Curious about making restaurant-quality beef ribs at home? Steve Nestor shares his experience with Prime Beef Short Ribs in this guide. He walks us through the simple steps of seasoning and smoking these impressive cuts, resulting in tender meat with a flavorful bark.
Grilling is simultaneously the easiest and trickiest method of cooking. Easy because basically all you do is cook the food over the fire. Tricky because every fire, every grill, and every grill session is different, and a million factors—from the weather to the particular cut of meat—influence the final outcome. In a nutshell, it all boils down to you learning to control the fire—not have it control you.
Over the years, I’ve grilled every imaginable food over just about every grill out there, and I’ve answered thousands of questions about barbecuing and grilling. Here are 12 tips to help you rock your grill this summer.
Since my book How to Grill was released, some pit masters have embraced a method for smoke-roasting ribs that relies less on intuition and more on a simple-to-follow formula explained before, the 3-2-1 approach. This is very successful with spareribs, which are larger and tougher than baby backs. If using the latter, consider smoking the baby backs for 2 hours, foiling for 1 hour, and finishing over indirect heat for 1 hour. (For more rib wisdom, check out my book Best Ribs Ever.)
Today, I want to introduce Planet Barbecue to Oscareware Grill Toppers. They have been making outdoor cooking accessories since 1989. They offer a range of grill toppers that include their porcelain-coated, disposable, and round grill toppers. The porcelain grill topper was the original and is still one of Oscarware’s most popular products.
The Oscarware Grill Topper was perfect for a dish my wife and I enjoy. We call it grilled shrimp bowls. It is just grilled shrimp, veggies, avocado, and rice. We mix up the veggies based on what is at the store or fresh from our garden.
Brisket. Few words have the power to make you palpitate, salivate, and levitate. Whether smoked in a pit, braised by a grandmother, or simmered for half a day by a Vietnamese pho master, brisket ranks among the world’s most revered meats.
Brisket’s been part of my life almost from the moment I started eating solid food. For decades, it was the centerpiece of the holiday dinners that took place at my grandparents’ home. My aunt Annette’s brisket was always the highlight of the meal. (Find her recipe on page 132 of my book, The Brisket Chronicles.)
As most backyard grillers know, the price of America’s favorite beefsteaks has risen dramatically in the past few years. Rib-eyes, New York strips, tenderloin, and even the humble chuck steak appear on family menus less often than they once did. But you and your grill grates needn’t despair: Just in time for Memorial Day cookouts, we’d like to introduce you to our favorite underappreciated cuts.
Today is National Barbecue Day—a holiday near and dear to my heart. After all, I’ve spent the better part of my adult life dedicated to barbecue—cooking it, eating it, researching it, writing about it, making TV shows about it, and generally marveling at barbecue’s ability to assuage our hunger, feed our communities, and soothe our souls.
If I have a personal Barbecue Day, it would be in November, not May, for that’s when my formal relationship with live fire cooking began. I remember exactly where I was sitting, what I was wearing, the place, the time, and the weather. I was working on a book on low-fat cooking—a far cry from what I do now! Time slowed down, as it does in portentous life moments. I heard a voice, as though from heaven. It gave me a simple order—drum roll, please. “Steven Raichlen—follow the fire.”
For years, I’ve extolled the virtues of cooking burgers on the grill (preferably over a wood fire), and for years I’ve warned against pressing those burgers with the flat part of a spatula (an act often practiced by people with Y chromosomes that squeezes the luscious meat juices onto the coals).
But there’s one burger that does better on a griddle than a grill and that absolutely thrives when pressed. You guessed it: the smash burger.
Taking St. Louis ribs to the next level using some awesome products from the Texas Pepper Jelly Company. We’re talking rubbing those ribs down with their spice blends, smoking them over apple wood, spritzing them with a zesty vinegar and rib candy mixture as they smoke. Good stuff!
Just released! Beer-can chicken is startlingly simple; grill a chicken upright over an open can to make crispy, succulent chicken of unmatched flavor. Once learned, the barbecue cook can apply this technique to endless variations: Cola-Can Chicken, Ginger Ale Chicken, Iced Tea Chicken, and more.
Written by award-winning, multimillion copy bestselling author Steven Raichlen—the expert who wrote The Barbecue Bible!—BEER-CAN CHICKEN: Foolproof Recipes for the Crispiest, Crackliest, Smokiest, Most Succulent Birds You’ve Ever Tasted (Workman Publishing; April 23, 2024; $24.99; paperback) is an updated classic: revised, redesigned, and beautifully photographed for a new generation of grillers. Raichlen, who brought beer can cooking into the American mainstream 20 years ago, offers 50 recipes for inventive variations on this ultimate chicken grilling technique, plus brilliant recipes for birds off the can, perfect sides, and even desserts!
Do you have a favorite restaurant, food truck, or burger joint (or even a fond memory of one) that makes outstanding burgers, burgers that are uncommonly, inexplicably good? “Wait a minute,” you think. “I make good burgers at home. Why don’t they taste like this?” The answer? Because many of these chefs and chef-like ground beef greats have a few tricks up their sleeves. Read on, and you’ll be privy to “secrets” that will have the guests at your table murmuring, “Best burger…ever!”
In our experience, the serious practitioners of barbecue always have a few tricks up their sleeves. Below, we share with you some of the most useful we’ve collected, along with several recipes to back them up.
