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!

Thousand Island Dressing

After having fantastic success with making homemade barbecue sauces and rubs, the next logical step was to try out making our own salad dressings as well. While Megan generally likes ranch or poppy seed dressing, thousand island is my go-to option. Below you can see the ingredients we used for our homemade version (ignore the beef ribs in the background - those were thawing for a later meal that will be covered in another blog coming soon). The basic components are mayo, ketchup, apple cider vinegar, sugar, hot sauce, relish, onion, and salt and pepper.

For the base of the dressing, mix together the mayo, ketchup, relish, seasonings, and hot sauce until it's all well blended.

Then throw in some finely diced onion (a little for just some flavor, a lot to change the texture and make the dressing thicker), a handful of sugar, and a few dashes of the cider vinegar. Mix it all together until it reaches the consistency and color you want. If it isn't quite the dark pink you'd like, either throw in paprika or more ketchup. To add another dimension to the flavor, put in a few squirts of liquid smoke.

While it can be fun to just dip croutons into thousand island, I wanted to use it as a spread and as a salad dressing. First up I decided to put together a turkey sandwich using the thousand island instead of normal condiments like mustard or mayo.

Any sandwich worth the name needs a nice bunch of fresh lettuce, along with some slices of delicious cheese. In this case I went with sharp cheddar, but anything will do - swiss, provolone, or pepper jack are all great options.

For some crunch I also put on a few strips of crispy bacon. On the other side of the bread is shaved turkey from the deli and an extra dollop of the thousand island for more flavor.

Here's the finished sandwich, cut in half and served with some of our delicious Italian style potato salad. While we haven't covered making that version of the American classic yet, you can check out our recent blog entry covering how to make traditional veggie and chicken bacon ranch potato salads.

Next up I decided to make a "double-decker" veggie burger, using both a "Grillers Prime" and "Mushroom Lover's" patty from Morningstar Farms.

Topping my deluxe veggie burger will be cooked cabbage, green bell pepper, white onion, and green onion. I've also liberally sprinkled on southwest seasonings and garlic powder.

After the cabbage and other veggies are sufficiently soft they get put on the first veggie patty, while some swiss cheese topped the second.

Each side of the bread is getting smothered in a different condiment - root beer barbecue sauce on the left, and then thousand island on the right. We've actually made several new barbecue sauces recently, including root beer, orange, and black cherry. Blogs on how to make those delicious sauces are coming soon, and in the mean time you can catch the low down on how we made smoky raspberry BBQ sauce here.

The excess vegetables are layered on one side of the bread, along with a few slices of tomato.

Here's the first veggie patty starting the bottom layer of the nearly-finished burger creation.

And after adding on the second patty with the cheese, this delicious sandwich/burger creation is ready for eating!

Of course, I didn't just slather my thousand island on sandwiches, as it also saw some normal usage - as salad dressing!

You might notice there's no meat on that plate - that's because a rack of delicious root beer ribs was added on next, and we haven't quite gotten to that blog yet (but it's coming soon)!  Check back soon for a range of amazing meals we've put together recently, including new ways to cook ribs, ranch injected whole chicken, a crazy good pork southwest salad, flaky quiches, hearty breakfasts, and much more.

Grilling Season '12: The Double Pork Rollup

Burgers and ribs are classic barbecue fare, but there's a whole lot more that can be done with a grill and some charcoal. This summer we're challenging ourselves to try as many different kinds of grilled meals as possible, and one of our most recent adventures involves a double dosage of pork. This rolled-up meal takes inspiration from two different sources: bacon wrapped meat, and cream cheese stuffed jalapenos. We decided to blend the two ideas together, and it ended up being a match made in heaven.

To start off with, we put together what's going to be the stuffing of the double pork rollup. Our first ingredients are roasted red and yellow bell peppers. If you ever see a recipe calling for roasted peppers, you don't have to buy an expensive jar at the store. Instead, cut a bell pepper in half and flatten it out on a baking sheet, and then set the oven to "broil." Leave the oven door slightly open and broil for 5 - 10 minutes until the skin is blackened.

After the peppers have had time to cool, the skin is pulled off and they are cut into thin slices. There's plenty more going inside the pork though - here we're chopping up both jalapenos and artichoke hearts.

Stuffed peppers or meats frequently have an outer breading or are coated with bread crumbs. To simulate that, we put butter crackers into a plastic bag and then rolled a rolling pin over it to create a fine crushed powder that tastes much better than normal bread crumbs.

For the main layer of meat we're using several large pork chops. To reduce on the cooking time and increase the surface area we can't keep them this thick, however.

Using a meat mallet, Megan pounded out the pork chops, which reduces their thickness. This can be a messy process though, so to keep it simple and clean the chops are placed between two layers of plastic wrap.

For the "double" part of the double pork roll-up we're going to wrap the chops in bacon. The roll-up creation starts in earnest by laying down a layer of tin foil and then placing strips of bacon on the foil.

Now that the pork chops are properly flattened they are going over the bacon. Here we've layed down the first two pieces.

And here all the pork is now covering the bacon on the fin foil layer. When the tin foil finally gets rolled up it will result in a meat roll with bacon on the outside and pork chops on the inside.

Don't forget about those stuffing ingredients we put together! Here we've got a layer of cream cheese and the crushed crackers.

Finishing the roll are the roasted bell peppers, the jalapenos, and the artichoke hearts. The entire thing is then tightly rolled together.

When cooking thick meats (or in this case, several layers of thin meat), you want to use indirect heat instead of direct flame so it cooks evenly without burning on the edges. For indirect heat, spread your coals out onto two sides of the grill, leaving an empty strip in the middle.

After turning several times and being cooked over the course of an hour, we opened up the tin foil to see how things were progressing inside.

Besides just the flavors of the meat and veggies, we're brushing on a sauce as well consisting of mustard, honey, and beer.

As you can see below, unfortunately the roll-up started to unravel. While this didn't change the amazing taste or texture, it did mess up the presentation a bit (although this still looks pretty on it's own - it's amazing how much it resembles a sub sandwich made completely out of meat!)

Although there were vegetables inside the roll-up, we still wanted a side salad to complete our meal. To put together a perfectly topped salad, we sliced up tomato, bell pepper, peperoncini, green onions, and avocado.

This is the base of my salad, where the vegetables are starting to get layered on before adding the dressing.

I prefer thousand island on my salad (and even made my own recently - which will be covered in an upcoming blog), while Megan goes for Ranch instead.

To complete my salad, I've tossed on some wasabi peas and the leftover cheese curds from the poutine we made during the Canadian stop of our culinary world tour.

Remember how the roll-up came apart a bit before? Unfortunately this prevented us from putting the roll on direct heat for the last few minutes of cooking to get the bacon crispy. We ended up finishing the roll-up under the broiler to crisp up the outer edge of bacon. You can also see kitchen twine in the picture below where we tried to "patch up" the meat to cook directly above the flame, but by that point the roll was falling apart too much to salvage.

We primarily use this twine for tying up whole chicken or turkey, and to see how it's utilized in the kitchen check out our Easter chickens, lemon chicken baked inside a dough crust, or orange injected chicken.

While it didn't end up as pretty as we'd hoped due to overstuffing and unraveling, it still smelled amazing and retained it's basic shape.

Here I've cut up several slices to get laid on a plate next to the side salad. To get the right presentation next time we'll use thicker bacon and put twine on from the beginning so the roll doesn't unwrap during the cooking process.

Here's my finished plate, filled to the brim with piping hot veggies and a double helping of delicious pork, along with a delicious and filling salad.

As this year's grilling season continues we'll soon be covering ribs injected with homemade root beer barbecue sauce, more unique twists on traditional potato salad, and the continuation of our culinary "world tour" as it heads to Greenland. Check back soon for more cooking at Six-Seven-Eight!