I’ve been buying whole pork loins lately: they come with a lovely pork loin for about two thirds and sirloin for the last third.  The loin is very nice but the sirloin on these pieces is jagged and just isn’t pretty, so I cut it off.  I find this cut works wonderfully for two applications: my and a slow roast smoked on my big green egg.

The front roast is my smoked slow roasted sirloin and in the rear is the cured and smoked sirloin.  The sirloin is a …

After a few sausage smoking sessions with my Big Green Egg and the I was happy with the results but found I was only fitting about fifteen sausages on the grill at one time.  Since it was a three to four hour time investment I wanted to fit as many on as I could, which let me back to the Big Green Egg web site and to my local barbeque shop Chadwick & Hacks.  There is a new three tier rack but it doesn’t hold a lot, which left …

A few weeks back I discussed smoking on my Big Green Egg and using indirect heat: I was able to accomplish this by using the Plate Setter.  For indirect cooking you remove the grate, insert the plate setter with a drip pan and put the grate on top.

Or you can flip it the other way and use it as a baking stone for bread or pizza.

It’s made a big difference in the smoking I’ve done.  Well worth the additional investment.  Since I’ve only used it for indirect cooking the bottom …

Our freezer was getting overcrowded with pork so I decided to take out sixteen pounds and make some sausage over the weekend.  My family seems to like smoked sausage the best so I made Hunters sausage (forgot the German name, sorry).  It’s a pork sausage with coriander and mustard seeds, dry milk powder and a little garlic.  I followed the recipe in Charcuterie and everything worked well.  The batch was too large to mix in my stand mixer so I did it manually and it was tough going.
The sausages above have grill …

I took advantage of the freezing weather to cold smoke my latest batch of bacon.  Until now I’ve been hot smoking it: working with a temperature of 200 degrees Fahrenheit in my Big Green Egg I smoked the bacon for about four hours until it’s internal temperature reached 150 degrees.
With the Weber Smokey Mountain I can maintain smoke indefinitely and keep the bacon’s internal temperature to around 100 degrees.  I smoked this batch with sugar maple charcoal and maple chunks for six hours.

The texture of the finished product was a …

Successfully came through my Thanksgiving dinner. The last few years I’ve been winging it with my stuffing and the results have been mixed to put it kindly. This year I turned to a great basic stuffing recipe from Saveur that was full of fresh herbs, celery, onions, dried bread cubes, stock and eggs. I added mushrooms and homemade sausage and baked for fourty five minutes: the end product was excellent. I also made Parker House rolls from a Cooks Illustrated recipe but let the buns do their final rise in …

For any burger fan it comes down to grill or fry.  I enjoy both and like to change it up now and again.  For either technique you want the same thing: a nice crust on the outside and a juicy center: pretty much the same thing as steak.
Which leads to patty formation and what actually works.  I’ve tried leaving the meat loose and barely forming the patty but that leads to the burger being so loose when you eat it there’s no cohesive mouth feel.  That doesn’t mean go the …

Since getting my Big Green Egg my way of thinking about grilling and barbeque has completely changed. For one thing it meant using charcoal: something I haven’t done since the old hibachi in the back yard when I was nine. When I bought the Egg it came with a bag of Big Green Egg lump charcoal: wood that had been made into charcoal by lighting it and removing the oxygen, such as burying it in sand. Nothing added, just a good burn that gives to my nostrils a heady smoke …