Don Genova's Blog

BC Day Barbecue

On the BC Day long weekend I let someone else do the work.  Bill Jones of Deerholme Farm held his annual barbecue, which I had missed for the past three years because I was always out of town.  This year, though, I was rarin' to go and a fine time was had by all, as we devoured a delicious whole lamb that Bill roasted over a charcoal fire.

He stuffed it with fresh rosemary and coated the inside with a porcini mushroom spread, then did the final carving with a unique knife that has only one side to the blade that a friend brought to him from Japan.  It felt very good in my hand, and Bill used it to slice through the roasted lamb like it was butter. The lamb was juicy and tender; it spent about 6 hours over the fire.

Over at the propane barbecue, James Barber, The Urban Peasant was holding court with a big bag of bread dough, a rolling pin and some help to put a pile of naan-like loaves directly on the grill.  Brushed with olive oil and sprinkled with salt, they were a fresh and tasty accompaniment to all the side dishes folks brought along.  I brought my famous Far East, Far Out Asian Coleslaw...which still seems to get better every time I make it.

After I had seconds, okay thirds, it was time for dessert.  My favourite was a blueberry-strawberry-blackberry-rhubarb crumble that could have fed an army. (with whipped cream on top, of course)

This little gaffer didn't care much about dessert.  He was quite happy to knaw on this huge lamb leg bone for the rest of the evening.  And the mosquitos were quite happy to gnaw on my wife Ramona...the poor dear just swells up whenever and wherever she gets bit!  Next year she'll have thicker layers of clothes on as dusk approaches.  Thanks very much to Bill and Lynn Jones for hosting an excellent party.

Food For Thought - BBQ Part Three

This week on Food For Thought, I chatted with the The Barbecue Queens, Karen Adler and Judith Fertig.  Their latest book is Weeknight Grilling with The Barbecue Queens: Making Meals Fast and Fabulous.  You can save 34% off the cover price by clicking on the title and purchasing through Amazon.ca. I also spoke with Anita Stewart, a food activist and cookbook author from Elora, Ontario, about her annual confluence of barbecuing Canadians from around the world and how they take part in this weekend's 'The World's Longest Barbecue'.  Check out the website and send in your story of cooking Canadian food outdoors this weekend and you could win prizes of cookbooks or the grand prize of a brand new Weber gas grill.

To listen to this week's documentary in streaming RealAudio, click here  . 

This weekend I'll be at a backyard barbecue on a beautiful piece of property in the Cowichan Valley as chef Bill Jones of Magnetic North Cuisine roasts a whole lamb on an open fire. Check the BBQ section of this blog next week for some pics and a report...and check out the BBQ Queens, they sure were fun to talk with.

Food For Thought - BBQ Part Two

This week on Food For Thought, Part Two of my Barbecue series, featuring Ron Shewchuk's latest book, Planking Secrets.  If you click on the link, it will take you to amazon.ca, where you will save 24 percent off the cover price of the book.   I've tried a couple of recipes out of this book, and I love Ronnie's treatment of cedar-planked pork tenderloin with rosemary and garlic.  See the recipe and all of its variations below.  Last night I tried another recipe from the book, planked steak!  I didn't have all the exact ingredients called for, but a little bit of ad libbing and the top sirloin I used turned out just fine.

The steaks were marinated in soya, rice vinegar, ginger, garlic, onion, honey and hot sauce.  First you put them on the grill for a couple of minutes on each side so you get some nice caramelization going, then put them on to your soaked plank for another 15 minutes or so for medium-rare.  In the meantime, you've taken the marinade and brought it to the boil,

then reduced it to a simmer to thicken it a little.

The resultant sauce is quite spicy and tangy.  If you want to listen to this week's mini-documentary, the streaming RealAudio is here .

If you don't think you want an entire cookbook of planking recipes, I also recommend Ron's first book, Barbecue Secrets.  It covers a much wider variety of topics, but also has some planking recipes.

Now, here is Ron's planked pork tenderloin recipe, reproduced here with his permission:

Planks and Pork Tenderloin: the Perfect Marriage

When I set out to research this book I knew that planking worked great for fish and for summer fruits like peaches and pears, but I had no idea what a perfect match this cooking style is for pork tenderloin. These little cylinders of tender, juicy pork are a staple of Chinese cooking and are great on the grill, but they are ideally suited to planking. Their size allows 2 or 3 to fit nicely on a plank, and they have just the right amount of surface area to cook quickly without losing moisture. They go with all flavors of smoke, from cedar to mesquite. And they take to marinades and rubs extremely well. Here are some basic techniques and a little collection of ideas for how to flavor pork tenderloin, but use your imagination and experiment with your favorite rubs, marinades and basting sauces.

Technique:

1.   Marinate and/or rub the tenderloin and have it ready to go before you start the grill. (Three tenderloins is usually enough for 4 servings.)

2.   Preheat the grill on medium-high for 5 or 10 minutes or until the chamber temperature rises above 500°F/260°C. Rinse the plank (which you’ve soaked in water overnight or for at least an hour) and place it on the cooking grate. Cover the grill and heat the plank for 4 or 5 minutes, or until it’s starting to throw off a bit of smoke and crackling lightly.

3.   Reduce the heat to medium and place the tenderloin on the plank. Cook for 10 minutes, turn, and cook for another 5 to10 minutes, basting if you like, until the pork is springy to the touch or has an internal temperature of 140°F/60°C. (This will give you juicy pork cooked to a medium doneness. The internal temperature will come up slightly when you let the meat rest.)

4.   If you like, just before it’s ready you can move the tenderloin from the plank onto the cooking grate and char the outside, or caramelize it if it’s coated with barbecue sauce.

5.   Take the tenderloin out of the grill, tent it in foil, and let it rest for a few minutes before serving. Carve the tenderloin into 1/2- to 1-inch/1- to 2.5-cm medallions and apply whatever sauce or garnish is called for.

Tasty Tenderloin Treatments (the recipes for all the rubs, sauces and marinades mentioned below are in Planking Secrets, but you can substitute your favorite versions):

Classic Barbecue: Coat with ballpark mustard, sprinkle with Championship Barbecue Rub. Cook on a hickory plank till nearly done and finish with a light glaze of Ron’s Rich, Deeply Satisfying Barbecue Sauce. Serve more sauce on the side for dipping.

Easy Asian: Marinate with Easiest, Tastiest Steak (or Anything Else) Marinade and finish with a coating of Asian Barbecue Sauce.

Spice-Crusted: Season with salt and pepper, drizzle with oil and coat with minced garlic, toasted fennel and cumin seeds, and a little cinnamon.  Serve with chopped cilantro and your favorite chutney.

Balsamic: Coat with balsamic reduction. Marinate overnight. Sprinkle on some chopped fresh rosemary and granulated garlic. Serve with a drizzle of the balsamic reduction and some chopped fresh mint.

Harvest Time: Season with salt and pepper and coat with a rub made with light brown sugar, powdered ginger, a sprinkle of freshly grated nutmeg, a pinch of clove and a little cayenne pepper. Baste with melted apple jelly and serve with Plank-Baked Apples with Rum-Honey Sauce.

Southwestern: Flavor using the same seasonings as Spice-Crusted Pork Blade Steaks and serve with some salsa and cornbread.

Wild Rice - the Barbecue Menu

Funny, after not eating out that much over the past few months in Vancouver and at my other place in the Cowichan Valley, there has been a sudden 'yeah, let's go!'  This is the first post of a few about some great summertime eating I've had over the past couple of weeks.  First up, a quick whizz through the summer 'barbecue' menu at Wild Rice in downtown Vancouver.

Chef Stuart Irving has come up with twists on summer classics with his usual magic touch that never results in con-fusion.  The picture above shows his cucumber dong gua salad with warmed chili oil, pea shoots and crystallized ginger.  The cucumber and dong gua(winter melon) provide fresh crunch and the crystallized ginger is a sharp, sweet surprise.

I love chips that are other than the standard potato chips...and this mass of yam, lotus and taro root chips pleases, especially with the addition of a roasted garlic and ginseng aioli.

The centrepiece of the barbecue menu (shown here in taster portions, are the wild boar bratwurst hot dog and the barbecue duck burger on a steamed bun which makes you forget about any previous gooey steamed buns you may have had in Chinese restaurants.

Other hits included Stu's forbidden city nugget potato salad with baby corn, chayote squash, daikon radish, quail eggs, and double smoked bacon, and a 'coleslaw' of jicama and sui choy with an avocado vinaigrette.  Prices are very reasonable, so make sure you check it out.   The restaurant is kitty-corner to Tinseltown, so it's a great opportunity to check out a movie before or after a visit to Wild Rice.                                                                     
                              

Food For Thought - BBQ Part One

My latest triumph, a 'spatchcocked' chicken marinated with Caribbean seasonings and slowly grilled on my Napoleon gas barbecue.  This week's Food For Thought is part one of my series on summer grilling and barbecuing.  To listen to the item in streaming RealAudio, click here .

If you want to find more links and photos about some of the barbecues and gadgets I talked about this week, go to this previous blog entry, where I covered the topic for my Pacific Palate program.  After that show, I received a note from George Radke at Bradley Technologies.  He told me that his company manufactures the Bradley Smoker in Delta, BC.  I've seen these in operation before and was impressed with the results, so if you're into something specifically built for smoking foods, you might want to check them out.

Just for the Halibut

Since I have been quite heavy on meat and pork fat for the past few weeks of grilling (and I haven't even gotten to the pork hocks and pig's feet in the freezer) I figured I would do something a little different on the weekend and put some halibut on the barbie.  What you see above is the amazing result.  My Grill Girl Ramona and I went to our favourite fish shop in Duncan, Mad Dog Crabs, and picked up a nice boneless, skin-on piece of fresh halibut.  For all the people (nutritionists and sustainable seafood folk) who tell us we should eat more of the right fish, halibut is damn expensive!

I think we paid about $14 a pound, and that was less expensive than some prices I've seen elsewhere, such as at supermarket chains.  Anyway, the halibut came home, and while I figured out what to do with it I grilled some eggplant slices.

I sliced the whole eggplant thickly, at least 1/2 to 3/4 of an inch, then brushed on some olive oil, and sprinkled liberally with sea salt and freshly ground pepper.  I turned my Napoleon Grill down to low and only turned the slices once, to preserve some nice grill marks, and to avoid sticking and tearing.  When they were soft, I pulled them off and drizzled on a bit more olive oil and some of my precious Venturi-Schulze balsamic vinegar and some chopped parsley. If you've never tried this vinegar, you don't know what you're missing.

I had roasted a whole bulb of freshly harvested garlic for one of my upcoming radio shows, and I had most of the head left.  So I squeezed out the remaining cloves into a bowl and put an equal amount of miso paste in with it, along with a splash of toasted sesame oil and a dollop of soy sauce.  Mixed it all together, then slathered it over the fillet and put it on the grill at about 400F for 10-15 minutes, just until the halibut easily flaked.  All the flavours blended together with the heat and made a great counterpoint to the robust white flesh of the halibut, Yummm!  Oh, that stuff you see around the halibut is a sharp mango salsa I made with one diced mango, some sweet white onion, chopped cilantro, a chopped pickled jalapeno, salt, pepper, olive oil and a little red wine vinegar.  Oh, almost forgot, tossed in the rest of a box of boysenberries I picked up at the Duncan Farmer's Market on Saturday morning.  The weather was great, we sat outside with a crisp white Orvieto Classico and smiled at each other.  Life is good!

Hot Smoked Salmon and Chicken Legs and Thighs

Yum!  Hot-smoked salmon on the BBQ this weekend.  Actually, it was a boneless steelhead trout fillet.  This is a very simple recipe from Ron Shewchuk's first cookbook, Barbecue Secrets. Rub the fillet with sesame oil, then sprinkle on salt, pepper and hot pepper flakes to taste, then sprinkle with a light coating of brown sugar, and drizzle with lemon juice.

This went on my Traeger Lil' Tex for about an hour and a half or two hours at 225F, and came out moist and flavourful.  I drizzled some more lemon juice on top when serving, and people just forked out sections of the fish onto slices of fresh Granary baguette from True Grain Bakery in Cowichan Bay.

The other great thing I've used the Traeger for lately was to smoke a rack full of whole chicken legs and thighs.  This was another recipe from Ronnie's book, and the flavours were supposed to be Thai in nature.  I found that after the 4-hour smoking process, the chicken was fantastic, but tasted more like smoked, barbecued chicken, then any Thai flavours.  I also crowded the legs a little too much on the rack, so they weren't quite done in the middle.  A flash on my propane barbecue took care of that problem.  The rack is supposed to be for chicken wings, but you can hang the thigh-leg combination on them is well.  Using it for wings is fantastic.  It keeps the fatty skin off the grill...so no sticking, and most important, no burnt wings! 

You might have a hard time finding these racks, so here's a picture and a link to help you.  I got mine from a friend who was working at a Hot Tub/Barbecue shop in Ontario a couple of years ago.  They're not very expensive at all, so they're worth the search!

Barbecue-alooza

“Grilling, broiling, barbecuing - whatever you want to call it - is an art, not just a matter of building a pyre and throwing on a piece of meat as a sacrifice to the gods of the stomach.” - James Beard

James Beard got it right.  Barbecuing and grilling is an art, and it's an art I have decided to embrace this summer and share on this part of my blog.

June 27, 2006. On my Pacific Palate program this morning, I talked about the three different barbecues I'm now using to practise my art.  Pictured above is my workhorse grill, the Napoleon.  It's the best grill I've ever owned. It's made in Canada and my favorite feature is the infrared rotisserie burner. Many a chicken and pork roast has sizzled to perfection on this grill.  What makes it so good?

- a high quality tubular steel burner

- heavy duty sear plates and a stainless steel cooking grid. 

- quite expensive, but I haven’t had to replace any of those major components and I’ve had it for about 5 years now.

My latest aquisition is the Traeger Lil' Tex. Check out the website for Traeger for a full explanation.  This thing is a 'pellet' grill.  An electric augur moves pellets into a smoke chamber and a fan distributes the smoke throughout at an even heat.  Use it on high to grill steaks.  Use it on medium to make a perfect beer can chicken.  And most importantly, use it to slow smoke cuts of meat that benefit from that treatment.  Here you can see what I smoked over the weekend, a whole duck, split in half, and some country-style pork ribs that had been smothered in a hickory barbecue sauce.  I've also done salmon, trout, and whole pork butts.

The other barbecue I've had a lot of fun with is the Cobb Portable BBQ.  This little thing is amazing. Invented in South Africa, it's called a Cobb, because it was originally fueled by dried corn cobs. All it takes is maybe half a dozen briquettes and you can cook on it for a couple of hours. It's excellent for chicken breasts and veggies, has a non-stick grill and it comes with its own carrybag.

On my Pacific Palate program of June 27th, I talked about some great barbecue accessories and gadgets.  You can find all of them at Ming Wo Cookware in Vancouver, my favourite location in the one in Chinatown. 

The Cuisipro dual baster is neat. It has two interchangeable heads, one that looks like a showerhead for even basting, and another one that is an injector so you can get marinades right into the flesh of the food you're grilling or smoking to flavour it and keep it moist.

Other useful accessories include:

A good set of tongs.  I find the ones that are sold as barbecue tongs are usually the most useless from a design and ease of use standpoint.  So a good set of long, steel kitchen tongs are best, or check out the ones with the silicon grabbers, as they are heat resistant and handle the food even more gently.

Chicken Wing rack
Beer Can Chicken holder
Skewers – flat steel, not round
Remote Thermometer for chicken and roasts
Silicon brushes for thick marinades and sauces
Instant read thermometers

And if you’re sipping a glass of wine while you’re grilling and you have nowhere to put your wine glass, how about the Hands-Free Wine Stem Holder?

Finally, a cute thing.  A silicone tray that makes ice skewers for your highball drinks.  What will they think of next?!