Lessons from Elizabeth Karmel: Best BBQ and Grilling Tips

How to avoid grill “stickage,” secrets to perfect beef brisket and more essential lessons from Hill Country chef and barbecue/grilling expert Elizabeth Karmel.

That’s one of my mottos (I’m all about the mottos!): “Oil the food, not the grates.” A thin layer of oil on the food holds in moisture. Many grilling authors tell people to take a rag or a paper towel, dip it in oil and coat the cooking grates of your lit grill with it. Number one, that is literally a torch waiting to be lit; that’s a big fire hazard. Number two, oil has a very low smoking point; you only have to oil the grates once to know that the oil will burn instantly. And anyone who’s washed a sauté pan knows what burned oil feels like: It’s really sticky. If you oil the grates and not the food, you’re effectively gluing the food to the grates. And “stickage” is a huge issue (I made up that word because anyone who grills knows that feeling). And if that wasn’t enough, by not oiling the food, any salt you’ve sprinkled on won’t stick to the food—it will bounce right off. And finally, as the food sits over the fire, all the food’s juices and natural moisture will slowly evaporate out. So all you’ve done is dehydrated the food and glued it to the grates. If you put the oil on the food instead—let’s say a piece of eggplant—you oil it and put some salt on it, the salt will stick, all of the moisture inside bubbles and boils and cooks the flesh. The outside caramelizes while the inside turns silky and delicious.

Cabbage: I would never eat stewed cabbage, unless I went to someone’s house and was being polite. But if you take a whole cabbage and core out the hard center, put a little butter and some barbecue rub between the leaves to season it and barbecue it, it is divine. Wrap the cored and seasoned cabbage in a sheath of heavy-duty aluminum foil and cook it indirectly while you’re barbecuing some ribs or pork shoulder or brisket, and let it cook for hours until you can pull the leaves off the core individually like plucking an artichoke. It is a life-changing food experience. It’s the food equivalent of turning a sow’s ear into a silk purse.Brussels sprouts: One of my favorite things to do in the fall is to buy a handful of Brussels sprouts, the stalk with the sprouts still attached, which now you can actually buy at Trader Joe’s—I used to only be able to find it at the farmers’ market. I add my grilling trilogy of olive oil, salt and pepper and roast it over indirect heat until the outsides of the sprouts are browned and crispy and the insides are soft and tender. I love it. It’s impressive when you put it on the table and let people cut or pull a Brussels sprout off the stalk. Bananas: I’m also crazy about grilled bananas. In fact, the dessert chapter in my first book, Taming the Flame, could have been called “Bananas for Grilled Bananas,” because there were so many variations on grilled bananas. It’s something I discovered early on. I was at a barbecue contest, Memphis in May, and felt a little tired of eating pork—only for about five minutes, because it’s very hard to get tired of eating pork. On a whim I decided to grill my breakfast banana. I couldn’t believe it—it tasted like bananas Foster. The heat of the grill intensifies the natural flavors of any food, and a lot of bananas these days taste really starchy. But once you cook them, they taste delicious and bananalike. I season them with what I call “my dessert rub”: cinnamon, sugar and a pinch of salt. You leave the skin on and put them cut-side down to get those good grill marks—because we all eat with our eyes first—then turn them over. You know they’re done when the flesh separates from the skin. In the summer one of my favorite things to make for a party is a grilled banana split bar. I grill the bananas while we’re eating, then put them out on a platter with every kind of topping, nuts, sauces and ice cream and let people go to town.

Get the right cut. You always want to cook the whole muscle. A cross-section of a brisket would reveal three parts: Two pieces of muscle (one called the flat or lean, and one called the deckle or point) and a fat cap. A lot of people cook only the flat or the lean part, which often comes out tough and dry. People should go to their butcher or their grocery store and say, “I want a whole, untrimmed brisket.” The butcher will say, “Oh, no you don’t! Here, you want this nice trimmed brisket.” You tell the butcher you know what you’re talking about, and that you want the whole fat cap on it, because that will keep the meat moist and protected during the long, slow cooking time.

Use the right temperature. I like to barbecue most meats between 280°F and up to even 325°F, a slightly higher temperature than a lot of competition barbecuers (who typically smoke between 180°F and 210°F), because you want the cooking environment to be hot enough to render the fat from the meat and melt those connective tissues. If the heat’s not up there, then you cut into the meat and you’ve got pockets of white fat. I want all that fat to melt and render out so it leaves the flavor behind, but none of the grease.

Cook until it’s ready. Every piece of meat is a little different, so the cooking time will always vary a little. When the meat is done, it will generally shrink anywhere from 30 to 50 percent, depending on how fatty it is. You want to make sure that there’s a nice dark bark. If you cook it right, the meat will be really juicy.

Salmon? One my favorite ways to make salmon is to put a deboned, skin-on side of salmon on a cedar plank. The wood protects the skin from scorching, which can give it that awful fishy flavor (just think if you opened a capsule of cod liver oil and burned it). I cook it at 325°F indirectly on a wet, water-soaked cedar plank. I like that temperature because it’s really important to me to get a nice crust, a nice crispiness—a good color on the outside, still juicy and perfectly cooked on the inside. It takes about 45 minutes to cook a side of salmon. You want to leave it a little rare in the center, because salmon is much more delicate; it has no connective tissue to melt away, so it can dry out. Because it’s sitting on the wood, you can very easily slide your spatula underneath between the flesh and the skin, and it’ll easily come off.

Chicken? Beer can chicken: Roast it whole on the grill on a beer can. You get this great crispy skin, and you infuse the chicken with beer, which gives it a really nice depth of flavor and keeps the meat really juicy. Whatever beer you drink is what you should use. You do have to be very careful in the way you position the chicken or else it’ll topple over. I have a chicken sitter that I created because a lot of people were scared that it might topple over. I made it black porcelain so that when it’s on the grill, it fades away and looks like the chicken is just sitting on the grill. You can do it in a 325°F oven—just take my chicken sitter, fill it with beer, prepare the chicken with oil, salt and pepper and set it on the sitter in a round cake pan for stability.

Ribs? Pick up the ribs and give it a bend: If it’s nice and flexible but not springy or rubbery, then it’s generally done. If it falls apart immediately, then it’s probably overcooked. When the meat pulls away from the end of the bone and the ends of the bones are nice and clean, too, then you know that your ribs are probably done.

View the original article here

F&W’s Masters Series: Lessons from Grilling and BBQ Maven Elizabeth Karmel

“I use tongs like an extension of my hand,” says Hill Country chef and barbecue/grilling expert Elizabeth Karmel. Here she explains the difference between the two crafts and how to perfect both. Hill Country chef and barbecue/grilling expert Elizabeth Karmel. Photo courtesy of Cramer-Krasselt.

Whether it’s a tip on testing a gas connection or knowing when your brisket’s done, few know more about cooking over flames than Elizabeth Karmel—and fewer still can explain the hows and whys as clearly. The North Carolina native has been obsessed with fire cookery for nearly two decades. In the 2000s she brought Texas barbecue to the Northeast as the executive chef of Hill Country Barbecue and Market in New York City and Washington, DC. The author of three books on the subject also keeps a trove of information on her twin websites, elizabethkarmel.com and girlsatthegrill.com. Here she shares the differences between a rub, a mop and a sauce, plus why you should oil your food, not your grill grates.

I was living in New Orleans, and I was missing my North Carolina pulled pork. I realized that I was going to have to teach myself how to make it if I was going to have it more than a couple of times a year when I went home to visit. So I decided to give it a try in my backyard. I took a Boston butt (and I’ll tell the blasphemous truth: I put it on a gas grill with some wood chips) and basically let it cook using indirect heat until the whole outside was covered with beautiful rendered fat that looked like cracklins. The outside was crunchy, and inside the meat was so tender, all you had to do was use two forks to pull it—into pulled pork! Then I made the Lexington-style dip, a.k.a. the vinegar barbecue sauce, which I grew up with. I made that by taste memory, too. I loved what I tasted, and I fed a whole houseful of hungry folks who proclaimed it just as good as any pulled pork they’d had in North Carolina. That was the beginning of my barbecue love story.

Barbecue is a culture and a lifestyle, it’s not just about the food—it is an authentic community. Even at competitions, which are very competitive, everyone is family. If you run out of something or forget a spice or a tool, your neighbor will loan it to you if they have it. Nobody’s trying to sabotage anyone—or if they do, they don’t stay in the community for very long.

And I have never seen anything in my life that melts the demographics the way barbecue does. It doesn’t matter who your daddy is, what your educational level is—if you like barbecue and the other person likes barbecue, you’re fast friends. It’s a genuine community in this complicated world.

In this country, we refer to grilling as “hot and quick” cooking and barbecue as “low and slow” cooking. That’s actually the subtitle of my first book, Taming the Flame: Secrets for Hot-and-Quick Grilling and Low-and-Slow BBQ, because it is easy to understand. But the real difference is that authentic barbecue is only cooked with indirect heat (no heat directly underneath the food), often for long periods—and it has to involve wood. I often say that real barbecue is seasoned by time and wood smoke. That wood smoke is different region to region, but a kiss of natural wood smoke is what makes barbecue barbecue.

Direct heat is cooking directly over a heat source; indirect heat is cooking food by convection or hot air rotating around the food. I tell people who cook indoors that direct heat is like sautéeing or broiling, and indirect heat is like roasting or baking. The combo method is my favorite way to grill: sear over direct heat, finish over indirect. For indirect heat, if I’m cooking with coals, I’ll arrange the coals on either side of a drip pan. Some people say to pile all the coals to one side, but one side is inevitably hotter than the other, and you have to rotate the food to cook it evenly. If the heat is even, you don’t have to touch the food. With a gas grill, I turn the burners off under wherever I place the food but make sure that I light at least two burners on either side of the food. It’s all about making sure that the heat is even and consistent.

Charcoal can be either preformed briquettes or natural hardwood charcoal, which is irregular in size. The best charcoal is pure hickory hardwood char that has been formed into equal size briquettes. That’s literally hardwood that has been burned in the absence of oxygen. Charcoal was actually discovered by Henry Ford—he burned the leftover wood paneling from his cars and created charcoal.

Gas can be either liquid propane or natural gas.

Wood is hardwood—logs. Traditional barbecue uses either all wood (but not pine, because of the acrid sap) or a combination of either charcoal and wood or, today, even gas and wood.

A rub is a combination of spices—dried spices mostly, unless it’s a wet rub—that may or may not have salt in it. If you make a rub without a salt, then you need to season with a little salt just before cooking. A dry rub can be thought of as a dry marinade that adds flavor and promotes a crispy crust or bark. (One of my favorite dry rub spices is dehydrated garlic, because it imparts a pungent garlic flavor in a dry form so it won’t scorch, unlike fresh raw garlic when exposed to the heat.) Wet rubs have a thick, wet consistency and are applied much like a thick marinade.

A mop is thinner than a sauce. They’re both flavoring liquids, but a mop is a thin, savory basting sauce that’s mopped or dabbed. It doesn’t have as much sugar in it, so you can put it on much more frequently during cooking. Mops are used a lot in authentic barbecue to keep the meat moist during the long cooking time, and will add layers of flavor to the bark. One of the easiest and best mops can be made with your favorite barbecue sauce, a couple pinches of your favorite barbecue rub and a can or a bottle of beer, whatever you drink. The reason they’re called mops is because the thin sauce was traditionally mopped—literally mopped onto the food with a cotton mop. In parts of the South, they actually use a full-size cotton mop when they’re doing whole animals, to get the sauce in there. I actually created the first-ever silicone barbecue mop because I wanted to be able to wash it, and I didn’t want the fibers of the mop to stick to the food. There’s no good way to wash a cotton mop or keep it from shredding.

Barbecue sauce is a highly flavored liquid that’s brushed on the food at the end of the cooking time to add another layer of flavor. It also adds moisture, and very importantly, it gives it great visual appeal. A slather of sauce will make any piece of food glisten and glow—it brings out beautiful colors in the food.

It’s interesting because it doesn’t only take smoke to make a smoke ring. Gas, charcoal and wood all do the same thing: They emit nitrogen dioxide, which reacts with water, oxygen and proteins in the meat to turn them pink. The same reaction happens when nitrates turn cured meats pink. It even happens in home gas ovens, when a big enough piece of meat is cooked at a medium-low temperature. A lot of times when people roast their turkeys in the oven at Thanksgiving, they think that their turkey is undercooked because it’s pink close to the skin, but it’s actually a kind of smoke ring.

One of the things I love most about grilled food is that nice, dry, crispy crust that develops during cooking. In barbecue the “best bite” for me is always the bark, or burnt ends, because it’s a combination of many flavor seasonings: The rub, mop, et cetera, the meat protein and the wholly rendered-out fat that has cooked long enough to turn almost burnt.

In a blind taste test, most people can’t tell the difference. In fact, the opposite almost always happens: With their eyes closed, people think what was actaully cooked on gas was cooked on charcoal. Gas is a very clean medium, so you can really taste everything else more clearly—the smoke, the caramelization, the wood if you use wood chips (and it’s very easy to use wood chips on a gas grill). These days, almost 80 percent of Americans use a gas grill, so gas is where it’s at. Good gas grills changed the game. These grills, which often performed better than indoor ovens, brought more and more people to the backyard. More people are cooking whole meals from the grill, going way beyond classic campfire food. When I’m baking a cobbler or a pie, I prefer a gas grill to a charcoal grill, because gas heat is going to be consistent and clean. But generally I use both. I’m an equal-opportunity barbecuer—both in what I eat and what I cook on!

The great thing about natural gas is you can hook a grill up to a gas line so you never have to refill a tank. Most standard size gas grills use 20-pound propane tanks that last for 20 hours (the general rule of thumb is one pound of propane for one hour of cooking). There’s no real difference in how either one cooks, but the higher the BTUs on a gas grill, the more fuel it will use, so the 20-pound tank might not last as long as it’s meant to.

It’s very important to follow some routine steps when you’re using a gas grill. I list them all on my site. A key one to start: Check that a gas line is secure: Pour soapy water on it. If it bubbles up, that means it has a leak.

I always tell people to buy the best and the biggest grill they can afford. When people buy their first grill, they often think, “Oh, we’ll just do a few sausages and hamburgers, we don’t cook very much.” But you want a grill that will be big enough to cook a turkey for Thanksgiving, because once you learn how to grill, you’re going to use it more than your oven.

Those are kamado grills, and there are two major brands: The Big Green Egg and Primo. I love the Primo Oval XL because it has almost the same real estate as a gas grill. Some of the other kamado grills are only 18.5 inches in diameter, so it’s hard to cook lots of food or barbecue big pieces of meat.

Just make sure you get a high capacity chimney starter, so that you only need one of them. You should have about 50 total or 25 gray-ashed briquettes on each side of your kettle if you’re cooking indirectly.

They’re ready to go when there’s no longer a flame and they’re coated with a white gray ash.

All you need are wet wood chips and a metal container. You can use a smoker box, a small aluminum-foil drip pan, or you can fashion your own smoker box out of heavy-duty aluminum foil. You soak the chips in water for 30 minutes, place them in the foil or an open smoker box and set the box on the back-left corner of the grill while you’re preheating it with all burners on high. That gets the chips smoldering and smoking. Once you put the food on, reduce the heat and close the lid, the food will be infused with the great flavor of smoke.

I always travel with a silicone-coated blending fork and two pairs of 12-inch locking chef tongs. One has red duct tape on it, one has green duct tape on it. Red means stop: Raw food touched these. Green means go: Cooked food touched these. I created the “stop and go” tongs to prevent cross contamination.

I use tongs like an extension of my hand. The best are 12-inch locking chef’s tongs that don’t open more than six inches. People think the longer the tongs are the better, but the truth is the longer the tongs, the less control you have. Our wrists aren’t that strong. If the tongs splay open too much (and a lot of them open to 12 inches or more), you can get a cramp from having to hold them closed. I sell tongs, and I literally measured the distance of a hand at rest so that they wouldn’t open any more than what was comfortable if you were holding tongs for hours, like I do.

How to avoid grill “stickage,” secrets to perfect beef brisket and more essential lessons from Karmel. READ MORE »

“A lot of people marinate raw food in barbecue sauce, because they’re thinking, Oh, I want barbecued chicken,” says Karmel. The problem is that sauce often contains sugar, which burns quickly, resulting in a lackluster version of the classic dish. Here, more ways home cooks ruin great ingredients, and how to avoid those mistakes. READ MORE »

“Barbecue is like religion and politics: People are passionate about it. There are many regions, and every region thinks they are the best,” says Karmel. Here, the North Carolina native offers a mouthwatering regional barbecue guide, which explains how she became an “all-encompassing, equal-opportunity barbecue lover.” READ MORE »

View the original article here

Elizabeth Karmel’s Essential Barbecue Trail

“Barbecue is like religion and politics: People are passionate about it. There are many regions, and every region thinks they are the best,” says Hill Country chef Elizabeth Karmel. Here, the North Carolina native offers a mouthwatering regional barbecue guide, which explains how she became an “all-encompassing, equal-opportunity barbecue lover.”

Probably the most similar to North Carolina, and that’s what drew me to it: They’re both all about the meat, though because of its long history of cattle ranching, Texas is traditionally beef. In the central part of Texas, the Hill Country, where Hill Country Barbecue originates, people use Post Oak wood because it grows indigenously there. They use a simple rub of salt, butcher-ground black pepper and just enough cayenne to turn the rub a light pink color.

They like to say, “We barbecue anything that moves.” They’re very partial to sauce, a very thick, red sauce. I think that the average American identifies with this barbecue region.

Memphis is known as the home of the dry rub, but they use a lot of sauce in Memphis, too. And Memphis pulled pork uses more of a sweet red sauce in their pulled pork, as opposed to the lighter tangy, peppery Carolina vinegar sauce.

North Carolina barbecue traditionally uses pork because of all the pig farms in the state. Hickory grows widely in North Carolina, so people tend to use hickory wood. In North Carolina the rub is just salt and pepper, no cayenne. Within North Carolina there are two subregions:

In Eastern North Carolina barbecue the sauce is vinegar-based, very peppery. And they don’t use ketchup.

In Western North Carolina barbecue they add a little ketchup, which turns the sauce red. I grew up in the Piedmont area, which is sort of halfway between the two, but by barbecue standards it’s considered Western, and we add ketchup to the vinegar sauce.

Then there’s the mustard region, a pocket in Georgia and a pocket in South Carolina. South Carolina is really the region that popularized the mustard, especially right around Columbia. And you know what? It’s not bad. The first time I tried it, I was skeptical, but if you think about it, they use yellow mustard, French’s mustard, that has a lot of vinegar in it anyway. So when I ate it, I was like, “OK! It’s just a yellow vinegar sauce!” But of course I still prefer what I grew up with.

Those are the major regions. But once you leave those, you’ve got St. Louis, where people are barbecue-crazy, and Alabama, which has a famous barbecue restaurant—Big Bob Gibson’s, where Chris Lilly is the pitmaster—that wins lots of awards. And then there are people in California who put their name on barbecue.

I gotta give a shoutout to my two Carolina boys. In Eastern North Carolina, Ed Mitchell is like the barbecue Santa Claus of the community. He uses a barrel smoker and smokes whole hogs, which not everybody does. Where I grew up, barbecue was a butt or a shoulder. But he does it the old-school way, which makes a big difference when he chops it all together. He’s got the ham, the shoulder, the tenderloin, a little bit of everything in there. You’ve got meat that’s a little bit leaner, a little bit moister, a little bit more tender, a little tougher—all of it together. He was at The Pit in Raleigh; now he left to open his own place. People can find him at the Big Apple Barbecue Block Party in New York.

Rodney Scott is from South Carolina, but he doesn’t do a mustard sauce because he’s not from that part of the state. He does a mop with vinegar and some other secret ingredients, and it’s very, very peppery. He butterflies the whole hog just like Ed does, but he cooks it on a really hot open fire. That’s not done by very many people, though I’m sure this is how it was done to celebrate the fall slaughter when everyone had land and livestock, including pigs. The great thing is, someone is honoring that tradition in a restaurant. TheScottsBBQ.com

Mike Mills is otherwise known as The Legend. His baby back ribs are legendary. He cooks each and every slab of ribs by feel. He is the barbecue grand master of “feeling the love.” His baby backs are just perfect. They’re kissed with smoke and have this beautiful hot pink smoke ring on them. They have just enough chew that you feel like you’re eating meat, yet they melt in the mouth into delicious pork heaven. 17thstreetbarbecue.com

They are the patron saints of Hill Country. We’re different, but they were our inspiration. I like that it’s all about the meat, it’s really simple, using Post Oak, and it’s just the way it’s been done for more than a hundred years; it’s now third-generation. They use an open fire box, and their smoker looks like a big brick coffin with a roaring fire on one side. The smoker is huge; it must be 40 feet of brick, steel, smoke and meat. And they have four of them. They also cook very, very hot. To create indirect heat, they move the meat from end-to-end of their pit with meat pins that are also more than 100 years old. It’s a sight to be seen. It’s so pure and unpretentious—it’s a great and true barbecue experience. KreuzMarket.com

If you like urban barbecue and you didn’t grow up in the South but you love well-smoked meat and tangy sweet sauce Dinosaur can’t be beat. They have tremendous respect for barbecue, even though they’re from upstate New York, which is not a “traditional” barbecue region. They do a great job of smoking their meat, and they add just enough sauce to keep it moist. They respect the meat. And I love that they say that barbecue saved their lives, because I think that the popularity of barbecue has played a role in saving American culinary traditions, particularly Southern culinary traditions. DinosaurBarbque.com

Find more of Elizabeth Karmel’s favorite stops along the barbecue trail on her website elizabethkarmel.com.

View the original article here

Elizabeth Karmel on the Crimes Against Grilling

“A lot of people marinate raw food in barbecue sauce, because they’re thinking, Oh, I want barbecued chicken,” says grilling expert Elizabeth Karmel. The problem is that sauce often contains sugar, which burns quickly, resulting in a lackluster version of the classic dish. Here, the Hill Country Barbecue chef reveals more ways home cooks ruin great ingredients, and how to avoid those mistakes.

It’s really important: Just like you’d heat a sauté pan before you put food in it, it’s very important to preheat the grill to cook any foods properly. Preheating also sterilizes the grill by burning off any residue.

You would never bake a cake with the oven door open, right? Just like preheating is essential to proper cooking, so is temperature control.

I’ve got a couple of good rules of thumb: If something takes 20 minutes or less to cook, use direct heat. If it takes more than 20 minutes, use indirect. And if you don’t know how long something takes to cook: The bigger it is, the denser it is, the heavier it is, the longer it takes.

The hotter the fire does not mean the better you’ll cook your food. Most food is delicate and needs a gentle heat after you sear it. You’re going to get a better result and coax the love out of the food by treating it gently and with respect.

A lot of people marinate raw food in barbecue sauce, because they’re thinking, “Oh, I want barbecued chicken.” Sugar burns quickly. You want to make sure that the inside of your food is done and juicy at the same time that the outside is browned. It takes 45 to 60 minutes to grill bone-in chicken pieces and only 5 to 10 minutes for sweet barbecue sauce to set and caramelize. So brush your food with sauce at the end of the cooking time.

View the original article here