symmetry with my dad that is very, very rare.

And who knows, if the stars align and the mood is right, maybe, just maybe, I can carry on another fine tradition on Sunday. Perhaps, the Great and Golden Onion, who resides in the skies over our fair city of broad shoulders, in all it’s curmudgeonly benevolence and ambivalence for all, will shine down once again, casting me in it’s glorious, stinking pageantry, beckoning me to become more than myself, to rise as the next incarnation of that obligatory, sausage-stuffed, drunk Chicagoan and tonally embed a coyly, sculpted insult upon the deeper masts of a young fat kid’s mind forever.

At this point, only Jesus knows how this will play out.

But, while Jesus holds all the secrets, I can take the proper precautionary steps to insure that, should the opportunity show it’s self, I can bow and meet it’s presence with a burgeoning quiver of proper preparedness.

In service of that I will be picking up some provisions:

CO2 cartridges for my corny keg travel kit so we can bring my present batch of Moo’s Dry-Hopped Brown House Ale to the lot for proper imbibing before the game.
A small Weber grill and some charcoal.
I will be making some home-made veal brats with my Kitchen Aid so that we can properly stuff our bloated mugs with the flesh memory of several dead beasts before the big game.

I feel it only right to share this fine recipe for homemade brats so that others can play the at-home version of this ancient rite of antagonism. In service of something greater than myself, here it is:

Ingredients:
The recipe is based of one pound of meat. You can work out the ratio for larger quantities. (60%=(9.6oz) Pork, 40%=(6.4oz) Veal…………1 lb

1 tsp salt (pickling)
1/2 tsp Onion Salt
1/2 tsp Ground White Pepper
1/2 tsp Marjoram
1/2 tsp Parsley
1/4 tsp Nutmeg
1/4 tsp Celery Seed
1/8 tsp Ginger
1/8 tsp Mace
1/8 tsp Cardamon
2 oz Red Wine

Grind meat through 3/16″ plate.
Mix non-meat ingredients in bowl and add to ground meat and mix thoroughly.
Chill in freezer for 30 min.
Mix again and grind throu 1/4″ plate.
Stuff into sheep or hog casings and air dry for 30 min or until dry to the touch.
Refrigerate for at least a day before use.

Make sure to read up on my recommendations for stuffing sausages in my post about Biscuits & Gravy. And, umm, Go Bears!

Lillie’s Q Offering Full Pig

brian — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 06:50:44 +0000

Chef Charlie McKenna from Lillie’s Q – my favorite bbq restaurant in the city – is now offering a full pig for groups of 6-8. He’ll prepare it, serve it and discuss preparation with his guests. You need to give the restaurant 48 hours notice. If you get over there in the next week you might be able to enjoy your hog with some tapped Hopslam as well.