If you are not from California, there is a very good chance that you have no idea what the hell tri-tip is. In California they love and revere this particular cut of beef. In Texas they consider it dog food. And in the rest of the world it gets cut up and sold as stewing beef, which is the worst sort of tragedy. Tri-tip is easily the second-most flavourful cut of beef, trailing only brisket in this regard and miles ahead of the second runners-up like prime rib and top sirloin. The cut is an odd triangular chunk from the very bottom of the sirloin. Your butcher probably knows what it is. If he or she doesn’t know what it is you should either get a new butcher or whip out your phone and show the mope this handy diagram. I vote for the new butcher.

Remember this layout and memorize it. Later this summer we’ll do some tri-tip here and hopefully introduce you to a new world of beefy goodness.

So what does this have to do with the reader mail? Easy – today’s comment and question comes from Tammy (apparently no “awesome” in her signature) sunny California. She points out that the Basic Chicken For Dipping also reheats just fine after freezing (this I did not know!). She also wonders just how many pieces of that insanely good dipped chicken she should make for guests. A good rule of thumb here is to never ever (eeeeever) come up short. The average joe will eat two pieces of chicken as part of a meal. So put on three per person – this gives you more for the folks that crave another piece (this is crave-worthy chicken!) and if you do have any extra its no chore at all for you to heat the leftovers up the next day and indulge again.
Just remember that you want the dip to be hot, and you dont want to dip your chicken pieces until they are about to hit the plate. If you are serving informally, put the platter of chicken out beside some sort of vessel containing the hot dip, and instruct your guests on the process. Don’t forget to provide tongs! They can dip each piece as they take it, they’ll have a bit of fun, you’ll look like a star, and the leftovers will be in their pristine and un-dipped state for easy reheating the next day.

Win, win, and win. You’re welcome.

“Awesome George” from Quincy, Illinois (honestly, that is how he signed his email!) with a great tip about mixing rubs:

Your rubs are great, but sometimes the brown sugar in the mixes can clog up. If you want rubs with no lumps, tell people to add the brown sugar and one of the salt ingredients first, and mix those. The salt will suck moisture out of the sugar and let it stay nice and smooth. Then add all the other ingredients and you will get a nice blend with no sugar bumps.

George, you are aptly named. I tried this out and it works exactly as advertised … in fact, it was awesome. I will be updating the order of ingredients and the instructions to both the pork and chicken rubs. You earn the first ever “True North BBQ Awesome Reader Of The Week” award. Wear it well, my friend, wear it well.

So a handful of people have written in with questions about the whole dipping thing. Never fear – I’ve got your back on this one. Over the next couple of days I’ll hook you up with a foolproof way to make some chicken that is perfect for dipping, and then show you exactly what the hell I am talking about.

Stay tuned.

This started out as a quest for a dipping sauce for chicken, and ended with a super simple bit of liquid love that you can dip damn near anything into with delicious results. The name, if you were wondering, is a reference to the old T-Rex song “Get It On” (the original, please, not that defective Power Station remake) and specifically the line “you’re dirty and sweet, oh yeah.” This sauce is dirty and sweet at the same time – it’s as sweet as your grade 9 girlfriend and it’s as dirty and skanky as that nasty Kate Gosselin chick.

If you were wondering, no, you don’t have to play the song while you cook this. But it doesn’t hurt, either. Marc Bolan was a genius.

So – you may not know that “dipped” is a classic way to serve fried or roasted chicken. And I don’t mean dipped in little fork-bites at the table (a la Swiss Pigeon), i mean dipped as whole pieces in sauce when those pieces are just hot out of the oil or the oven. If you have never had chicken this way – a method that was inspiration for the first “buffalo wings” – then you are missing out on one of the great taste explosions of our time. But don’t stop there – and don’t shy away from making this if you aren’t planning on piece-cooked chicken. I have been dunking and/or exposing all sorts of things to this little concoction, and when push comes to shove you can pair this with pretty much any meat that is served hot and has any sort of salt in it’s seasoning profile.

Best of all, this is super simple. It has a a mere four ingredients (if you are like me and count this as one ingredient) and takes 5 minutes to make. Full details, some ideas on use, and random ranting after the jump.

Let’s get saucy!
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So a few people had a few questions about the whole brisket thing. And I thought I would be a helluva guy and take the time to impart some wisdom on the whole subject. You’re welcome.

What is up with cooking to 195 degrees? I thought beef was well done at 160 and after that was a burnt mess?

Yes, those would be accurate statements – for regular old beef for the masses. We are talking about something special here – a cut of meat that has huge ropes of connective tissue running all through it. That connective tissue makes the meat tough – really tough. But, at about 175 degrees fahrenheit, something interesting happens: The collagen in that connective tissue turns into gylcerine, and the fat that surrounds it starts to render into tallow. The combination of glycerine and tallow running through the meat is the magic combination that turns an otherwise leathery chunk of cow into a butter-tender hunk of meat that has more beef flavour than anything you will have in any other way. Getting the meat to this temperature for as long as possible is what lets you violate the universal rule of beef – the tougher the meat, the tastier. In this case the toughest cut of meat on the whole animal retains every bit of its flavour but becomes as tender as the best prime rib.

What is really interesting is that the process of collagen-to-glycerine uses up literally all of the heat energy that you are pumping into the beef mass – at that point in time, there is no energy going into the cooking process at all, and the internal temperature of the meat will “stall” here, sitting at 175-180 degrees for a startlingly long time and sometimes even dropping down despite the heat input remaining constant. This is good, the longer you keep it here the better. Once it crosses this plateau the temperature will run up to 195 pretty quickly, so using a remote thermometer probe is a must.

The only reason we take it to 195, if you were wondering, is to make sure that all of the places where there are little fat pockets inside – which can be somewhat insulated – have a chance to get the full benefit of the process.

So why isn’t all dried out like my mom’s pot roast?

It’s because we protected the meat. First we put a sear on the outside to seal in the moisture, and then we took it through the rest of the roasting process at a temperature that was low enough that we didn’t drive the moisture past this barrier. Low and slow, kids, low and slow. Note that if you are doing the brisket in a real barbeque pit and cooking it with smoke, you dont need the searing step. The natural smoke ring protects the moisture in the same way.

So why do I need the “whole” brisket? What is wrong with the piece that they sell at the supermarket?

The fact that they sell it at the supermarket is the first thing that is wrong with it. Besides giving you the wrong cut, there is a very good chance that they are injecting it full of salt water before they sell it to you. Look for the key word “seasoned” on the sticker. This is not meat you want to cook, and not and industry that you want to support.

However, and to be less preachy about it, you need the full brisket cut (both the point and the flat) because the interface between them is where the biggest share of the above-mentioned collagen is hiding. You need that layer, and you need it to be attached to the two other pieces of meat. This is key.

So quit arguing and get yourself a proper butcher already!

Where the hell am I going to find a butcher?

Oh, I don’t know, maybe you could search the freaking internet? Sheesh.

What am I going to do with all this meat?

Make friends with your neighbours – you never know when you are going to need a favour, and buying some goodwill with free brisket on a bun never hurt in that regard. After that, slice up some for your own sandwiches and freeze it into individual servings. And take at least a kilo and a half (three pounds for you colonial types) and make it into chili. And yes, I will give you a recipe.

Do you cook it fat up or fat down? Does it matter?

Wow! A good question! Actually, in the long run it doesn’t matter all that much for the overall taste. If you can, cook it fat up so that the fat renders off more evenly and you get a better crust on top without washing all of your rub away. Do that if you are oven roasting or cooking in a smoker where the fire is off to the side in a seperate chamber. BUT – if you are cooking it in a veritcal smoker (where the heat comes from below, like a Weber Smokey Mountain) or in a ceramic cooker like a Big Green Egg or on a grill with the burners on the side turned on, then you should put it fat side down. The fat cap will protect the meat from some of the inevitable hot spots that develop on the bottom side of the meat. Mail me if you aren’t sure which way to go.

Do I have to do that part with it sitting in the foil and wait for it? I’m hungry!

Then eat a carrot or something. You can’t rush this. If you’re in a rush, you are in the wrong place. Close the door on the way out, you heathen.

Does being locked in the deep cruel heart of winter mean that barbeque gets put on hold?

Hell, no!

This week we will look at brisket – some general thoughts and tips, a foolproof smoking technique, a way to cook brisket in a hurry if you have a Beef Emergency, and a killer chili recipe using cooked brisket instead of cubes of raw beef.

Stay tuned!

Welcome back, plankers. In our first thrilling episode we talked about what kind of wood you should select for planking, and where to get it. Today we will discuss two absolutely cruicial concepts: plank thickness, and plant preparation. The two items are closely related, and getting your head around this is crucial for your planking success. So – in a nutshell, here it is:

1. The more delicate the food, the thinner the plank you want – we touched on this briefly in part one, but it is worth repeating on it’s own.
2. If your food needs a thick plank, it also needs to be prepped. This is the step most beginners mess up.

So – details. As far as thickness goes, deciding whether or not a food is “delicate” and needs a thin plank can be generally summed up as thus:

Animal flesh = thicker plank. Not animal flesh (ie: fruit, cheese, Twinkies, whatever) = thinner plank.

If you follow this generally simple rule, you will do just fine. Beef, pork, fish, chicken, turkey, emu … if it ate and pooped, it counts as an animal and goes on the thick plank. Anything else, thin is in.

Now – if you picked the thick plank (ie: the food you are cooking once ate and pooped) then you also need to properly prep the plank the get the proper cooking result. Luckily, the prep part is easy. Soak it (the plank, not the food) and then burn it (again, the plank and not the food).

Soaking is easy – just run a sink or pail or bathtub or some other suitable vessel of water, and let the plank sit in it for 20 or 30 minutes. Clever types among you will have probably figured out that the plank is going to float, so be sure to pile something on top of it (a plate, a brick, your dog, whatever) to make sure it gets submerged.

Burning the plank is also pretty easy. Just before you want to put your food on to cook, and when the grill is nice and hot (and yes, we are talking about cooking over direct heat here, so grillheads rejoice) put the plank on the grill for about 5 minutes. You want to get a surface char on one side, but not dry the plank out. Once you have a char on the bottom of the thing, and some wisps of smoke coming off, turn the plank over and put the food on the charred side. This is the crucial bit that most beginners don’t grok on their own, and it is the key to building the layers of flavour that you want to achieve here.

Thin-thick, soak, char. Dwell on these sage bits of truth for a few days, and in the final installment of our adventure in planking I will pony up a couple of recipes you can try. And yes, there will be Twinkies.

After some fiddling, some cursing, some serious head-scratching, and a couple of dozen dogs down the hatch … I think I have a valid starting point for a workable Detroit-style coney sauce. It is by no means perfect and I still have a sneaking suspicion that the memories I am working from are less-than-razor-sharp, but the result was tasty, enjoyable, and – for now, anyway – tasted like what I think I remember a coney dog should taste like.

The full recipe is after the jump if you want to indulge on your own (see note below) but if you just want the highlights and keys, here is a quick rundown:

1. You can’t make Detroit-style coney sauce without using beef heart. Period. There is no other way to get that slightly gamey and verging-on-too-rich taste.
2. Get your butcher to grind the meat as fine as he can, triple-grind if you can talk him into it.
3. You can’t screw around with half-measures for the rendering of the meat, you have to use lard.
4. Adding the roux after simmering down the stock is the trick to getting a passably-wet texture.

Where this first attempt comes up short is in the texture. Detroit-style sauce is very wet – it is more of a “sauce flavoured with meat” than it is a “meat sauce”. This sauce was wet, but not wet enough, even after the final step of pureeing some of the sauce into a kind of a “meat juice” and adding it back in to the main show. Also, while the flavour is in the ball park, I think I am missing at least one crucial ingredient. One of the hallmarks of a great Coney Dog is the need to head to the can for a Truly Atrocious Dump about 2 hours after eating. My “dog-to-dump” time was about 24 hours, which makes me thing that something is definitely amiss. On the other hand, the dumps were pretty atrocious, so it could just be that the ingredients are all there and just out of balance. There is hope.

If you grew up with Coney Dogs and you are missing them as badly as I, try this mix and let me know what you think. If you have never tried a Coney before and are feeling brave, feel free to jump on the bandwagon. But do it on a day when you can open your windows – if you aren’t used to the aroma, it can be a bit … er … repellent.
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You cant watch a cooking show for like 15 seconds now without someone babbling on about “planking”. And no doubt you have seen all sorts of “plank paraphernalia” down at ye olde barbeque store or over at the local big box hardware joint. Now, this is not a bad thing – in general, planking is an excellent concept, and way to bring the benefits of barbeque (moisture and smoke) to all you grillheads out there. The problem is that most of what people try to tell you about planking is either stupid, incomplete, or wrong.

Luckily for you, however, you have stumbled onto the correct resource for this sort of thing. Today we present the first of a three-part extravaganza on how to get planking right. Pay attention – this is important.

Today we talk about the actual planks themselves – what kind to use, and where to get them. The first problem here is that everyone seems to want to start and end with cedar planks. And frankly, cedar is about the last kind of plank you want to use. It has nasty oils in it that carbonize – giving you a less-than-delicious benzine tang to whatever you are cooking – and as a softwood the flavour is just too harsh for pretty much any food that you might want to eat. Stay away from cedar. Even salmon does better on a traditional hardwood like alder or oak. Especially alder. If for some reason you absolutely must have cedar, use papers and not planks.

What you do want to get into is hardwood planking. Maple, oak, and alder are three great places to start. Fruit and nut woods – apple, peach, pecan – are great too, but trying to find planks cut from small gnarly orchard trees is usually an exercise in futility. Stick with the first three for now. Branch out later if you really get into it, but start with the basics.

Now – with an idea of what you want to use settled into the back of your brain, let’s go to the store. Planking used to be an obscure sort of deal, but now you walk in and you are overwhelmed by a freaking plethora of planking selection. Where do you start?

Where you start, of course, is by walking right past all of this overpriced stuff. You can save a lot of money and gain a lot of flexibility if you don’t buy your planks in the “grilling supplies” section of the store. Head on down to your local home improvement or hardware place, walk past the area with all that crap and go back to where they sell the actual lumber. Here you will find all manner of oak, maple, and alder planks, for about half the price of the fancy packaged ones, and in nice long lengths that you can cut yourself to whatever size you need. Better, you can buy assorted thicknesses – thin ones for short-cook and vaguely delicate items like cheese or twinkies, thicker for big heavy pork loins and the like.

Yes, I said twinkies. More on that in our third installment.

The only real reason for buying the pre-packaged stuff is if you want to get a “cross-cut” plank to jazz up your plating. These things from Montana are pretty cool – they hold more moisture because they are open across the grain, and they look fabulous at the table.

But for work-a-day planking of average stuff, you want to buy your planks at the back of the store. Lay a few in, find your saw, and next time we will talk about plank prep. See you then.

A few people have asked me about charcoal. WIth that in mind, I will be posting some charcoal reviews over the next week or so. It’s not a topic to be taken lightly, and deserves a proper treatment, so stay tuned!

As promised, I have updated the instructions and photos for the Charred Pineapple with Maple and Cinnamon recipe. The shapes and cuts make way more sense now, but the taste remains yummily the same. Enjoy.

Before we start, it’s worth pointing out that this particular item has nothing at all to do with cooking barbeque. Hell, if taken to its traditional extremes, it isn’t even involving grilling. But, well, this is my cooking blog and if I want to go completely off the beaten path then I am entirely free to do so. Deal with it.

If you are jonesing for some more barbeque goodness, come back after the weekend – there will be some smoke and fire going on over the next couple of days. And if all goes according to plan, there will be sliders.

Mmm … sliders.

Until then, however, it’s time to talk about Coney Dogs. The real coney dog (aka a Coney Island Dog, aka a Coney Island) is one of the great treats of my kid-hood, and something that you just don’t seem to find in its pure form if you get more than a few minutes drive from Michigan. It is also a badly misunderstood item, and there are a lot of people who don’t seem to know what a real coney dog is.

The most important fact is this: A coney dog is not a chili dog. A hot dog with chili is a chili dog. A hot dog with coney sauce is a coney dog. There is nothing wrong with a chili dog, it can be a very good thing, but coney sauce – despite sharing a pretty obvious genetic bond with chili – is not chili. Normally you could just ignore the sad souls who think that putting chili on a hot dog makes it a coney, but these people also tend to be the same misguided heathens who think that chili has beans and ground meat in it. You end up with a double abomination, and I am sure that there are legions of deceased Greek restauranteurs who spin madly in their graves ever time it happens.

So let’s not go there.

Now – people new to the coney dog game might not know this but there are two different kinds of coney sauce: Detroit-style, and Flint-style. Detroit-style traditionally uses ground beef heart (or at the very least, a mix of ground beef heart and ground chuck) and it is “wetter”, with a pasty liquid component to the sauce that soaks into the bun. Flint-style coney sauce is drier, and uses a mix of ground chuck and ground wieners, and also has a bit of tomato in the sauce. The meat in both sauces is ground ultra-fine (usually a triple grind) and the only solid components you should see are the ground meat and the onion.

In the interests of sanity, I am only going to pursue a perfect version of one of these sauces. The big question is … which one? Growing up on the Michigan border in Sarnia, Ontario – almost equidistant to both Flint and Detroit – I was generally exposed to both types. Did I have a favourite? Hard to say. The best coneys in my hometown were at the Rendezvous snack bar, which served it Detroit-style. The second best coneys in town were at Tab’s drive-in, where they did them Flint-style. And if you went across the river to Port Huron and stopped in at the Krystal Bar, they had a Flint-style dog that blew both of the Sarnia offerings away. Complicating matters is the little fact that I haven’t had a real coney in years and years. I have been gone from Sarnia for a long time, and the Rendezvous and Tab’s are both long, long gone.

This project might have to start with a style-off. Or a road trip. Or both. Stay tuned.

Two new dishes coming today – Big Beefy Ribs and Maple-Cinnamon Glazed Grilled Pineapple. With photos! Stay tuned!

Let’s be clear: Grilling isn’t any sort of great evil. Grilling often results in some quick and tasty food, and in some cases (hot dogs, hamburgers*, steaks, yummy vegetables) grilling is pretty much the correct way to cook. So – while I am going to remain pretty hardcore about the fact that grilling is not barbeque, I am also going to be giving grilling it’s proper due … talking about it, doing it, and sharing some ideas. It helps that the Egg is not only a fabulous inderect cooker and smoker, but an incredible grill.

There is no shame in grilling., Just make sure you call it what it is, and don’t use the “b” word when talking about it.

*NOTE: While grilling makes generally excellent hamburgers, I have been using the smoker to take sliders to a whole new level this year. Details and photos to come.