Tag Archives: barbecue

Nice Buns: Cha Siu Bao (steamed Chinese Pork Buns)

So I’ve come across a few recipes for cha siu bao in the past few months and thought, this is fascinating.  Sure the closest I’ve ever gotten to actually seeing one in my own life was while watching Hayao Miyazaki films.  That doesn’t matter.  I could make these.

The pound-plus of barbecue pulled pork meat I had leftover from slowcooking on Saturday lent itself pretty well to my plan today to make these buns.  I also maybe cheated just a tiny bit by buying a fresh ball of pizza dough from the store instead of making my own.  I won’t apologize for that, though; it speeded up the process AND you know how much I hate to knead dough. But either way, they were pretty easy to make!  And quite tasty.  The great thing is that you make quite a few with a recipe and you can very easily make and freeze them for later.  They steamed up in 15 minutes and were fabulous dunked into some extra barbecue sauce.  Josh thinks they’ll be ever better baked, and with some cheese added.  So basically what Josh wants is an empanada.   But he enjoyed them anyway.

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BBQ 2: Delicious Boogaloo

Sure we just had barbecue last night and perhaps if we were lesser mortals, we’d avoid doing some version of barbecue tonight.  Ha.  Right.  We’re not average mortals.  We’re superheroes.  Wonder Twin powers, activate!  Form of…bbq beef sandwiches!

Just kidding.  Maybe.

Anyway, I put it to Josh to decide what we were having for dinner tonight, since I decided the last few times.  He suggested pasta.  Mmm.  Eh.  We do pasta a lot. But it made me think of meatballs, so I countered with “meatball sandwiches.”  And then he countered with an absolutely brililant idea–why don’t we get the butcher to thinly slice a pound of roast for us and makes barbecue beef sandwiches like I get at Pizza House? I figured sure, it would be like the cheese steaks we sometimes make, but with barbecue sauce.  Delicious.

So we did.  If you’ve never taken full advantage of having a grocery store nearby with a real butcher in it, you should.  They’re trained to do it, they can do it quickly, and they really don’t mind.  Talk to them.  They have ideas, they know what’s good—and ours today clued us in on an upcoming porkchop sale this weekend…faaaabulous.  Anyway, we asked him to just measure us out a pound of one of their great looking chuck roasts and slice it paper thin. Voila!  Perfect sandwich meat.  Time to get home and get cooking. Continue reading

OMGWTFBBQ

Barbecue.  Is quite possibly my favorite. food. of all time.  Now read it back again but like Will Shatner.

Seriously, I love barbecue.  I could eat it all the time and, like any good connoisseur, I have my opinions about what constitutes good barbecue.  For starters, throwing a chicken breast on the grill and slathering it in Open Pit is not barbecue.  Cooking ribs on a grill over very low heat for hours until soft and sumptious and falling off the bone–that’s barbecue.  Or smoking a nice meaty pork butt spiked with herbs and spices.  Mmm.  I am so hungry.

I generally only do “real” barbecue a few times a year.  Sure, about once every six weeks or so, I rub down a pork roast with spices and put it in the crockpot and after about 8 hours, introduce it to some great sauce and a good hefty bun and that’s my “barbecue” fix but it’s not the really real thing.  I only do it during the summer, because I consider the grill to be absolutely necessary for the process.  And I only do it a few times in the summer because if I’m going to do it “right,” it normally takes me about three days.

Yes.  Three days.  This tickles Josh to no end.  My usual process involves a bath in garlic, onion and olive oil, followed by a lengthy rubdown with a generous helping of homemade dry rub, followed by a day of slow cooking over low heat on the grill while delicious, tangy sauce is carefully applied at regular intervals until the meat is falling off the bones and I’m about ready to just stand there at the grill, tearing pieces off with my hands in some sort of deliciously primal haze. Continue reading

Porky's Revenge: In Pictures

(bone-in pork shoulder roast)

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(lemon, spice mix and olive oil)

x

(combine and marinate in a bag over night)

Then

(wrap tightly in tin foil and place on grill over medium heat; lower lid and cook about 4 hours)

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(barbecue pork roast!)

!