July 27, 2009

Websites and Blogs About Food That You Should Bookmark - www.CookManFood.com


If you've got a few extra minutes and your looking for a great food site surf on over to our friends Cook Man Food from Durango, Colorado at CookManFood.com. The guys were kind enough to post several blog posts featuring our All American Spice Rub. Check out post 1 and post 2 while you're checking out their excellent food blog.

Here is the Mission Statement of Cook Man Food -

Mission Statement – Good food, good friends, a good drunken story, that is how we want everyone to live. It could be the guys getting together for a football game and enjoying the latest twist on a Turducken, it could be climbing a few 14,000 foot peaks over a weekend and eating bacon wrapped elk bundles stuffed with cheese and mushrooms. There are many trips and places where the man food philosophy comes into play. This site will help you learn better ways of cooking other than your noodles with ketchup or your fast food no flavor crap. We all eat three meals a day (sometimes five) we might as well enjoy them all to the fullest. This site will help teach the trade and craft to do that with ease

Now that's a Mission Statement we can follow!



Stumble Upon Toolbar

July 20, 2009

Pork Barrel BBQ - Thanks for the Great Comments!

Pork Barrel BBQ has been lucky to have great fans of our All American Spice Rub - and we really love getting emails and tweets with your comments! Here are some recent comments on how folks use Pork Barrel BBQ's All American Spice Rub - please email us how you use it on your bbq grill or bbq smoker!


"Pork Barrel BBQ makes cooking a flavorful dinner on a time crunch easy. When I get home from work and want to throw dinner together I can take any piece of chicken, fish or beef, throw on some rub and cook it up. It is delicious, easy, and a staple in my cupboard." - Krista, Washington, D.C.

"I used the All American Spice Rub to grill chicken for my teenage daughters - they said it was the best chicken I have ever made - I'm a customer for life!" - Jim, St. Louis, Missouri

"I was given a tin of the rub and have used it exclusively on salmon.......fabulous!!!!! I have yet to use it on anything else as I have run out and is time to reorder. You have a winner." - Dian, St. Louis, Missouri

Stumble Upon Toolbar

Pork Barrel BBQ Tools of the Trade: Rib Rack

We love to cook ribs - in fact, I just smoked two slabs yesterday - they are so easy to cook, and with a little bit of Pork Barrel BBQ's All American Spice Rub - they are guaranteed to be a big success at the party. A big part of grilling or cooking is space management. We've talked about a lot of important tools on this blog - if you bbq a lot, epecially bbq ribs on your bbq smoker or grill - a rib rack is a key tool of the trade! We use the 22.5 inch Weber Smokey Mountain Cooker, and always use the rib rack to make sure we can fit all the ribs we are smoking. There are a lot of good choices - make sure you get a heavy duty kind, I've seen some that bend at the mere site of the ribs we cook!

Stumble Upon Toolbar

Pork Barrel BBQ Explores BBQ Without the Q?

At Pork Barrel BBQ, we grill everything - I mean EVERYTHING - we even bake cakes on the grill. But we also know there are times when you just can't grill, or that you may live in a condo or apartment that doesn't permit it. We actually created our All American Spice Rub for this express purpose - you can add our rub, and still get that perfect smoky flavor.


A reader sent us the following article on how to cook BBQ in the oven - I'd recommend just adding some of our rub, but thought it was a well written article - enjoy!


Serving up Texas BBQ without The Q

Written by GIL MICHAELS Published: THURSDAY, 16 JULY 2009

Alameda Epicure

There is perhaps no activity is more indigenous to summertime in America than the backyard barbecue. A Weber grill, well-stoked with charcoal and emitting fragrant, smoky aromas of, say, some grilled, 1-1/2 inch-thick New York strips, or a grill-roasted beer-can chicken, or maybe a couple of racks of baby backs slowly smoking all afternoon, is as American as surrogate moms, sugar-free, low-fat apple pie, and a pre-bankruptcy General Motors product.

But what of us apartment-dwelling proletariats who live in one of Alameda's late 19th-century fire-traps with a conflagration-paranoid landlord who wears a smoke detector on his head and has fire extinguishers duct-taped to his legs?

As Seinfeld's soup Nazi might say, "No Smoky Joe for you, babalou" There are then but two choices: Settle for some of the local uninspired, inconsistent commercial 'cue, or turn your good old home oven into a Texas BBQ pit.

Real BBQ is nothing more than seasoned meat, usually beef or pork, covered and slowly cooked over a slow fire that flavors the meat with its smoke.

Although replicating the smoke is difficult in a home oven (unless it's as grungy as mine), the smoke flavors won't be missed if zingy sauces, rubs or mops (bastes) are used to season the meat. This is also a good way to avoid the nasty carcinogens present in wood and charcoal smoke. It's best to avoid the chemical smoke substitutes; they tend to add an acrid, chemical harshness to the flavor mix. Here are some recipes for real Texas BBQ without the 'cue.

Without the 'Cue BBQ Beef

1/4 lb beef roast (chuck, eye of round or sirloin tip)

3 cloves garlic, sliced

Salt and pepper

3 tbsp vegetable oil

2 cups Coca Cola (not diet!)

1 3/4 cups ketchup

2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce

1 teaspoon Tabasco

Pre-heat oven to 325 degrees. Cut slits all over the roast. Stuff each slit with slices of garlic. Season roast well with salt and pepper. In a heavy skillet over medium- high heat, brown roast well on all sides in oil. Remove roast from skillet, and blot off fat. Place roast in a foil-lined pan. Pour Coke and ketchup over roast, then drizzle with Worcestershire sauce and Tabasco. Cover pan loosely with foil, then place in oven and cook for 3 hours. This roast will be very tender with a nice, garlicky BBQ taste.

Without the 'Cue BBQ Ribs

2 racks pork ribs, regular or baby back

BBQ sauce of choice (Bull's Eye Original is good)

Heavy aluminum foil

Pull any silverskin and excess fat off the ribs. Cut the racks in half vertically. Tear off 4 pieces of foil that are about 6 inches longer than the rib sections. Coat the ribs all over with sauce, then wrap each section tightly with foil, and place in the fridge for 24 hours.

Pre-heat the oven to 300 degrees. Place the rib sections in the oven with the foil seams facing up, and cook for 2 1/2 hours. Remove the ribs from the oven and turn on the broiler. Remove the ribs from the foil, smother with more BBQ sauce, and place on a broiler pan and broil close to the flame a couple of minutes on each side until the sauce is bubbly. With a sharp knife, slice the meat between each bone about halfway down and serve ribs immediately.

Without the 'Cue BBQ Chicken

4 boneless, skinless chicken half-breasts

Salt

Freshly ground black pepper

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

1 3/4 cups BBQ sauce of choice. (Bull's Eye Original is good)

Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees. Season the chicken with salt and pepper. Heat the oil in a heavy, ovenproof skillet (not cast iron) over high heat until oil begins to smoke. Brown the chicken until light golden on each side, 1-2 minutes per side. Transfer the chicken to a plate.

Pour the fat from the skillet, and off the heat, add the BBQ sauce, stirring up any browned goodies on the bottom of the skillet. Simmer the sauce, over medium heat, for 2 minutes, stirring often. Off the heat, add the chicken to the sauce, and turn each piece so it is thickly coated, spooning sauce over each piece. Place the skillet in the oven and cook until the thickest part of each breast reaches 130 degrees, about 12 minutes. Then set the oven to broil and cook about 6-10 minutes longer, until thickest parts of the breasts reach 160 degrees. Transfer chicken to a plate and let rest 5 minutes. Whisk the sauce in the skillet, and transfer to a bowl. Serve the chicken, and pass the sauce.

http://alamedasun.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5484&Itemid=29

Stumble Upon Toolbar

Pork Barrel BBQ Crosses 13,500 Followers on Twitter!

We at Pork Barrel BBQ spend way too much time on the computer - but have found Twitter to be a great tool for connecting with BBQ lovers around the world! We are pround that Pork Barrel BBQ is the largest BBQ Twitterer and hope that you'll continue to follow and support us by visiting us at http://www.twitter.com/porkbarrelbbq

Stumble Upon Toolbar

July 9, 2009

New BBQ Joint Coming To DC's Penn Quarter - Hill Country


One of the reasons we started Pork Barrel BBQ was because we thought that DC was lacking good BBQ joints. Coming from Kansas City we got spoiled by a town that within an hours drive of downtown boasts enough BBQ joints that one can eat at one everyday for an entire year and not have to eat at the same joint twice in the year.

When we aren't firing up our own grills in our backyards or at an event cooking our award winning BBQ we are still in search for great BBQ in the DC area. Last week we were excited to hear of the prospects of a new BBQ joint making its way to DC. Hill Country, a stalwart of the New York City BBQ scene (Is there a NYC BBQ scene? - I'm still trying to figure that out too.) is coming to DC's Penn Quarter (at 410 Seventh St., NW) sometime next year (we hear July).

Hill Country pays homage to Lockhart, TX's Kreuz Market. Kreuz Market is famous for selling its meats by weight and on butcher paper. A quick glance at the Hill Country website has us excited to try this new entry into the DC BBQ scene (Again, is there a DC BBQ scene? - We are still trying to figure that out too and if there isn't one we are trying to get one started.) Not only are we looking forward to trying their BBQ, we're looking forward to the prospects of a live country music venue in the heart of the city. Now the wait begins so you'll still be able to find us in our backyards and at events in the area handing out our BBQ to all of our fans.

Stumble Upon Toolbar