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Cooking meat outdoors

How should meat be cooked outdoors?


  • Total voters
    45

fatprop

George Gregan (70)
Staff member
Yep, I have eaten plenty of the stuff (unfortunately) it is a blight of the modern restaurants (I would eat out at least 50 times a year at decent restaurants) Restaurants like it because it maximises yield and gives the kitchen more control.

Let me have a piece of meat pan fried/roasted while being properly basted in plenty of butter any day
 

I like to watch

David Codey (61)
Yep, I have eaten plenty of the stuff (unfortunately) it is a blight of the modern restaurants (I would eat out at least 50 times a year at decent restaurants) Restaurants like it because it maximises yield and gives the kitchen more control.

Let me have a piece of meat pan fried/roasted while being properly basted in plenty of butter any day
nothing better than cooking fish or duck in the bag,then finishing it off in the pan to crisp the skin or render the fat.
Best of both worlds IMO.
 

Baldric

Jim Clark (26)
Yep, I have eaten plenty of the stuff (unfortunately) it is a blight of the modern restaurants (I would eat out at least 50 times a year at decent restaurants) Restaurants like it because it maximises yield and gives the kitchen more control.

Let me have a piece of meat pan fried/roasted while being properly basted in plenty of butter any day


I agree with you completely. I have tried putting a decent cut of steak in and the result was dissapointing. It is better to cook your good cuts in a pan or a grill. BUT, take a cheaper cut and put it in the sous vide for a lengthy time and you will have the most the most delicious piece of meat that you have ever tasted. Restaurants use them to make it easy to prepare meals and its wrong.
 

fatprop

George Gregan (70)
Staff member
I agree with you completely. I have tried putting a decent cut of steak in and the result was dissapointing. It is better to cook your good cuts in a pan or a grill. BUT, take a cheaper cut and put it in the sous vide for a lengthy time and you will have the most the most delicious piece of meat that you have ever tasted. Restaurants use them to make it easy to prepare meals and its wrong.


The issue I have with lessor cuts being boiled in a bag is that the fat isn't rendered, it just becomes gelatinous. I have the same issue with slow cookers for the same reason.

But I do a great pulled pork, 14 hours on the BBQ foiled in a tray set up for indirect heat, the shoulder renders down wonderfully. (cook it on a trivet of pork bones adding stock as needed, let the gravy cool and scrape of the 1/2 inch of congealed fat off the top and you end up with an intense gravy as well, )
 

Tex

John Thornett (49)
I'm picking up a new (2nd hand, but you know what I mean) Weber on Sunday. It'll be good to use a working kettle as the last one had its vent fins bent all out of shape. Made it a nightmare to control temperatures.
 

Tex

John Thornett (49)
Any action in these parts gents?

Re-upped my stock of smoking wood for the coming months. I've mainly stuck to salmon and trout, but feel the need for a proper meat hoedown.

I got all gourmet a few months ago and put in some serious hours. Sauces from scratch, brining, marinading, smoking, grilling - the works. Smoked ox cheek with marrow and horseradish on toast, hot wings, and some smoked knransky. Was a fuck load of effort but a show stopping result.

Recipes from here: http://www.amazon.com/Pitt-Cue-Co-Cookbook-Adams/dp/1845337565/?tag=serieats-20
 

Tex

John Thornett (49)
@Paarlbok seems to have gone AWOL so I'll keep kicking this bad boy down the road.

We're spending the long weekend camping and I've decided to take the weber with and will be making some slow cooked/smoked pulled pork.

My mate is one-upping me and is bringing a spit for some riverside lamb souvlakis.

God I love camping!

Provided the dogs don't eat the meat and major disasters are avoided, I'll post some pics next week. Maybe that'll be enough to restart the posts about braais from SA!
 

Tex

John Thornett (49)
In between the swarms of blow flies and the steady stream of cold beer I didn't snap any usable pics of the process. Shame!

But it was such a resounding success that we conceived a future event, title Meat and Malt which will essentially be an afternoon of cooking meat and tasting alcohols of various complexion.

So yes, a barbecue. Revolutionary I know!
 

The_Brown_Hornet

John Eales (66)
Ah this thread, one of my favourites. About 18 months ago I got a smoker (Fornetto Razzo) and the 'ole meat outdoors has never been quite the same. On the weekend I did a smoked lamb leg with rosemary and garlic and bugger me if it wasn't delicious. I followed it with a sous vide block of pork scotch fillet and then over the flame to finish it off. Grouse.
 

Tex

John Thornett (49)
Good on you for digging it out Brown Hornet. It's a nice change from the doom and gloom of the rugby threads.

Winter time means curing meat. I'll do some bacon, pancetta and guanciale in the coming week. Had some excellent wins in this area last year. The pic is from the last batch of pancetta; used a basic salt/pepper rub on some, and bought a commercial spice blend from Gerwurzhaus for the other. Delicious and decadent.

A mate attempted a salami day last winter and buggered it up. Got all the right ingredients, then got lax (IMO) with the hygiene while prepping, and quite possibly didn't hang them in an ideal environment. Ended up with green and black mold, which is as welcome as a fart in an elevator. He's talking about doing it again but I'm cautious about letting someone who 'goes by the vibe' when it comes to preparation take the lead again.
 

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Tex

John Thornett (49)
It's too much of a pain in the arse to transfer photos from phone to this website so I'll stick with a written update.

I visited the local butcher and bought wayyyyy too much meat. 2kg of loin for bacon, 2kg of belly for pancetta.

The old Italian guys who own it gave me the third degree on my process and recipes but in the end I got the tick of approval. Basically I'm doing the following:

Pancetta
  1. skin removed
  2. dry cure mixed, consisting of 2g/kg of sodium nitrite ('cause nobody wants botulism), 15g/kg salt, 8g/kg brown sugar. I used a liberal amount of salt and sugar but was very precise with the nitrites
  3. meat placed in a large ziplock bag and rubbed with the cure
The curing will take 3-4 days. The cure will leech a fair bit of liquid from the meat and the resulting brine will be sloshed around the belly twice daily. Tomorrow night I'll probably take it out, soak it in tap water for an hour then leave it to dry in the fridge for 24 hours. After that it gets another spice rub (no salt) and hung in the shed for a few weeks or until it smells too good to ignore.


Bacon
  1. skin and bones removed from the loin roast, fat cap retained. Probably called a 'Canadian' cut of bacon, i.e. loin only, without the belly part attached
  2. brine made (dissolved salt and sugar in water, plus coriander seeds, bay leaves, nutmeg, lemon rind), mixed with water at a 1:4 ratio
  3. loin immersed in the brine in the fridge for 3 days, where on Friday morning I'll take it out and rinse with red wine (because why not?!), then leave it to dry in the fridge
Saturday I'll dust off the Weber, glaze the bacon with some maple syrup, then smoke it with apple wood chunks for an hour or two at 100c.

Voila.
 

Tex

John Thornett (49)
oztimmay doesn't know where I live but I'm expecting him to come knocking at some stage in the next fortnight
 
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