Smoking Ribs

Go ahead – make the jokes. Yes, it’s hard to roll them and light them. No, Topps doesn’t make papers big enough. Go ahead – I’ll wait.

There. Got it out of your system? Good. Then let’s proceed to the serious business of smoking ribs.

First, what kind of ribs are you going to smoke? Pork, obviously, but that still leaves the choice of baby back ribs or spareribs. My usual choice is spareribs, because they’re much meatier, but you need 4 hours to smoke them, and I only have a couple of hours. Baby back ribs are good, and they do have the advantage of cooking faster, needing only two hours to smoke. I did find some gorgeous baby back ribs at Reynolda Farms Market, so that’s what I’m cooking today.

I always start with a dry spice rub the night before. The rub I use is a mixture of dried spices, from a recipe of Alton Brown’s. I made a batch of it three or four years ago, and I’m still trying to use it all up. I use this same spice rub for ribs and brisket, but since I only smoke things 3 or 4 times a year, it’s taking me a while to use it up. I take the ribs out of their packaging and put them in a large baking dish, then sprinkle the dry rub all over both sides and pat it in to the surface of the meat. Then I cover the baking dish with plastic wrap and let the ribs sit in the refrigerator overnight. I take them out of the refrigerator about an hour before I want to start cooking them so that they can come to room temperature before they go on the grill.

About 30 minutes before I want to start cooking, I put a bunch of hickory chips in a bowl of water to soak. They are going to provide the smoke. I use different types of wood for different meats. I like hickory for ribs and for pork shoulder. It’s the traditional barbecue wood for North Carolina barbecue. For smoked brisket, I use mesquite. And for smoked turkey breast, I like apple wood, which is a lighter tasting smoke, suitable for the lighter flavor of turkey. Hickey or mesquite are way too aggressive for turkey. Soaking the wood chips keeps them from burning and instead makes them produce lots and lots of smoke, which flavors the meat. The chips will eventually burn, once they dry out, but first they smoke, which is exactly what you want.

You can also get wood chunks, which are exactly what you’d think – big chunks of wood, rather than smaller chips – but I find that they never really get wet enough all the way through and you get more flame and less smoke from them, so I prefer chips.

Smoking is a little bit like braising in that you want to cook something at a low temperature over a long time to make it tender and succulent. The key to good smoking is temperature control. I smoke in a large charcoal grill, which is rectangular in shape and has a vent in the body at one end and a vented smokestack in the top at the other. I can control the temperature by opening and closing the vent and the smokestack. The less oxygen which reaches the coals, the lower the temperature. It also has a thermometer in the lid which tells me the temperature inside the grill. Using natural hardwood charcoal, I build a small fire in the side of the body closest to the vent. I place the ribs on the grates on the other side of the body of the grill, under the smokestack. I add soaked wood chips to the fire and close the lid. The movement of the heated air through the smokestack (that’s the Bernoulli effect for all you Vocal Ped people out there) pulls the heated air and the smoke across the ribs, slowly cooking and flavoring them.

Smoking in a grill like this means you have to constantly tend the fire. So I sit on the deck with a tasty beverage, communing with nature (Oh, look – there’s mama raccoon! And two flies just landed on my table, apparently engaging in an act that would get them arrested if they were humans and doing so in public.) and enjoying a lovely afternoon and keeping an eye on the fire. You want to avoid open flames, add charcoal often enough to keep the fire going but never letting it get too hot, and add wood chips frequently.

About half an hour before the ribs are done, I’ll start slathering them with barbecue sauce. I have a recipe for a nice tomato based sauce that I like, but I’ve been awfully busy the last few days (hello – it’s Easter Monday – I’ve been singing a lot), so I’m cheating and using doctored Kraft barbecue sauce, which is just fine. I’ll step up the heat a bit so that the sauce will glaze nicely. Once that’s done, I’ll take the ribs off the fire, and using a cleaver, cut them apart between the bones. Then, making sure there’s a good supply of wet kitchen towels, Terry and I and our guests will proceed to gnaw the bones clean, chasing the ribs with potato salad, baked beans, and rice and corn salad, followed by strawberry ice cream, made from the first local strawberries. Yum.

Unusual Ice Cream Flavors

My friend Stephanie is the queen of homemade ice cream. She has one of those great little Cuisinart ice cream makers with the canister that goes in the freezer, which makes about a quart of ice cream in 20 minutes and does a very good job of it. It’s not hand-cranked ice cream, but I don’t have the slave labor of five very competitive kids that my parents did to make hand-cranked ice cream. “Hey! Let’s see who can turn it the longest!” We always fell for that.

Anyway, Stephanie comes up with great, creative, and very tasty ice cream flavors. My favorite is one she calls Nuclear Winter, which is a Philadelphia style vanilla ice cream (which means some mixture of milk and cream, with sugar and flavorings and no eggs) with crushed Atomic Fireballs mixed in. I love Atomic Fireballs (are you reading this, Teri?) and surrounding them with ice cream just makes them that much better.

Which got me thinking about the combination of hot, sweet, and dairy. I knew I liked hot and dairy together – I love Mexican food, with peppers, cheese and sour cream. How could you miss by adding sweet into the mix? Thinking along those lines led me to chocolate, which, of course, came from Mexico in the first place, and is used as an ingredient in savory foods in Mexican cooking. So I thought what if you were to add peppers to chocolate ice cream. Seemed like a great idea to me.

So I went out to the internet and searched for a recipe that did that and I found one. This particular recipe has you make a bittersweet chocolate ganache by bringing half and half, in which you have placed a jalapeño pepper which has been stemmed, seeded and sliced, to a boil, then stirring in chopped bittersweet chocolate. You stir to melt the chocolate and mix it in well, let it cool, then refrigerate overnight. The next day, you strain out the pepper. In a separate bowl, you beat eggs and sugar until they’re light and fluffy, then mix in the chocolate mixture, cream and pecans. Then you freeze it into ice cream.

It was a huge disappointment. The jalapeño imparted no heat whatsoever and only a mild vegetal flavor, which was mostly covered by the chocolate. The chocolate fell out of the suspension and turned gritty in the ice cream. It was kind of a disaster.

But I still liked the idea in theory. So I did some research. There is a Good Eats episode in which Alton Brown makes chocolate ice cream. He addresses the chocolate issue by using cocoa instead of chocolate because it stays in suspension. I had thought of that myself and was glad to have his corroboration. For his chocolate ice cream, he also uses a custard base (one in which, as opposed to Philadelphia style ice cream, you do use eggs), but I really like the Philadelphia style, because it taste lighter and fresher to me, so I decided to use his Philadelphia style recipe for vanilla ice cream as my starting point. For the chocolate, I used the same amount of cocoa that he uses for his chocolate ice cream.

I then turned to the pepper. What would give me the most bang for the buck in terms of pepper flavor. With most herbs, when you want concentrated herbal flavor, you turn to the dried version. I have a recipe for Honey Lavender Ice Cream (more about it later), which calls for steeping dried lavendar flowers in hot cream and half and half for 20 minutes to extract the flavor. I decided to do the same thing with dried red pepper flakes. Being a serious fan of heat, I started with a teaspoon.

I also wanted some vanilla to round out the flavor. Vanilla is originally from Mexico and Central America, so it’s part of what was beginning to emerge as a unified theme of flavor for this ice cream. And I just happened to have a bottle of Mexican vanilla that someone had recently given me. If you’ve never used it before, real Mexican vanilla (there are a lot of imitation Mexican vanillas out there), has a very different, more robust flavor than vanilla made from Madagascar vanilla beans.

So I had an ice cream with Mexican vanilla, chocolate, and hot red peppers. What was I going to call it? Easy. Aztec Ice Cream. Here’s the recipe.

2 cups half-and-half
1 cup whipping cream
1 cup minus 2 tablespoons sugar
1.5 ounces (by weight) cocoa powder
1 teaspoon dried red pepper flakes
1 tablespoon Mexican vanilla extract

Combine all ingredients except the vanilla in a large saucepan and mix thoroughly. Place over medium heat and bring just to a simmer. Turn off the heat, cover and let sit for 30 minutes. Strain mixture into lidded container, stir in vanilla, and refrigerate overnight to mellow flavors and texture.

Freeze mixture in ice cream freezer according to unit’s instructions. Once the volume has increased by 1/2 to 3/4 times, and reached a soft serve consistency, spoon the mixture back into a lidded container and harden in the freezer before serving.

When you eat this ice cream, the first thing you taste is chocolate, with a nice creamy mouth feel from the dairy. (I used Homeland Creamery cream and half and half. It’s a regional dairy and their products are very creamy.) When the ice cream gets to the back of your mouth, the heat hits and it finishes with a wonderful back of the throat burn, which the cream helps to put out. It’s a little like a roller coaster ride in your mouth.

Now, about that Honey Lavender Ice Cream. The recipe is from Gourmet and it can be found on Epicurious.com, so I’m not going to post it here. It’s also a Philadelphia style ice cream. In this case, it’s sweetened with honey and flavored with dried lavender flowers. You mix cream, half and half, and honey in a pan, then pour in the lavender flowers, and bring the mixture to a boil. Turn the heat off and let it steep for 20 minutes. I can’t tell you how incredibly good it smells while it’s steeping. Then you strain the flowers out, put it in the refrigerator overnight to cool, freeze it, let it harden in the freezer, and serve. To my taste, the combination of honey and lavender makes it taste a little like cough syrup, but it’s a wonderful flavor and very unusual. It also taste incredibly summery because of the scent of lavender. (For people in Winston-Salem, I found dried lavender flowers at Fresh Market.)

Pound Cake

I had a meeting tonight which ended with a potluck dinner. It’s been a pretty busy week, and I had a very short window in which to make something to take for the dinner, and no time to shop for ingredients. So with only about a half an hour to put something together and only staples from which to make it, I decided to make a pound cake.

The recipe I use for pound cake comes from the cookbook the church I grew up in put out in the mid-70′s. My mom was the head of the committee that pulled it together, and I remember typing lots of recipes (on a typewriter – a manual typewriter, yet) for it when I was in college. It has some great classic recipes in it, including this pound cake recipe. The woman who submitted it was the meanest old lady I’ve ever known (seriously – she scared me to death), but she could really cook. As I recall, the original recipe lists the ingredients, and says something like “Mix all ingredients. Bake at 300 until done.” And I’ve pretty much done that, with not a whole lot of care about how I mixed all the ingredients, then dumping the mixture into whatever pan it would fit in, and baking it at 300 until it was done. And it was pretty good, although very dense and heavy.

However, probably 20 years ago, I came across an article on pound cakes in Southern Living magazine, which talked about how traditional pound cakes, which use no chemical leavening agents, should be mixed to ensure lightness and lift. The method they prescribed was to beat room temperature butter (and DO NOT let me hear you use the “m” word anywhere near a pound cake) for at least 2 minutes with a stand mixer at high speed. Then slowly add the sugar and beat for another 5-7 minutes at high speed until the mixture resembles whipped cream. Stop and scrape down the sides of the bowl as you need to, but don’t underbeat at this stage. You want the sugar to dissolve into the butter and to lose its graininess and you want to beat a lot of air into the mixture, because it’s this air that will give the cake its lightness.

You then beat in the eggs one by one, mixing in only until the yellow of the yolk disappears into the batter. Add the flavorings and the flour, again mixing only until the flour is lightly mixed in. Pour the batter into a greased and floured tube pan or loaf pan and bake at 300 for one hour.

Here are the ingredients:

1 cup of butter
1 2/3 cups sugar
5 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon lemon extract
2 cups flour

Today, I just happened to have a banana which was at the banana bread stage, so I peeled it, broke it up in pieces, and tossed it in just before the eggs, beating it with the butter and sugar until it was mixed in thoroughly. I’d never done that before, and I didn’t know how it would do, but it was great. This cake is never dry, but it made it even more moist, and brought a nice flavor along with it.

Sometimes, I’ll make a citrus glaze to go with this cake. I’ll squeeze the juice from a couple of oranges and a couple of lemons, mix them with some sugar and some butter, and cook it down until it’s syrupy. When the cake comes out of the oven, I’ll turn it out of the pan onto a plate, then use a skewer to poke holes in the top. Then I’ll slowly pour the glaze over the top, letting it soak into the holes. You can add a little Grand Marnier or Amaretto or Frangelico – or pretty much any liqueur – to the glaze too, if you like.

This pound cake is great just by itself. It’s also a nice delivery vehicle for sliced strawberries and whipped cream, or peaches, or ice cream and hot fudge sauce, or anything else you can think of to pour over it. It’s like the little black dress of desserts. You can dress it up, dress it down, and take it anywhere.