the go-to recipe

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While I always like to try out new things there is one dish that gets cooked more than any other… beer and honey marinated Pork Tenderloin. Simple and crowd pleasing.

Grab yourself a good sized pork tenderloin between 700-900g (1.5-2lbs). Smaller is ok if you can’t find a big one. Throw it into a zip-lock bag (a bowl works too but you’ll have to use more marinade). Mix together one bottle of a good dark beer (stay away from anything too bitter) and a couple tablespoons of honey. Add that too the zip-lock bag and chuck it in the fridge for a couple hours, or 45 minutes at room temp if you forgot to plan well (yeah, thats usually the route I take). If you went the cold route then make sure your pork has come back up to room temp before cooking. Set up your grill for indirect cooking. Pull the pork out of the bag and pat dry. Here you can add a dash of rub if you like, or just season with some sea salt and black pepper. Quickly sear the pork loin over the coals and then cook indirect until desired doneness. Depending on the size of the piece the total cook time should be about 35 minutes. Let it rest for 10 minutes under tinfoil before you slice it up.

This works out nicely for hungry groups because you can pack quite a few of these on the grill. You can also really play around with this by switching up the beer you use, adding a rub, mopping during the cook, different type of honey or sugar, or adding a sauce.

Care to share your go-to dish in a comment below?

bird in a bottle

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Early Bird is now bottle conditioning. After my brewday with Murphy and his so-called law I was pretty dissapointed and ready to dump this beer down the drain. I called off all extra experiments that I was going to try with this batch (no funkdafication, no bottling with maple-syrup, no oak). With much trepidation, I transfered the fermented beer to the bottling bucket and drew off a sample for the hydrometer. Much to my surprise the beer ended at 1.011 SG. I was expecting it to end lower. Still, its not the 1.016 I was hoping for but it shouldn’t be “too thin”. So not all is lost.

Flavor wise it seems to be going in the right direction. The roast level is quite nice, assertive but not astringent in any way. A nice blend of cold steeped coffee and chocolate. It was a bit hard to tell, and maybe I was hoping for it too much, but the oat malt did seem to bring some oaty flavors to the mix. In the back there was also a definite fruitiness that I assume is from the raisins but it seemed a little more cidery than it did before fermentation. You wouldn’t necessarily pick it out as raisins… at least not yet. You never know what will happen once its bottle conditioned.

To bring a little  experimentation back into this brew I decided to try out a variety of bottles. It will be nice to see if the different bottle volumes really do have an impact on the beer. I also just wanted to make the chore of bottling (I really need to start kegging) go a bit faster so I only bottled up a little over one case of normal bottles and the rest of the batch went into 75cl champagne bottles, a couple 37.5cl bottles, and one Magnum! It was my first time with the Magnum and the champagne style 75cl bottles. The Magum is quite impressive and will definitely call for a label. To finish them off I had to get out my old hand-capper (as opposed to my bench capper) for the 29mm crown caps. The capper didn’t like the thicker necks of those bottles but with a little extra persuading they seemed to go on just fine. Next time I will try my hand at corking and caging those bottles.

Barbecook Smoker vs. WSM

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Last summer there was a decent amount of traffic coming from people looking for information about the Barbecook smoker, or more importantly comparing the Barbecook Smoker and the Weber Smokey Mountain cooker (WSM). I thought I would finally write a post about this as spring comes around and fire hungry people start contemplating a purchase. Since I have thoroughly used both smokers I’ll try to offer some good comparative information.

price: There is no competition here. The Barbecook smoker retails for 69euros and can sometimes be found for 49euros. The weber retails for 299euros for the 47cm (18″) diameter or 399euros for the 57cm (22.5″) diameter. Clear win for the Barbecook.

assembly: The Barbecook is split up into 4 sections, base, two middle sections and the lid. Assembling the legs, cooking grid hooks, charcoal bowl hooks, handles, vent, and the four hinges on the two doors is a bit of a pain in the ass due to the small size, and high number of nuts and bolts. The original Barbecook smoker had a sort of twist to lock feature that secured the sections together but Barbecook has since replaced this system with some simple clips. A much needed improvement. Moving the smoker with the handles on the side is easy once the sections are locked together.

The WSM is split up into 3 sections, base, middle, and lid. To assemble the WSM you need to attach the three legs to the base and then attach 4 metal straps on the inside of the middle section. This is easliy done in a few minutes. All the bolts are easy to get to and are large enough to handle. The sections just sit on top of each other and do not lock together, and there are no side handles on the unit  so you can not just pick up the smoker and easily move it.

never move either smoker when it is in use!

build quality: The matte-black painted Barbecook Smoker is made from a very thin steel, and is prone to denting. Infact you will most likely dent or bend the sections out-of-round during assembly. The cooking grates are  made from a very small gauge wire and have a cheap looking finish that can scratch off during a good cleaning. After total assembly the unit wobbles quite a bit due to the flimsy leg construction. Most of the nuts and bolts on the unit will quickly rust.

The WSM uses a nice thicker gauge steel with a durable black enamel finish. All of the hardware is rust-resistant, strong and secure. Once the unit is assembled it feels very stable. The Weber is way ahead of the Barbecook in this category.

ease of use: Use of a chimney starter is recommended for getting the Barbecook smoker going. The lit charcoal sits on a grate in the bottom of the charcoal bowl. The only air that can get to the charcoal has to come over the top of the bowl and get sucked underneath the charcoal. Once some ash builds up under the charcoal it starts to choke the fire.  If your cook is under 5 hours or so then you can resonably control the temperature in your Barbecook smoker with the top vent and some good fire tending. If you plan on doing anything longer then you will find yourself in trouble. Unfortunately the Barbecook smoker has no control of the air coming in, only the outgoing smoke on top of the unit. Not the best way to control a fire. Measuring the temperature with the built in thermometer can be a bit misleading. I have seen many reports of the thermometer being way off, 50-100°C!

The WSM also works best when used with a chimney starter. Once the charcoal is started it is pretty easy to maintain the desired temperature by only adjusting the three vents which feed air directly to the charcoal. Under the charcoal there is plenty of room for ash so during a long cook you don’t have to worry about choking your fire. Depending on the type of charcoal you use you should be able to easily get 10-12 hours burn time before needing to add more fuel. On my WSM there is no built in thermometer but on the new models there is one. According to others the thermometer is pretty accurate but could be as far off as 5°C in some cases.

overall: The Weber is hands-down a much beter smoker. It offers great quality and is easy to use. However, it is expensive enough to make you really question purchasing it. The Barbecook Smoker won’t last for years and years but it does work and it won’t hurt your wallet. With some practice and lots of patience you should be able to smoke up some good eats… but you’ll probably have to give up hopes of smoking a whole picnic or butt.

recommendation: If you know that you like smoked food and you are an outdoor cooking nut then the Weber will not disappoint. Ease of use, quality, durability, cooking capacity and flexibility will ensure years of great meals for you and your friends.

If you are not so sure that a smoker will really be something that you’ll enjoy or if you’ll only use it once a year then the Barbecook smoker could be the right choice. It won’t last forever, but if you are careful and patient you can get some good cooks out of it. For those that like to tinker with things, you could easily improve the unit with some careful thought and a trip to the hardware store. You can get inspiration for modding your Barbecook Smoker by checking out the many ECB mods, or Brinkmann mods on the net. The WSM is also prone to be modified by some die-hards, but out of the box it already works wonders.

If you are looking for a bargain and you like to work with your hands you could look into building your own smoker. Its not that difficult. Take a look at Alton Browns smoker. Or for a little more sweat and some grinding you could put together a UDS (Ugly Drum Smoker).

Just remember, smoking is good for you!

smoke ’em if ya got ’em

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I’ve been neglecting that whole world wide web net thing for a while so I’ve been missing out on all kinds of information. Apparently a lot of people have been talking about a guy with a funny name and health care for all. Fortunately I can rely on some trusted bloggers to pick out the real important news, like Noskos over at BBQ NL. It seems that Weber is expanding their line of wood chunks and chips. Now thats news I can sink my teeth into!

The wood I’ve ben using is a mix of odds and ends… a few apple and pear logs from somebody who knows somebody, some grape-vine chunks and the Hickory and Mesquite wood chips from Weber. Now I can expand my smoke repertoire by using the new Apple, Cherry, and Pecan wood chunks! Cherry is something I’ve been really wanting to use and Pecan could be very nice. Hopefully my now official local weber retailer will carry all the new wood chunks. Previously he only sold the chips. If not, I will have to either order them from Barbecueswinkel.nl, Bbqwinqel.nl or Amazon UK.

Other exciting news (that was actually announced a long time ago) is that the line of Dizzy Pig rubs will be coming to Europe. They set up a site a while back saying that they’ll be up and running soon. Lets hope that soon really means soon because the weather will quickly become the kind that beckons you outside and forces you to feed your caveman fascination of fire. Mmmmm, fire.

have you done this before?

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That’s the question I was asking myself last sunday while I was brewing the first batch of Early Bird Breakfast Stout. The brewday didn’t exactly go as smoothly as I would have hoped. In fact I have never had such a bad brewing session. Even my very first all-grain brew went much better. Let’s just hope that the resulting beer will turn out well.

After milling the grain bill by hand (I can never get my drill to work with the Barley Crusher) I proceeded to dough-in, hoping for a mash temp of 68°C. Problem # 1: Stirring the mash I thought that it seemed a bit thick. After taking a reading of about 64°C I knew I had made a mistake somewhere. Normally this would not be a huge problem. A bit of quick math and heating up some extra water will bring the temp right up to 68°C. Done. Problem # 2: .. wait… why is it now at 65.5° C? By this time I was highly confused. The mash was now too thin to add more water and I didn’t want to bother with decoction mashing, so I just let it go at 65.5° C.

After the mashing problems I hoped that the rest of the day would go well. The first runnings came out of the tun smelling fantastic. There where some nice roasty toasty coffee and chocolate notes with a distinct oatmeal aroma. I was actually surprised that the oats came out so evident on the nose. Problem # 3: Sparging went well for the first 8-9 liters, but then the flow came to a stand still. The dreaded stuck sparge. Great, the brew day just got worse. After cutting into the grainbed I was able to eek out the rest of the wort to get my desired 25 liters. Problem # 4: Unfortunately the gravity reading was a bit high. Some more quick math told me that I needed 2 liters more water to get to the right SG. Thats when I realized the 2 liters I needed to add to get the correct SG was also why my mash looked so thick and the temp was so low. Yup, somehow I measured the strike water volume wrong.

The boil did go much better. In fact I was quite pleased with how the raisin addition went. With 20 minutes to go in the boil I placed the 225g of organic raisins in a steel pot and tapped off about 1 liter of boiling wort. A few minutes with a hand blender then puree was dumped back into the boil kettle. After the boil was done I cooled down the wort and ran it off into the bucket.  Problem # 5: I only got out about 5 liters before the run-off siezed up. Apparently the raisin bits were blocking the flow through the copper manifold. Running off the remaining 15 liters took a long time. I had to take my brew spoon and continuously run it back and forth under the edge of the manifold like windshield wipers to clear away raisin bits. I suppose a bonus is that all the raisin bits stayed in the kettle. It was also nice to see that the black raisins were now a light brown color so I can feel confident that all the raisiny goodness was pulled out of them during the boil.

The low mash temp now meant that the beer would turn out drier than I was aiming for. To adjust for this I decided that I would use a pack of Wyeast 1968 London Ale yeast (even though I had not made a starter) which is less attenuative than the US-05 I had initially planned on using. I activated the smack pack during the mash to hopefully start to wake up the yeast before throwing them in. Problem # 6: By the time my stretched out brew day was done the smack-pack had not swelled at all. Feeling quite desperate at this point I dumped it in anyways. I waited patiently for signs of fermentation. 24 hours passed by. Worry started to set in. I waited some more. 48 hours after pitching there were still no signs of anything happening. I popped open the lid and sprinkled a pack of US-05 on top of the lifeless wort. Problem # 7: Another 24 hours later there were still no signs of action in the airlock. However, there was a faint indication of something happening through the plastic bucket. The next day at work is when I remebered that the black rubber bung in the lid isn’t air tight (thats why I normally us the red ones). A couple sheets of plastic wrap and the problem was solved. The airlock is now bubbling happily.

Thats were the story ends for now. I really hope that bottling goes well or else I may just pour this beer down the drain in spite. I still have hopes for this beer though. The hydrometer sample tasted great and the recipe still looks solid to me. If it doesn’t work out this time, or if it is way too dry, then my next brew will be a re-brew of this beer. Now let’s all pray to the beer gods.

Early Bird

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In the last post I mentioned that I want to brew up a stout. It’s been a while since I’ve brewed a stout and the last one was a big boozy Belgian Imperial Stout fermented with Wyeast 3787 Trappist yeast (Westmalle yeast). It clocked in at almost 12%ABV. This time round I am looking for something more sessionable; something under 5%ABV.

I have some oat malt laying around and have been looking for an excuse to use it so I am going to brew up an Oatmeal Stout and substitute a portion of the flaked oats with the oat malt. Apparently Oat malt adds a lot more oat flavor than flaked oats. Some say it is too pungent but I am thinking that some real oat flavor may work out well here. This is what I am thinking of brewing:

expected OG 1.050
expected FG 1.013
4.8%ABV
30.5 IBU (rager formula)
expected color 27.3 SRM (71 EBC)
boil duration 60 minutes

60% Pale Ale malt
12% Munich malt
8% Flaked Oats
6% Oat malt
5% Roasted Barley
5% Chocolate malt
4% Biscuit malt

East Kent Goldings at 60min

Single infusion mash at 68C for 60 minutes

I am hoping that the biscuit will lend a nice toasty edge to the oat malt. I know a lot of people like to toast their flaked oats in the oven before using but if the biscuit works out well I think this could be more consistent than toasting my oats. Since I can’t leave well enough alone I have been thinking about what other flavors would go well with the chocolate, coffee, and hopefully oatiness of this beer. Raisins immediately popped in my head. Heck, a handful of raisins is my favorite addition to a nice hot bowl of oatmeal. Together with a large cup ‘o joe and you have a satisfying breakfast! Now I just need to figure out exactly how I want to add the raisins. I could puree them with a little wort and add that to the boil during the last 10 minutes, or I could just dump some raisins into secondary. Anybody out there have any experience using raisins?

Of course I feel I have to experiment with some non-traditional fermentation. So here is the plan… I will brew the base beer and then split it between two fermenters. One fermenter (most of the batch) will get Safale S04 English ale yeast (possibly Wyeast 1968 London Ale) and the other fermenter will receive only Brettanomyces Bruxellensis. After everything has fermented I may play with blending the two and age that with some medium toast French Oak chips. Some of the two separate batches would get bottled before blending so I can compare  all three and see what’s going on, but I really like the idea of a light musty, bretty oak note in the back of a nice smooth oatmeal stout.

If you have any ideas/input I’d like to hear it.

on the mend

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The Smoking Bottle has been a little lifeless lately. I’d like to say that is because I have been too busy brewing and cooking but unfortunately the silence has been caused by bacteria, viruses, evil spirits and possibly witchcraft. It all started with Half-Pint bringing home a bad cough from daycare. That was then followed by pneumonia. Of course she handled it well, as she always does, but daddy on the other hand was not so brave. After thinking that the illness was leaving the house, I was hit by the same upper respiratory infection and a week and a half later I found myself with pneumonia too. Of course Mrs. Smokey has also caught this and is now lying in bed waiting for the antibiotics to kick in.

So far it’s been 20 days since a beer has touched my lips. That has to be a record for me. The worst part is, I also had to call off a brew-day and a day of testing out the Cold Smoke Generator (ok, the worst was actually seeing my baby and my babe go through this… and the phlegm sucked). I was really looking forward to some smoked gouda and a nice brew. I am not sure when I will be able to fit these activities back into the schedule but you can expect some upcoming posts about cold smoking and brewing up an interesting breakast stout (I’ll post the recipe-in-progress later)…. but first we are all going to rest a bit and make sure the plague has finished with us.

Recipe for “A Good Year”

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All you need to have a wonderful 2010 is a good recipe. I happen to have one I’d like to share with you. Feel free to make some substitutions, but don’t stray too far from the original recipe:







A Good Year
– 1 good charcoal grill (you can add more if you really like fire)
– 1 or more sources for great craft beer (Oerbier Reserva is a must)
– 1 quality butcher
– a couple of good beer glasses (you don’t need one for every style of beer!)
– a good green grocer with local produce
– local brewery or homebrewer (or your own brewing passion)
– large handful of friends
– patch of green for you and your friends to rub your toes in
– a supportive partner
– A fresh child who is intrigued in everything you do (teenagers may be past their prime)

Simply stir these ingredients together and marinate yourself in the mixture for 365 days. Thats it! The trick with this recipe is balance. You may have to alter the amount of devotion/obsession placed on each of the individual ingredients until a harmonious mixture is obtained. This is something I myself am still working on.

I also threw together some random photos from this past year that were never posted here. You can find them by clicking on the snow covered grills above.

Happy new year everyone!

rub it good

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A while back I won a bottle of Yardbird from Noskos over at BBQ NL in a giveaway. Unfortunately I can’t say that I won it in some impressive show of skill, just dumb randomized luck. It was a while until I actually had a chance to try out this rub, and once I did it got lost in the shuffle. Well, I just happened to see the photos from that first cook and thought I would post a quick note.

As stated on the bottle “Created for Chicken, made for Pork” this rub was originally intended for chicken but users quickly found that it works great on pork too. I tried it out on a trimmed up “hammetje” for the first cook. A simple and quick cook. The rub was a smashing success! Good balance of flavors. It is definitely a rub you should pick up if you see it. It is also great since you can cook up a classic duo of ribs and chicken with the same rub and have both turn out fantastic. I’ve done a couple of other quick cooks with this rub but have no photographic evidence, but the results were great each time. Now I need to find a European supplier for Plowboys rubs. I’ve heard wonderful things about their Bovine Bold.