The best "baloney samwitch"
you ever ate.
Smoked Canadian Back Loin
per Mike Mills
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Canadian Back Loin
(Bologna Bullet)
When we lived in Germany we fell in love with
the "biergarten food". It's the simple stuff that is served in virtually every biergarten in the
country. This stuff is waaaay better than the "pub food" you get in the UK. One of the staples
is a garlicky sausage that we took to calling "the best bologna you ever ate in your entire life".
It's almost always served with a bowl of mustard and potato salad. This is our attempt to reproduce
this in sandwich form.
You start with the whole Bologna bullet,
unwrapped, peeled and heavily layered with a good rib rub.
Set the sausage on the indirect side of the
grill and smoke it at 250 to 300 for three hours.
Move it over the coals, brush it with BBQ
sauce, and roll it around until the outside is charred.
Slice it thick and serve it on buns, or by
itself with mustard and potato salad. It's great either hot or cold. You'll have enough for lunches
all week and it fries up with eggs for breakfast. A perfect food.
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Smoked pork chop with
caramelized apples, potato
onion pancakes and red cabbage
Set up an indirect heat zone with
a lot of smoke until the internal
temp is 140. Then finish them
over direct coals for color and flavor
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Smoked Pork Chops German style
If you can find some really nice thick pork
chops and you know the quality is good, here's a very traditional German preparation that we love.
The basics for this recipe come from the Culinary Institute of America's handbook: The Professional
Chef, which (if you can afford it) is a wonderful reference.
Let the chops come to room temperature and
liberally season with salt and freshly ground pepper. Start your indirect fire on the left
side using a normal load. Add a couple handfuls of wood chips (I used cherry for this
dish) and set the vents so you get a 250 to 300° intensely smokey chamber. Put a drip pan
under the meat to make cleanup easier. Flip the chops once during the smoking process and don't
let the internal temp of the meat go over 140°.
The side dishes really have to stand up to
the sweet pork flavor and smoke, so I chose some potato pancakes that
were about 1/3 onion and 2/3 potato with a little flour and egg to bind it together. I browned
them in peanut oil (which really seems to compliment the flavor or potatoes) and drained them on
paper towels before serving.
The apples on top were simply Granny Smiths,
sauteed with butter and brown sugar until just thick and caramelized.
For the red cabbage braise, start with a sautee
of apples and onions along with chopped bacon for a fat, add the chopped red cabbage, red
wine, red wine vinegar, sugar, currant jelly, and enough water to come up about a third of the way.
Add a bay leaf, whole clove and cinnamon stick, and finish it in the oven until the cabbage is
how you like it.
When the side dishes are done, throw the chops
over some live fire to finish off both sides, just enough to brown them and add that final touch
of flavor. The center of the chop should be just barely rosy pink and almost sweet and
juicy. The outside should be smokey and browned. An amazing contrast of flavor.
Serve in a stack: cabbage on the bottom, potato
pancake next, then a chop. Pour on the apples and add a green side
dish.
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An Easter ham with all the
Betty Crocker touches -
Pineapple, cherries, apricot glaze
the whole nine yards.
We smoked it for three hours with
apple wood chips, then glazed it
and finished it in the oven.
I can't ever seem to find a real
smoked ham anymore. So I
usually buy a good quality ham
and smoke it myself. You
won't believe how much better
this is until you try it.
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Easter Ham
For Easter this year we had a big crew over after church and decided to go all out
with a perfect 1950's style over the top, impress the troops ham
extravaganza.
Most of the hams you get today seem to be either way too salty, or are fatty meat
that is plumped up with some kind of salty jelly stuff.
But even if you get a good ham, they have an obvious lack of smokey taste -- nothing
like a real smoked ham should have. Here's how to take a store-bought ham to the limit.
We got a good quality pre-cooked bone-in ham from the local warehouse club, washed
off the exterior salt crud, and scored it with a knife in the traditional diamond pattern.
Then I stuck it full of whole cloves.
Next it went on the indirect side of the grill at around 225° for three
hours.
I started it early in the morning and added apple wood chips every half hour until a
medium load of charcoal had burned out and the outside was very nicely smoked after three
hours.
Once it was smoked, I put it in a small cooler to tenderize and
moisturize until we started preparing our traditional Easter side dishes.
About two hours before mealtime, we made it fancy. Using toothpicks (don't
use the ones that have food coloring in them, which I found out the hard way) stick
on pineapple slices and cherries until it looks like a Carmen Miranda hat. Then glop on a
thick glaze made of apricot jam, brown sugar, gray mustard and frozen orange juice
concentrate.
Put it in a 375 oven in an open pan. Re-glaze it every 20 minutes or so until
the outside is almost burned, but perfectly caramelized and thick.
Let it rest for 20 minutes before you slice it across the grain. Use the
fruit as a garnish on the serving platter.
This was a genuine revelation. I've never had a ham this good.
Period.
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