The thrill of the grill: techniques, recipes & down-home barbecue

414 Pages·1990·3.87 MB·English

by  Chris Schlesinger

THE
THRILL
OF THE
GRILL
Techniques, Recipes,
& Down-Home Barbecue
Chris Schlesinger
&
John Willoughby
To Cary, with love and respect
Contents
Introduction 13
Grills Just Wanna Have Fun 19
Enough of These Will Make a Meal 33
Fish and Other Water Dwellers 95
Birds and Things with Hooves 145
Grilling at the Ritz 189
Sambals, Blatjangs, and Salsas 225
Slow and Low Is the Way to Go: Barbecue (Smoke Cooking) 265
And All the Fixin’s 293
Breads and Desserts 331
Whistle While You Work: Refreshing Beverages 361
Your Basic Pantry 369
Where to Get It: Sources for Unusual Ingredients 381
Index 389
Acknowledgments 415
About the Authors
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher

Introduction
I’ll try any kind of food at least once—particularly after a long day
of surfing and a couple of rum drinks. Back in 1978, during my first
stay in the tropics, this particular combination set me on a path that
led to this book.
I had quit a humdrum cooking job and headed down to the Car-
ibbean—Barbados to be exact—to spend the winter with the two
great loves of my early life: overhead waves and low 80s temperat-
ures. Being a misguided youth, I managed to exist on hamburgers,
potato chips, and Cokes for the first month. Eventually, however, I
bowed to financial needs and the entreaties of my newfound local
friends and began to eat the food they ate. I started frequenting the
same restaurants they did and cooking with ingredients from the
open-air markets. This was the first time I had immersed myself in
another culture and its food.
One fine Sunday afternoon shortly before I had to leave to come
back stateside, my buddies and I were out back grilling some dol-
phinfish. Some of our Bajun friends showed up, among them my
sometime culinary guide. He brought out some small, lantern-shaped
red and yellow peppers. “Best in the world,” he said. “Check ’em
out.” I trusted the guy, he had always come through before, and,
like I said, I’ll try any food once. So I chopped up the peppers, added
some lime juice, mango, and herbs, and ended up with a yellow-
orange relish. I whipped some of it on the fish, took a big bite, and…it
practically blew my head off. Sweat poured down my face and every
cavity in my head opened to twice its normal size as my mouth
tasted a great, distinct, aromatic flavor. The culprit was the Scotch
Bonnet, the World’s Hottest Chile Pepper, and I loved it. Soon I was
happily splashing this sauce and any other fiery hot condiment I
could find on everything I ate. That was the beginning of my fascin-
ation with hot foods and tropical ingredients.
At the time, however, this fascination seemed to have little con-
nection with my life as a professional cook. After starting out as a
dishwasher, I had gone to the Culinary Institute of America, where
my training had mostly been devoted to reproducing the classical
13
recipes and techniques of Escoffier. Being a chef, it seemed, consisted
of re-creating the past. I learned what my teachers had to teach me,
but I can’t say that I was inspired by food—until I returned from
my Caribbean trip full of memories of spicy foods, exotic ingredients,
and raw, strong flavors.
My timing was right. When I got back to the United States, the
nouvelle cuisine movement, which had been under way in France
for some time, was beginning to make its presence felt. In Boston,
this was nowhere truer than at a Cambridge restaurant known at
the time for being at the culinary vanguard. At the Harvest, the best
expression of the emerging principles of nouvelle cuisine were in
operation. For the first time, I found myself working with young,
eager cooks who were inspired by the freedom this cuisine allowed.
The basis of this new cooking style was a rededication to the
profession of cooking, in which integrity, freshness, and use of local
ingredients replaced such irrelevancies as flaming dishes tableside.
Cooks began to use the highest-quality ingredients and let them
speak for themselves, rather than overpowering them with elaborate
preparations. At the Harvest, curiosity and imagination were encour-
aged, and the kitchen staff was exposed to a vast array of new in-
gredients. This was the best training I could have had to complement
my formal schooling, and it is from this time that I date my passion
for food and my sense of culinary adventurousness.
All this innovation and ferment created a climate in which being
a cook meant following principles, not recipes. As long as the prin-
ciples were observed and the results were rewarding, each cook
could bring his or her own background to bear on food. I began to
look to my own background for inspiration.
I was weaned on grilled food, and that burned, crusty taste was
one of my first taste memories. I grew up in Virginia and spent every
possible minute at my parents’ cottage near Virginia Beach. When
we were there, we wanted cooking to be as easy as possible, which
meant grilling. My dad taught me to appreciate food for itself, not
the trappings that surrounded it. He always went to Woolworth’s
for hot dogs because they had the best grilled buns, and he would
drive an hour out of his way for the perfect barbecue sandwich. He
loved shad roe, oysters, and charred steak. When he cooked, which
wasn’t often, he’d grill a steak so that it was burned on the outside
and raw on the inside. My sister and I would always tell him that it
was both too burned and too raw, but he refused to cook steak any
14 / The Thrill of the Grill
other way; and eventually we got to like it. Years later I would use
this principle to create one of my favorite dishes: seared sushi-
quality tuna, burned on the outside and raw on the inside.
Then of course, there was that great Southern specialty, barbecue.
How can I do justice to this food, steeped in tradition, surrounded
by myth and lore, subject of a million arguments and stubborn
opinions—it is the most commonplace food around. The best barbe-
cue is always found in a low-down dive that is as comfortable and
easy as old clothes. I love barbecue for its taste and for the type of
people who cook and eat it. Every year when I was a kid my folks
would throw a “pig-picking” party. They always hired some local
guys to come to our house the day before, dig a pit, and barbecue a
whole pig. They would arrive just as I was going off to bed, pulling
up in their trucks with their hats and their beers; they’d dig the pit
and start the pig. When I got up in the morning I’d see them lounging
around with that particular tired, satisfied slowness that comes from
staying up all night drinking beer and tending the pit. I’d spend
time with them, helping them cook and enjoying their easy camara-
derie. So it is that I came to love the process of barbecuing and the
atmosphere that surrounds it as much as the actual food. Barbecue
taught me what I consider one of the cardinal principles of cooking:
It’s the cooking, not just the eating, that is to be enjoyed.
On holidays we would visit Grandma Wetzler’s house in rural
Pennsylvania. Her table was jammed with an incredible number of
dishes—homemade applesauce, pickled eggs, corn pudding, ham
salad, homemade baked beans. It always seemed like a picnic. She
had developed an enormous repertoire of rural American dishes by
cooking every meal for her large family since the age of sixteen. I
still think of her table as the very essence of honest, bedrock Amer-
ican food.
I also drew on the memories of food I had eaten as I traveled
around the world looking for the perfect wave. The Scotch Bonnet
was followed by many such discoveries in tropical countries from
Costa Rica to Thailand and points in between. I began to notice cer-
tain similarities and pieced together an understanding of why the
food of hot climates captured my imagination. This style of cook-
ing—highly spiced, usually grilled, and served in that informal,
friendly fashion that goes with beaches and hot weather—defined
my own feelings and ideas about food. For want of a more precise
term, I call this food “equatorial cuisine.” This doesn’t mean that it
Chris Schlesinger & John Willoughby / 15
is all found precisely midway between the Tropics of Cancer and
Capricorn, but that it shares the characteristics of hot-weather food
that I just described.
Running through all of my food memories and discoveries, from
barbecue to the tropics, is my love of very distinct tastes. My food
has strong flavors that are not blended into a single taste; instead
they are combined without losing their individuality. My sauces are
raw, with lots of herbs, spices, and garlic. I like to finish my relishes
and sauces as close to serving time as possible so the individual
flavors stand out rather than blend together during cooking. So I
add something at the last minute—a squeeze of lime, some fresh
herbs, a chunk of spicy butter. I like my sauces to reach as many
parts of the palate as possible simultaneously. In general, my food
has an earthy simplicity, a casual style, with the emphasis on the
clarity and dimension of the taste. I pay more attention to the proper
preparation of particular ingredients than to flourish and presenta-
tion.
Since 1985, I have been the co-owner and chef of the East Coast
Grill in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There I have a custom-designed
open-pit wood-fired grill, which in its five years of constant use has
been a testing ground for my own brand of culinary adventurous-
ness. A menu that changes monthly, combined with my frequent
research-and-development field trips, has given the kitchen staff the
opportunity to creatively explore the relationship among spices,
grilled food, and hot-weather staples. On any given night, a rather
complex Thai-inspired dish like Steamed Clams with Lemongrass
and Chiles de Árbol may share the menu with a straightforward
Grilled Big Black-and-Blue Steak for Two as we try to encourage
our customers to explore new food experiences in an atmosphere
that doesn’t intimidate.
One constant menu item, though, is barbecue. My fascination with
the intricacies of the craft of barbecue has led me to crisscross the
country sampling other people’s versions of this classic, taken me
to the Memphis in May International Barbecue Championship three
years running, and eventually found me at the doorstep of John
Willingham, two-time National Barbecue Champion. With a little
work, I talked him into building me a barbecue pit that incorporated
his infinite knowledge of the method. Satisfied that we finally had
the understanding, experience, and equipment necessary to do it
justice, in 1988 my partner and I opened our own version of that
16 / The Thrill of the Grill
unique American phenomenon, the barbecue joint. We called it Jake
and Earl’s, after my one-eyed dog and my partner’s two-eyed father.
I love food but I think of it as part of the celebration of life, rather
than the centerpiece. The Thrill of the Grill presents no-fuss food,
meant for people who like to explore new and interesting tastes but
don’t want to be burdened by intricate preparations. Strong equat-
orial flavors and spices, the barbecue of the South, and the excitement
and informality of cooking over live fire are what this book is all
about.
Chris Schlesinger
Boston, Massachusetts
Chris Schlesinger & John Willoughby / 17