Grilling Season '12: Southwest Pork Salad

Big racks of ribs, juicy burgers, and tender chicken are all staples of backdoor barbecuing, but your grill can be used for quite a bit more than just the old standbys. This summer we'll be making a variety of meals that use non-traditional ingredients cooked on the grill, or instead utilize meats in different ways outside the norm.

Recently we wanted to have something along the lines of a taco salad, but with at twist. We had some thick pork loins in the freezer and decided to go that route instead of the normal steak, chicken, or taco style ground beef. Instead of pounding out the meat like with our grilled double pork rollup, we instead decided to leave the pork as-is and just slice it thinly once the cooking was complete.

Another change we made for this barbecuing session was to use a chimney starter instead of lighter fluid. If you haven't seen these before, they are tall metal cylinders with a wooden handle that are sold at hardware stores, or you can find them at places like Walmart during the summer months with the rest of the grilling equipment.  To use a chimney starter, flip it upside down to find the small metal compartment with a series of air holes. Roll up a piece of newspaper and then fit the paper around the inner edge of the compartment, forming a ring so there's still an empty spot in the center. Flip the starter back over and fill the top section with charcoal. Use long neck lighters to light the newspaper at several spots at once through the air holes. Within about a minute you'll see a whole lot of smoke like this:

Then 15 - 20 minutes later the charcoal is ready for use when a plume of fire is clearly visible at the top. At this point the bottom and middle coals are already white hot, and the top coals are flaming. Once the coals are ready, lift up the starter by the handle and dump the charcoal into the grill. Besides removing the need for lighter fluid, a chimney starter also lets us use up the weekly grocery store ads instead of just throwing them away.

For extra flavor and to keep the meat tender, our pork loins were soaked for several hours in a store bought Mexican style marinade.

As we've mentioned in previous grilling blogs, we use an indirect heat method where the coals are pushed apart onto opposite sides, leaving an empty space in the middle with no direct heat.

During the first few minutes of cooking the loins are placed on the direct heat so they get grill marks and a hint of char, then they are moved into the middle to finish cooking indirectly. This ensures even cooking and prevents burning.

For our southwest salad we also wanted corn, which was of course grilled along with the pork inside tin foil.

Each of the pork loins was then cut into thin slices to top our salad. We ended up with a whole lotta meat, and all of it with a perfect smoky barbecue flavor.

Here's the rest of the toppings for our salad, including the corn (removed from the cob), diced tomato, avocado, yellow bell pepper, green onion, and poblano pepper.

The salad starts off with an iceberg lettuce mix that also had slices of carrot and raddichio. First up is the grilled corn...

...followed by a few slices of our grilled pork!

Here we're adding on the rest of the veggies, including green onion and avocado.

After all the vegetables are placed, Megan shredded on some colby jack cheese and then threw on some jalapeno flavored pretzel bits for added spice.

In this instance we actually ended up using a store bought southwest ranch sauce that we found on clearance, but our homemade thousand island would have been delicious as well. The southwest pork salad was a fabulous meal we'll definitely make again that let us mix up the standard dinner salad with grilled meat and lots of veggies - and all with a restaurant-worthy flavor.

This was just one of our recent grill creations, and there's lots more coming to Six-Seven-Eight. Soon we'll be covering root beer BBQ sauce and pork ribs, along with many more unique and delicious meals to inspire your own cooking adventures!