BBQing in SE Texas

SE Texas is recognized by its fabulous BBQ. Reckon in Texas refers to beef not pork. One of the primary ingredients is the brisket.

Brisket is a cut of meat from the breast or lower chest of beef. The brisket muscles support about 60% of the body weight of standing/moving cattle. This requires a significant amount of connective tissue, so the resulting meat must be cooked correctly to tenderize the connective tissue. Otherwise you will end up with very hard meat, not what you want.

After almost 10 yrs, in SW TX (and multiple tries barbecuing briskets), we have finally reached a recipe and technique that is worth trying.

Trimmed Beef Brisket

We start off with a nice and trimmed whole beef brisket. We recommend not to remove the fat in between the layers, as the same will provide moist during the smoking process.

Quality ingredients and spices will be require to make both the wet rub and the dry rub. If you can grind whole toasted spices would be even better, as this technique will improve fragrance and flavor to be infused by the spices.

We like to use black pepper, garlic, smoked paprika and cayenne pepper for the dry rub.

For the wet rub we chili peppers, yellow mustard and beef concentrate are a good combination. 

Rub the brisket with the wet run ensuring you are covering all sides and rubbing in between the layers of beef.

Sprinkle the brisket with the dry rub on all sides. Press the rub down with your hands to ensure it remains on the meat.

Cover and refrigerate the brisket for up to 2 hrs turning once after the first hour.

Remove the brisket from the refrigerator and let it sit at room temperature for about and hour. 

Place the brisket in the smoker and hot smoke until internal temperature reaches 160 F. This could take anywhere from 4 to 8 hours depending on how cold was the brisket at the time it was placed in the smoker, the average temperatures of your smoker, and the outside temperature.

Remove the brisket from the smoker, place it in an aluminum pan. Pour one bottle of your favorite beer and one cup of apple juice, and cover with two layers of aluminum foil. Return to the smoker and continue to cook until the internal temperatures reaches 195 F. This can take up to another 4 to 6 hours.

Remove the brisket from the smoker and let is sit cover for 30 minutes.

Grilled the brisket for about 30 min, turning one, and serve. 

There is no such thing as a lean sausage - we don't make dry grainy tasteless links

Well marbled pork shoulder

Diced back fat

Sausages are at their best when you have the opportunity to make them yourself. With home made sausages you can control the quality of the meats used, and specially the amount of fat you add. But yes, you will need to add fat to ensure your sausages are juicy and pumped when grilled. Home made sausages do have a lower fat ratio than commercial links, but they still need fat. You can accomplish this by either using well marbled meats or by adding back fat. This should not be of concern, since the amounts to be used are still very low when compared to commercial sausages. I would not recommend to remove the fat from your sausages, as this will make the dry, grainy and just yukky.

Spices

Smoked sausage cut to reveals spices

High quality spices will go a long way to give your sausages a rainbow of flavor, not to forget that they will look great when you cut them, and you can see them perfectly arranged inside the meat. Mustard and coriander seeds are perfect, they stay whole when mixed and look great on your links.

meat & spices

Well mixed ingredients

Add the spices to your meats prior grinding, and if possible let them marinate overnight prior grinding. Thorough mixture of your spices with your meats and back fat is critical to ensure even taste for all your links. If you plan to smoke your sausages adding a binder, such as soy powder, helps ensure the links will retain their moisture when grilled. Small portions of liquid are essential, and any liquid will do from water to rum.

Stuffing machine

Stuffing the tripe

The use of the right equipment is essential. From the grinder and the mixer to the stuffing machine, you want to make sure you are using the right tools when making home made sausages. Keeping the stuffing machine and your meats very cold throughout the process will make the grinding and stuffing processes easier, and will maintain the integrity of the food. A little water on the receiving tray will go a long way to help the tripe slide.

Hot smoked links

Sausages in the smoker

Stuff all your tripe first, then you can make the links by either twisting them, or tying them with cords. The length is up to you. We prefer animal tripe (fresh or dry) to synthetic casings. 

Whether you are making fresh sausages or you will smoke them, home made sausages are the best you can have. Smoking sausages gives them  a very nice color, not to mention the added flavor. Apple & cherry wood are the best for these links, and remember to spray them with apple juice every now and then while in the smoker.

When your links are ready give the a quick bath in icy water, this will stop the cooking process and ensure your links are not overcooked.

Enjoy!

Taking on Crawfish

Cannot live in SE TX, next door to Louisiana, and not venture with crawfish. We experimented with  two typical dishes which main ingredient is crawfish: Cajun boil and Etouffee. Both were delicious and quite simple to make. We are sharing our experience with the Cajun Boil.

This is an outdoor activity, for both cooking and eating. You will need a big pot, large enough to hold all the ingredients, a high BTU burner to ensure you can properly boil the water, and a lot of news paper to cover the surface you plan to use for eating. This is a "hands-on" meal and its is very messy but all worth it.

We boiled about 13 pounds of crawfish (about half a sac), enough to satisfy our cravings and use the rest for the Etouffee. 13 pounds of boiled crawfish will feed 8-10 people, depending on their hunger.

We recommend using fresh live crawfish and the best veggies you can get.

For spices we used Old Bay and Louisiana brands. You can also use Zatarain.

It is important to boil the potatoes almost to a done state, as the crawfish will be done only in 5-7 min. How much you boil the ears will depend on how soft you like your corn. We placed ours when the potatoes were half done. Total boiling time for the potatoes and corn was about 20-22 min.

Because you need to perform these tasks prior using the crawfish, it is very important that you keep your little critters nice and cool. We kept them in an ice box with ice.

Lastly, we added the crawfish and cooked them for about 7 min counted from the time the water boiled again. As they cook you can see them turn to a nice and bright red. You get to eat the corn ears and potatoes, which are great sides to accompany this dish.

Once cooked we scooped them out with the ears and potatoes, leaving the rest of the items in the pot. The liquid should be discarted.

We served them in separate plates with lemon wedges...Enjoy!

You can add fresh shrimp, heads on, to the mix and make this a Seafood Boil too.

Duck liver pâté Au Cognac

Have you ever made Duck liver pâté? We have not, only made chicken liver terrines.
I personally love liver pâtés and have had in my sight to try to make both duck and goose pâté. Looked at various pâté recipes, including terrines and mousses, but none of them were appealing. I am not a fan of baking the dish, much less grounding the raw livers.
Decided to modify my chicken liver terrine and it was a success. The delicate flavor of the liver combined with black truffles and Madeira was perfect. Use mascarpone for consistency and finish with a splash of cognac! This is one going to the recipe book. Next try to make goose pâté. Needed to try with a less costly ingredient, you have to have some experience before you experiment with a 65$/lb dish :D

Smoking Game - Pheasants & Quails

Birds brined

We had the incredible opportunity to smoke game hunted by our neighbors. Pheasant & quail that was, both fresh from the hunting grounds.

Lay out to form pellicle

We started by brining the birds for 24 hrs, and drying in the refrigerator for another 24 hrs.

Birds were smoked with Alder chips, 1.5 hrs for the Quails and about 3 hrs for the Pheasants, using the lowest temperature range for hot smoking. It is critical for the wet pan to have plenty of liquid to ensure bird don't dry out while smoking.

Birds smoked

Smoked Pheasants

The results were perfect. Meat was juicy and tasty, without overshadowing the sweet taste of the birds.  

We enjoyed them as appetizers served over toast pieces of breed, spread with peppered goat cheese, and topped with four berries preserve. An excellent combination to enjoy the delicate flavors of the smoked birds, and the perfect or' derv to celebrate Xmas Day in the great company of family and dear friends.

Blood Sausages / Morcillas



Fully cooked & read to eat

There are home-country items not available in the US. You can find some acceptable substitutes but at the end of the day they are not really that good to bother. Either you learn to live without them or --like we did-- you learn to make them! Blood sausages are on the list of many items we learned to make and enjoy abroad // Hay muchos platos Venezolanos que no se consiguen en EEUU. En ciudades grandes puedes encontrar substitutos acceptables pero en realidad no son tan buenos. Por lo tanto, aprendes a vivir sin tus platos favoritos (y de vez en cuando acceptas substitutos), o haacs como nosotros aprendes a prepararlos y disfrutartlos cuando quieras.

Fall season is here and with it comes time to make boold sausages // Llego el otoño, la mejor epoca  para preparar morcilas

Really really Good Cook Books

Have you ever tried to cook a great dish? You followed the recipe to the letter, and the end results were terrible? The aspect of your dish looked nothing like the picture? Not to mention whatever you created was not edible? I sure have, the problem is not that you cannot follow a recipe, but that not all chefs are willing to share their secrets in their books, and "forget" to share sequence of actions, and even some steps that happened to be critical for the success of the dish. Unfortunately, unless you start learning some way, you cannot master cooking to be able to cook w/o a recipe; hence the need to start with cook books and recipes.

Lucky for you there are some really really good Cook books out there that truly help you get to the end result, and have a dish that looks like the one on the picture. Below is a list of excellent cook books proven to given you what is on their picture and obtain meals that are tasty as they look!

Serious Barbecue by Adam Perry Lang - For the outdoors aficionados
Mexico - Beautiful Cookbook – Excellent Mexican food made from scratch
Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlma & Brian Polcyn – For the more adventurous cooks that are ready to take their cooking skills to the next level
Bread from ciabatta to rye by Linda Collister – If you like bread and don’t mind the time it takes to make and bake good bread, this is the best bread book out there
The River Cottage Meat Book by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall – This guy is great! You will love this one

For any cook aficionado, there is nothing more frustrating than investing in ingredients, time and effort to have to throw your dish to the garbage. Many “simple” recipes shown in none cooking magazines, are very likely to be a waste of your time. If you are into mag subscription Saveur is one of the best ones out there.

If you like to watch cooking shows, anything with Alton Brown in it will be worth your while, especially if you are new to cooking; and as Alton would put it, anything you cook from his show or his books will be "Good Eats". Please stay away from Emeril, he never shows you the whole process, and the dishes he portraits in the show are not what he was cooking on TV.

I invite you to try some of these recommendations and have fun while you cook!