Grilling Season '12: Pork Spareribs

Charcoal backyard grilling is fast becoming one of our preferred ways to cook meals, and now that the weather is relatively warmer (besides a few unexpected snow storms and tornadoes...) we're able to grill once or twice a week for dinner. One of our most delicious grilling successes came a few weeks ago when we tried out barbecuing pork spare ribs.

We'd already made pork babyback ribs, which are thinner and tend to have less overall meat on the bones. Spare ribs, on the other hand, are quite thick and are a more tender cut of meat. For this first crack at spare ribs we're using store-bought rubs, as at this point we hadn't started making our own rubs yet. We mixed together a smoky Texas style rub with "Butt Rub," a barbecue seasoning again given to us by our fantastic friend Cristal, who is always bringing us interesting cooking ingredients when she comes home from trips.

The full rack of ribs is pretty big, and here you can see the whole thing out of the package as I'm washing it off and getting ready to rub it down with seasonings.

The two seasonings are mixed together in a bowl and then rubbed directly onto both sides of the rack, which is on a sheet of plastic wrap. Not only does this keep the table clean, but we'll also tightly wrap the ribs and briefly store them in the fridge prior to cooking so the rub has enough time to flavor the meat.

As with our other rib experiments, we combine both a rub and an injection for maximum flavor potential. This time around we're going with a fun combination of apple juice, Worcestershire sauce, liquid smoke, and a spicy Kansas style barbecue sauce, as this particular grilling experience was before we started making our own barbecue sauces. You can check out our first attempt at making a homemade version with smoky raspberry BBQ sauce, and soon we'll be posting up entries detailing how we've made a spicy sauce and a root beer barbecue sauce.

Once all the ingredients are mixed together, the concoction is injected directly into the meat with the giant needle you see below.

Here's the rack of spare ribs after being completely rubbed down and injected. You can see some of the injection sauce ends up seeping upward, but this just further flavors the top layer of the meat.

Because of how large a rack of spareribs is and how long it will take to properly grill, we don't want to use any direct heat, which will just end up over-cooking the outer layer and make the meat tough. To properly slow cook the spare ribs, we heat up the coals until they are white hot and then slide them apart onto two opposite sides of the grill.

The ribs go over the empty stretch in the middle so the heat from the coals cooks the meat, but there's not any direct heat underneath the ribs. The full cooking process ended up taking a little over three hours, which gave us plenty of time to enjoy being outside in the warm weather with a pack of beer. Of course the ribs are flipped around, over, and then around again at different points during the grilling process so that all sides receive even cooking. In addition to the injection, we also spritzed the ribs with apple juice several times throughout the cooking process to give it a shiny look for a better presentation and keep it moist.

Our earlier grilling adventure with babyback ribs ended up with just a tad more char than we wanted, so with the spare ribs we laid down a sheet of tin foil underneath the meat for the last hour and a half of cooking, resulting in these amazingly moist and tender ribs with just a hint of a char ring around the outer edge.

However good you think these look, I guarantee you the in-person experience was far better, as the smell just can't be properly described.

This is my plate for dinner that evening, with both an end piece and a middle rib. The tender meat pulled away easily and had an amazing combination of smoky and sweet flavors with just a hint of the spicy. With this amount of flavor preparation, and meat this tender, there isn't any need for barbecue sauce.

Here's another look at my plate with a focus on the sides, which included our grilling standard of the potato packet with yellow pepper, red pepper, onion, liquid smoke, and several spices. I've also got a hefty side salad with a host of chopped veggies, some shredded cheddar, and thousand island, my personal favorite dressing. On a related note, I also recently made my own thousand island dressing, which will be covered on an upcoming blog.

To see more of what we've been cooking up on the barbecue, check out our grilled pork and turkey burgers.  Coming up we've got even more coverage on grilling season '12, as well as a look at how to make stellar potato salad with some surprising ingredients, making homemade sauces and rubs, and another look at hearty breakfast meals. See you again soon, and be sure to let us know if you've made any fantastic meals lately!

Orange Chicken And Chicken Salad Sandwiches

Megan and I love making big dinners, but we don't love big shopping bills, so to save money during our weekly grocery store run we base our cooking around what's on sale (shopping at multiple stores to get the best deals), and we try to plan meals that utilize several of the same ingredients (for more keeping ingredients grouped together, check out our original post on interconnecting meals here).

Recently we put together a staple in our kitchen - the whole chicken - and then used the leftovers to make homemade chicken salad.  Normally we like to bake whole chicken with a butter and herb mixture, but after trying a pineapple pork roast with sweet pineapple flavors, this time we mixed up our recipe by making orange chicken.

The best method we've found for getting flavor mixed all throughout a whole chicken is to slide your fingers underneath the skin and pull it up from the meat, so that seasonings can be added inbetween the skin and meat. Here we've pulled up the skin and Megan is starting to rub our seasoning mixture inside the chicken.

For this chicken's seasonings, we mixed together orange juice concentrate, teriyaki sauce, onion and garlic powder, and ghost pepper salt.  Our friend Cristal bought us this spicy salt concoction as a gift a year or so back and it's since become a normal part of our seasoning cabinet. If your local grocery store doesn't stock it, there are many spice websites that carry it, and you can even find a few varieties on websites like Amazon.com.

After being thoroughly rubbed down inside and out, the skin is pressed back down and the chicken is tied up with kitchen twine to keep all the juices inside, ensuring the chicken cooks well and the meat remains tender.

For an added level of flavor, and to keep the meat incredibly moist and tender, we also injected some of the seasoning mixture, mixed with melted butter, directly into the meat. For more info on ways to inject meat with amazing flavors, check out our smoky raspberry BBQ beef ribs or pork baby back ribs.

Before getting popped into the oven, the remaining injection sauce is brushed all over the skin so there isn't a single part of the chicken that won't be bursting with orange flavor.

Our handy meat thermometer gets popped into a deep portion of the chicken breast and the whole guy gets baked for about an hour and 20 minutes.

And here's the end result: a perfectly baked, perfectly seasoned chicken that is all tender and flavorful meat through and through.

After carving up the chicken, I'm getting ready to dig into a drumstick along with our sides for the evening: some brown rice cooked in chicken stock, and a side salad with tomato, green onions, and thousand island dressing.

Obviously we didn't eat the entire chicken that night however, as plenty of it ended up as leftovers. Besides just having a heated up plate of the delicious chicken for another meal, we also carved the remaining meat off the bone and mixed it with the buffalo sauce injected chicken thighs from "the Insani-Which" to make our own chicken salad. Here you can see the orange chicken, the buffalo chicken, and some of the leftover bacon from the Insani-Which.

The chicken and bacon gets finely diced up and thrown together, so there's a great mix of sweet, spicy, and savory going on in that bowl. To turn the chicken into sandwich spread, we added in mayo, dijon mustard, and a few seasonings.  Just about any seasonings work here, but I prefer pepper and oregano. If you like it spicy, toss in a bit of hot sauce as well.

Here's the chicken salad all mixed together, ready to hit a delicious sesame seed bun to create a gourmet sandwich worthy of any restaurant lunch menu.

Here I've got two slices of tomato and some lettuce. If you look close you can also see an interesting addition hiding under the tomato: a few fritos! These add a bit of crunch and some saltiness to the sandwich. Kettle cooked chips also work fantastic in this capacity.

I've put a few spoonfuls of the chicken salad mixture over the lettuce as the sandwich is nearing completion.

Finishing off my perfect sandwich is a handful of shredded cheese. You can also throw on another dash of pepper or oregano here as well.

And the sandwich is now complete and ready to be eaten! The flavor injected chicken creates a sandwich you can't get with store-bought canned chicken salad.

Thanks for checking out our latest blog, and hopefully we've inspired you to try out some new things in your own kitchen. Coming soon at Six-Seven-Eight will be more ways to connect meals to save on your grocery bills, additional articles on making fantastic barbecued ribs, and detailed instructions on how to make amazing potato salads that mix unexpected ingredients for absolutely delicious results.

Culinary World Tour: Canada (Poutine) and the Insani-Which Revisited

Random snow days and even an unexpected tornado watch (!) have prevented us from doing as much grilling as we'd like lately, so this is a perfect time to return to our culinary "world tour," where we are challenging ourselves to make new and unfamiliar dishes from different cultures around the globe. We already made a spicy and beatiful posole soup for our Mexico stop, and next up is a culinary trek north of the border to Canada.

We both have a couple of friends on Facebook who reside in Canada, and when we asked their opinions on what dish is "quintessentially Canadian," everyone unanimously agreed on: Poutine! It's a funny name for a delicious dish frequently served at fast food restaurants.

Poutine isn't an involved or complicated dish that takes a lot of prep time, nor is it a ridiculous monstrosity of ever-growing flavor profiles, like many of the meals we showcase at Six-Seven-Eight. In fact, there's very little actual cooking involving, and rather just "assembling." Despite the ease of making the dish, we settled on poutine because we want to sample flavors and methods of cooking that are outside our normal purview. While Canada has plenty of high-end French inspired dishes, we'll save that sort of meal for when the world tour hits France.

The basic idea of poutine is to combine a variety of junk foods into one heavy and satisfying dish. To start off, a bed of crinkle fries are laid down in a bowl. We frequently make our own fries by slicing potatoes and adding seasoning, and generally bake them instead of frying them to avoid all the fat, but for poutine we wanted something that was more like a greasy fast-food meal. Here we're using Ore Ida extra crispy fries, which we fried in vegetable oil until perfectly crunchy.

The next layer of poutine is an ingredient we've never used before: cheese curds! After a bit of searching we could only find this at one grocery store and only in a much larger package than we expected, but the work was worth it, because these are delicious. Note that these are fresh cheese curds, not the fried variety that are typically sold by street vendors or at fairs. Now that we know the glory of the curd, which has a different flavor and texture than normal cheddar, we'll definitely be using them in other dishes, and we may even try making our own.

To finish off a perfect bowl of poutine, the fries and cheese curds are covered in a steaming layer of beef gravy. We usually only make our own gravy from the pan drippings of whole turkey, so this time we used a jarred, store-bought variety.

Although a pretty simple dish that doesn't take any skill to put together, poutine is absolutely delicious. It's a salty snack, although not overwhelmingly so, and combines several different savory and heavy flavors in a very satisfying way.  This isn't finger food - be sure to bring a fork to the table! The American equivalent of Poutine would probably be the diner favorite of cheese fries with bacon bits. The next time we try poutine I'd like to change it up by going with a thicker gravy.

Since poutine didn't have nearly as many steps as the Mexico stop of our culinary world tour, we'll also be covering another heavy and savory dish we recently constructed (although this one doesn't have a Canadian connection). For regular readers, you may remember when I made an absolutely insane chicken sandwich back in 2010, inspired by the show "Man Vs. Food." Now that we've got some new tools and methods of cooking under our belts, we revisited this monstrously messy concoction and dubbed it the "insani-which!"  Here's the basic ingredients: sesame buns, chicken thighs, macaroni and cheese (use the "thick and creamy" kind, not the regular kind), bacon, and breaded seafood. Last time we used popcorn shrimp, but for this go around I wanted to try breaded clams instead, which are longer and skinnier.

The chicken thighs are the base of the sandwich, and they need to be as flavorful as possible to compete with all the other ingredients. To make a perfect sandwich chicken thigh, I removed the skin and then covered the outer layer of the meat in a homemade rub consisting of garlic powder, onion powder, pepper, ghost pepper salt, sugar, and Mrs. Dash chipotle seasoning.

The whole thigh needs to be bursting with flavor though, so we went to the next level by injecting the meat with a mixture of buffalo sauce, liquid smoke, and melted butter. To see how we've been injecting meat, check out our previous blog on making a Hawaiian pineapple pork roast. The leftover buffalo mixture was then spooned over the meat, and the chicken was baked in the oven. Thighs are usually fairly tender, but to ensure it didn't get tough and remained flavorful, I pulled them out, flipped them over, and basted with extra sauce halfway through the cook time.

Here I'm assembling the sandwich, laying down a chicken thigh, the cooked macaroni and cheese, several clams, and two hearty strips of bacon. Between the macaroni and cheese and saucy chicken you don't strictly need a condiment on the bun, but if you want to add one, go with mayo, extra buffalo sauce, or horseradish by a spicier kick.

The end result is amazingly messy, but also amazingly tasty!  It's not a food to eat while watching your waistline, but if taste is your end goal, this sandwich can't be beat.

Now that we've sampled poutine, a Canadian dish we'd never normally get to eat at home, the culinary world tour will be marching on to it's next stop: Greenland.

That's all the cooking adventures we've got for you today, but check back in again soon as we continue trying new methods of grilling ribs, making savory restaurant favorites at home, turning cheap food into extraordinary meals worth raving about, and an upcoming look at several different ways to create out-of-this-world potato salad!

Grilling Season '12: Turkey And Pork Burgers

Living in Montana, we've got to get as much grilling in as we can while the weather holds, as it's not uncommon for a sunny and hot day to be followed by rain or snow the next. We unfortunately went through that phenomenon recently when an unexpected temperature drop and sprinkling of snow forced us to switch gears and cook beef ribs in the oven.

Despite the schizophrenic weather patterns, we've still managed to get in several great grill sessions. For some of our recent exploits, check out some amazingly tasty pork baby back ribs and our first attempt at making a homemade smoky raspberry BBQ sauce.

Burgers are a classic of grilling, but we generally only make beef burgers a handful of times over the summer, instead opting for some more exciting and less traditional options. Here we'll take a look at two different varieties: spicy chipotle turkey burgers, and pineapple-apple pork burgers.

For turkey burgers, we start off with chopped white onion, fresh cilantro, and some chili in adobo sauce. For more on adobo sauced marinated chilis, check out our pepper comparison guide.

Just like with a beef burger that has extra seasonings added in, the ground turkey is mixed together gently with the onion, cilantro, and chili.

After ensuring all the ingredients are mixed together well, the turkey is formed into circular patties by hand.

The grill is going hot and the coals are almost ready. We're also having potato packets (read more about these fun side dishes here!) along with our burgers. Because the packets take much longer than the turkey burgers, I've got them inside the grill while the coals are still flaming and heating up.

After the fire has died and the coals are properly white-hot, we lay down the turkey burger patties and start to take in the amazing smells of grilling.

About 10 minutes later we flip these low-fat but high-taste burgers over to reveal some great grill marks and a nice layer of char.

And here's the finished burgers along with the still steaming potato packets, which are still heating up before being opened.

A spicy turkey patty can be put together like any other burger, using mayo, mustard, ketchup, etc. This time I went with some of our homemade guacamole (check out our guide to making guacamole) along with a few dabs of hot sauce.

Next up I'm piling on some colby jack cheese and a squiggle of standard ketchup for that familiar burger flavor.

Here's my finished plate, complete with delicious potatoes and peppers ready to be dipped into more ketchup.

The turkey burgers are fantastic, but sometimes we want something without the spicy kick and with a different texture - which is where pork burgers come in. To pay proper homage to this unusual burger meat, we're going to take things to a different level by using some Hawaiian inspired sweet ingredients. For this burger, we're starting with diced green apple and some sweet onion.

Like before, the meat is mixed together thoroughly and then formed into perfect burger shaped patties.

Unfortunately these burgers didn't hold their form together as well, as you can see by the one poor burger that fell apart in the upper-left corner. To combat that nonsense we layed down an extra grill cover so nothing fell through the cracks.

Besides the green apple and sweet onion, these burgers also get topped with grilled fresh pineapple slices! We always try to interconnect our meals by ensuring any ingredients we buy can be used for multiple dinners, so to check out what was done with the rest of the pineapple, take a gander at our pineapple pork roast. You can also see at the bottom the corn on the cob grilling inside tin foil underneath the burgers.

Now that everything has reached perfection on the grill, we've got our burgers, pineapple slices, and corn ready to be served up.

Cooked up on the grill, the thick pineapple slice is actually very tender and still a bit on the juicy side, adding a perfect flavor and texture to the sweet pork.

Here's my finished burger and corn on the cob, about to be messily devoured. Although very different from a beef burger, the flavor and consistency of these pork variants are fantastic, and I highly recommend them if you'd like to try something outside the norm.

The weather has unfortunately turned again, so while we wait out a few days of rain we'll take some time to cook inside and create a wide range of amazing meals.  Coming soon you'll see the Canadian entry in our culinary world tour, making our own onion rings and corn dogs, and more ways to jazz up cheap and ordinary food into extraordinary dishes.