Peach Baby Back Ribs

We had a couple of slabs of really nice natural baby backs that have been staring me in the eye every time I've opened up the freezer over the past couple of months - It was a gorgeous weekend here in Trout Lake, so it seemed like the opportune time to prepare some ribs!

I've been working on a peach barbeque sauce, trying to perfectly balance the sauce with a rub - The idea was, to have a nice sweet layer on top of a spicy but not too spicy bark layer on the ribs. I'm getting close. For the rub I combined  & ground:

• 10 g seeded & deveined chile de arbol
• 1 tbsp black pepper
• 1/2 tsp yellow mustard seeds
• 1 tsp dehydrated onion
• 1/2 tsp whole coriander seeds

 then added:

• 1 tsp ground ancho chili
• 1 tsp ground guajillo chili
• 2 tbsp brown sugar 
• 2 tsp kosher salt

There really isn't too much to the sauce. Doris freezes peaches each year  so I just grab a bag of frozen peaches, add some agave nectar, along with some chile arbol pieces - I like to have the flecks in the sauce. Once that's mixed together, I hit it with the immersion blender then let simmer for about 1/2 an hour. I'll then thin the sauce down with apple juice.

After trimming the ribs, removing any unnecessary fat and squaring them up a bit,  we apply the rub. We like to apply one side at a time, leaving some time for the rub to sweat in before flipping them over and doing the other side.

Once the rub has been applied we let them sit for a couple of hours to soak up all the goodness. During this time we start prepping the fire and start chopping up stuff for the beans. Doris is making her barbeque buttermilk rolls, so its also time to mix the dough and let it begin to rise.

With the fire now at 250 degrees, the ribs go on at about 12:30. Today we will be smoking on a mix of apple and peach wood. We'll leave these guys alone, only  opening up every hour to flip them for the first 3 hours. Next up are the beans:

                                     

 
We start by sautéing some bacon pieces, and then add chopped garlic, onion and  jalapeno. Once those have cooked for a bit we add the beans, brown sugar, barbeque sauce  and molasses. The beans will simmer for the remainder of the afternoon.

While the ribs and beans are cooking, Doris bakes the rolls on the Weber gas grill. The gas grill works well for baking if you use indirect heat and raise the baking pan or tray off the grate. These look about done, and are ready to come off.

Here are the ribs at 3 hours. At this point we will wrap them in foil, adding a couple of tablespoons of apple juice, some agave nectar and brown sugar. They go back on for about another 1.5 hours before we unwrap them, and hit them with the peach barbeque sauce.

After hitting them with the sauce we let it set, flipping them a couple of times.

Ready to come off and serve:

Bacon for Porkfest

We had a little party at the end of June and thought it would be appropriate to serve bacon for breakfast. We started out with 3 bellies - The bellies are Carlton Farms products:

We did half the bacon sweet with maple sugar, and the other half savory with garlic, bay leaf, black pepper and juniper berries. After rubbing them down in the cure, we let them do their thing in the fridge for about 2 weeks.

We smoked them on apple wood at low temperature - somewhere around 125 -140 for about 8 hours.

After the 8 hours, we jack the temp up to around 180 degrees to bring the internal temperature to around 140 and then pulled them.

The next morning, under the careful eye of our quality control agent Roxy,  we sliced them:

Then wrapped and sealed.

Rack of Lamb

One of my favorite lamb recipes is the out of the little book that's shipped with  Weber kettles. There's also a version in the Keller Ad Hoc book which is essentially the same thing. The prep of the panko is a bit different, other than that, it's true to form. We also made a great salad which included tomatoes that were cooked for 7 hours on the WSM with very light apple wood at 200 degrees:

We had a nice rack of lamb that was locally raised. It was pretty huge for lamb. It  almost looked like a rack of baby backs -

I was watching the golf for most of the day so I was lazy, and did it on the Weber gas grill. The key is not to mess with it to much once you put it on or the panko will fall off. You want that buttery, crunchy goodness to adhere to the meat.

Doris made  Boone Tavern Rolls, and the Au Gratins from the Julia Child book. The salad was a slight variation from the Keller book, which included those tomatoes, lardens from our last bacon cook, and a yummy buttermilk blue cheese dressing made from local blue cheese and a garlic confit aioli -

Butter Burgers

We are moving the blog over to Google - It will take a bit to catch up, but I believe its a good move as the software seems to be less flaky  than at CenturyLink -

pbg

We had done an adaptation of Mavericks’ Butter Burger. Maverick is a great joint in San Francisco’s Mission district.

We started out with local natural beef chuck from Emerson Dell Farm. We cubed and seasoned, and then partial froze it prior to grinding:

Next we ground the beef with butter - Lots of butter:

We then formed patties, and sealed them with more butter in preparation for sous vide:

It was at this precise moment I realized we didn't own a sous vide tank - Doh! As we all know, outdoor cooking and BBQ is all about the ability to make adjustments. I headed out to the garage and grabbed a few things: A Smokey Joe, a number 12 Lodge and tripod might just be the the ticket!

We cooked them at 52 degrees Celsius for about 25 minutes in the Lodge, then seared them for about a minute.

We served them on homemade buns with all the fixin's with a side of slaw. We poured a 2009 Capiaux Pisoni Vineyard Pinot. They were pretty good!