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Watch Steven Smoke Seafood to Perfection
If you've been following our blog lately, you know that we've been compiling recipes and tips to help you take advantage of October's spectacular food holidays. National Pizza Month brought out our frugal side, while National Pork Month and National Sausage Month had us reexamining our most popular recipes and keeping it fresh with new twists on the classics. In honor of National Seafood Month this October, we'd rather watch the recipes come to life than read about them. Words...
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7 Steps to Grilling Nirvana
Grilling is the world’s oldest and most universal cooking method, practiced in virtually every country and culture on six continents (seven if you consider the cookouts staged by grill-obsessed scientists in Antarctica). Today’s grillers face a staggering number of decisions, from which grill and accessories to buy, to selecting the best fuel and cooking method. (There are actually five different grilling methods, each with its own unique cooking properties. And that’s before you get to specialized grilling techniques, such as plancha grilling and planking.) Of course, you need to know...
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4 Ways to Use Coffee To Up Your Barbecue Game
O Coffee how we love thee! Strong coffee and espresso have helped us survive long overnight smoke sessions and clear early morning mental fog enough to prep a brisket for an all-day cook. Perhaps it is the reliance on caffeine that inspired the first barbecuers to use coffee in their recipes. Whatever the reason that introduced coffee to the barbecue scene, it has been a happy marriage between the two. Have YOU tried coffee in your barbecue routine? There are several...
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Courage! First Timer’s Brisket
What? It couldn’t possibly be 5:00 a.m. already, could it? (I’d gone to bed around 1 a.m.) But my phone alarm affirmed it was time to face one of the biggest challenges of my barbecue life: cooking not one, but three whole packer briskets for the finale of a week-long family reunion. And if I’ve learned anything from being Steven Raichlen’s assistant for many years, it’s this: When smoking, allow more time than you think you’ll need. Especially if...
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Happy Anniversary to Barbecue! Bible
If you happen to visit the Smithsonian Museum of American History, you’ll find an exhibit on a uniquely American institution: the backyard barbecue. And if you happen to tour that backyard barbecue exhibit, you will see, next to James Beard’s Complete Book of Barbecue & Rotisserie Cooking (published in 1954), and the Sunset Barbecue Cook Book (1958), a book near and dear to my heart: The Barbecue! Bible, written by yours truly and published by Workman in 1998. Which makes this the 20th anniversary for the book that got me into barbecue. (Yikes—two decades have passed already?!) And an unexpected but much appreciated honor for a book that wasn’t supposed...
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Outrageous and Fun: Fair Food to Grill At Home
Forget cotton candy, caramel corn, and funnel cakes. If you’ve been to a fair or festival recently—the national calendar is clogged with dates in August and September—you know food offered on the midway has veered into “freak show” territory. Fried nuggets of pure butter, beer-battered dill pickles stuffed with hot dogs, and even deep-fried Kool-Aid. (Don’t ask.) With nearly everything on a stick. I couldn’t help myself: I started trolling newspapers, blogs, and the food press to find the most outrageous fair-type foods that could be replicated...
Read more →Eat Your Words
Remembering Jonathan Gold
I never met Jonathan in person. But his writing was so personal and intimate and his advice generously given and spot on, I felt in some sense I knew him. Jonathan Gold was the restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times, of course, and he passed away earlier this week at the way-too-young age of 57. Actually, to identify him solely as a restaurant critic would be like calling Shakespeare a scriptwriter or Picasso a dauber of paint. Jonathan had a bloodhound’s nose for sniffing out authentic cuisine...
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Add a Kick to Your Grill – Jalapeno Cheddar Sausages from Southside Market
This post is brought to you by Southside Market & Barbeque, which provided advertising support. Summer is prime grilling time for many reasons—perhaps most prevalently as a way to bring friends and family together during a backyard party. For many grilling enthusiasts, however, the main reason has been to keep your kitchen cool during the hot summer months. Remove the oven from the equation, and enjoy the sun on your face...
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Raichlen’s Top Grill and BBQ Restaurants You Must Visit
Book tour is hard work. Eight cities in ten days? That kind of hard work. But it definitely has its perks, and one of them is discovering new restaurants where the wood fires burn bright and the food comes to the table the way I like it: slow-smoked over smoldering hickory or grilled over blazing oak or mesquite. So midway through the year seems like a great time to share some of my best finds for 2018. Do you have a great grill restaurant or barbecue find in your area? Share it on my Facebook page, via Twitter, or on the Barbecue Board....
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Ultimate Vegan Barbecue: The Secret to Grilling Tofu
Shhh. Don’t tell anyone—especially not our hardcore carnivore friends—but I have been know to eat grilled tofu. Willingly. Even with gusto. So it’s with pleasure that I introduce fellow Workman Publishing authors Nadine Horn and Jörg Mayer, the writers behind VBQ—The Ultimate Vegan Barbecue Cookbook. The authors are not only vegetarians. They're vegan, which in some BBQ circles makes them heretics. But listen up, because they also have the chops when they fire up the...
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