Beef Does a Body Good Grilling Tips

Got beef?

Beef and The Body

Meat and potatoes. Or just meat. This was the food of our ancestors. There is so much stank put on the beef industry due to their use of growth hormones in fertilizer and feed, some accused of injecting the animals themselves, or the monopolies they once placed on beef, that we have some forgotten just what it is that beef does for our bodies.

I've made a living selling beef. It is a product I believe in.

Beef does a body good.  Makes us strong. Muscles.  Oh yeah, that's why I'm supporting the first annual Atlas Classic Bodybuilding Show and talking about beef and protein! Nutritionally speaking, it contains protein and iron which are essential, in fact, recently it was noted that Top Round, Eye Round and Bottom Round (which I use) came out on top of the 12 Skinniest Cuts of Meat list.  They also claim you have to eat a crapload of Tuna to get the same nutrients in 3 oz of beef.  Read about it here in Beef Bytes.

You can read how to make these beef tips recipe here.

Choose Your Meat Wisely

Now what type of beef you eat or buy is up to you and this is where it gets dicey. If you go to the grocery store with a few bucks in your pocket chances are you are going to get yourself some crappy ass ground snout and hoof meat. I'm not going to call this "pink slime" because the public has done a good enough job of using that term to destroy the beef market (which drove prices down, so I guess that was a good thing.) 

Seriously folks, eating healthy is a bit more expensive these days.  If you are going for steaks, they come in different cuts, some fattier than others.  There are ways to trim and sear your steaks to cook off some of the fat.  I use Bottom Round beef flats, but after high temp grilling on the fatty side, which protects the meat from getting burnt to all-hell, then trimming and searing in my five step grilling process the fat is 90% gone so there are ways to grill your meat to death and still have it taste dynamite.

Big Fat Daddy's Beef Grilling Tips:

• Tenderize your meat with a butcher hammer before applying dry rub or marinade.
• Marinate over night in dry rub or liquid even up to 48 hours for optimum flavor.
• Trim fat leaving only a thin layer to "grill off".
• Grill low and slow.
• Flip often avoid burnt or overcooked areas.
• Place fatty side down at first which will serve as flame enhancer and sear flavor into your meat.
• If using wood and you have a flame flare up, do not "doust" the flame but instead hit with a few drops of water. Otherwise you just put your flame out.
• BBQ Sauce or final leftover marinade should be placed at 80% to 90% finished to avoid excess burning.
• Some may choose to use the "foil" method for placing beef that is 60% cooked in a foil wrap with veggies and oil and steaming it off the rest of the way, which has been known to flavor the veggies and keep the meat tender and juicy. 

Hunk of Bottom Round, marinated, with fatty side down allowing fat to cook and burn off!

Get Creative With Your Meat

If you are wanting to eat healthier, try to find grass-fed or organic beef. Perhaps you can budget accordingly and buy a small steak that is top quality versus three steaks at bad quality. Use the steak in another dish such as beef tips over pasta or veggie wraps with beef in them, or grilled steak on top a dynamite salad.

You don't have to have straight up steak. You can get creative implementing this beef or steak into something tasty and low fat, obtaining the protein from a good quality cut of meat.

Burger Junkies : Love Me Some Angus

I'm a burger junkie. If you a burger junkie, ground beef can be bought lean or high quality rather than fatty, choose lean ground round, Angus, or even Bison if you really want to have less fat.  Make sure to read the label, because some "angus" labels are not "Certified Angus".

According to this Angus Beef Explanation article at Straight Dope, "Certified Angus Beef" (CAB) is a special industry designation developed in 1978 that involves standards for marbling, tenderness, age, and color. According to the National Cattleman's Beef Association, only about 8% of U.S. beef is entitled to the label "Certified Angus." Just because something is labeled "Angus" or "Black Angus" doesn't mean it's the same quality as "Certified Angus Beef." Angus beef is further differentiated by USDA grades such as "prime," "choice," and "select," giving us such labels as "Certified Angus Prime," indicating the best Certified Angus Beef."

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Pork BBQ Grilling Tips Be a Grillmaster

Depending on who you ask, there may be a "right way" or "wrong way" of home grilling or experimenting with your pork barbecue. Now granted, I'm not talking competition because rules do apply. I'm talking home cooking for your family, friends, or even trying to market your own style pork BBQ. I'm here to tell you there is no right and wrong.

Certainly we must give credit to Memphis Style and traditional Southern Pork Barbecue, but today, there are so many styles of "barbecued pork" throughout the US and abroad that if you took a lifetime you could not try them all. Certainly one could make a living eating and reviewing everyone's pork BBQ because, chances are, no two will ever taste exactly alike.   Some will indeed make your tongue slap your brain.

You have the sweet and tangy.
You have the bitter yet brown sugar honey-fied.
You have the vinegar based sweet succulent.
You have the spicy and red sauced.
You have the hickory smoked sliced bbq pork.
You have the pulled that melts in your mouth that you can't describe.
You have the soy based pork bbq.
You have the kind that sets your mouth on fire.
You have the kind that falls right off the bone.
You have the kind that's been processed into fine little bits.
You have the sliced and diced kind.
You have the kind they cut up old Southern Style with a small axe.
You have the one you can't quite put your finger on what it is but it's damn good.

Be Daring.

At home you are your own grillmaster. Do it up right. Sprinkle some love. Put a dab or this and a pinch of that and see where it takes you.   Should you get bone in or bone out? That's up to you.   Smoke it. Bake it. Broil it. Boil It. Do whatever the hell you want to your butt of pork.   Season it, baste it, taste it, pull it,  shred it, cut it, chop it, mutilate it, it's all good.  

If I lived by the rules of doing it "this exact way" or "that particular way" I would never have had my own hickory sweet tastin' pork bbq that is not duplicated by anyone because it's my own recipe.  Some people will say hey, that doesn't look pulled like traditional bbq.  Others may say "hey, pork isn't supposed to be smoky or taste like apples and hickory." That's when I make them a sub and they shovel it into their mouth bite by bite. Yum.

 

I have spent lots of time at barbecue festivals tasting other's pork bbq and I have to say that no two have ever tasted alike to me, but I could spend the day eating it all as there are so many ones that are delicious.   So what I'm advising is be daring. Try something new. Don't be scared to add that pinch of brown sugar or touch of Tabasco. It's all you.  It's YOUR PORK BBQ.

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Electric Meat Smoking with Liam O'Sullivan Part One

Liam took this picture of his electric smoker.

Twitter is a wonderful thing.  That's how I met Liam Sean O' Sullivan who (let's say loves his Cubs baseball team) as much  almost as much as his barbecue! He's currently in Central Illinois (Champaign) but does up some very tasty creations. So I wanted to showcase them here. 

First of all, how do you smoke your meat?

"I won't lie. I cheat at smoking.  And I'm so happy about it.  I use an electric smoker. I make really lame smoke bombs (I wrap my wood in foil, but leave the sides open so it smolders instead of burns). " 

Electric Smoking Hint: Liam uses hickory chips and often a pan of water to keep his food moist.

What do you do for pork?

"Pork at 170. Once at 180, wrapping it, and placing in a pan. Bring it to 205 and we're golden! When I wanted to make my pork have a little extra oomph, I injected half a jar of giardinera oil. (Chicago style hot peppers, soaked in oil. The oil holds the spices).  Did I mention 5 full injectors through the fatty side of the pork?  Most of it cooks out, but you get a little bit of a kick."

Liam's pork looks scrumptious.

Any recipes you'd like to share? 

Liam's individual meatloafs, yum!

"Here is my individually smoked meatloaf.  The recipe idea was taken from smoking-meat.com , but I used sweet peppers instead of jalapeños."  

 

What does barbecue mean to you? 

"To me, bbqing is what you do when the weather is nice and friends come over to eat. It could be any type of food, just tossed on the grill/smoker/fryer. Just the other week we did a bachelor party for a friend, and it was pulled pork, some burgers, and sides. And was the simplest yet tastiest thing I'd had in quite some time. It also seems to be the essence of American food. Every other type of food seems to be a derivative of another country, but bbq, bbq holds it's own as truly American. And as an Irishman, I love that."

What do you obtain your beef?  

"I use www.rkbeef.com for all my beef/pork products. The website is outdated, call Ryan for product info."

Go To : Part two: Liam's Smoke Bomb Chicken Bacon Wrapped Chicken Part Two.

Prime Rib Recipe and Prime Rib Roasts

This illustration of Prime Rib Roast is by Jenny Mathews, who does a lot of illustrating for ZombieLogic.

I get asked a lot about Prime Rib Recipes.  Truth be told there is an inside joke that stems from a Prime Rib Tragedy in our family about Prime Rib and we won't ever eat it again.  One Christmas I took the largest prime rib I could find (a very large bone in portion to feed about 20 people)  to my wife's Aunt's house for Christmas. She didn't know exactly how to cook it, but she never asked, so we assumed she did. 

By the time we arrived on Christmas, and she put it on the table, it was a pile of charred remains.  I wept that very day.  I will never forget her husband asking, "What is that?"  As it seemed she left it in the oven, broiling  for about nine hours, only to remove all the "ribs" and throw them away because it looked too large for the oven. She had cut it into small pieces which of course, disintegrated onto the cooking platter. 



Cooking Prime Rib is a lengthy process, but one that takes care and basting, and proper removal (and keeping) of the rib portions, as these are yummy in themselves or can go to make soup stock or another dish later.

Ever since this horrible tragedy, my wife makes us eat Filet or Ribeye.   So here is my answer to the Prime Rib Recipe: Elise over at  Simply Recipes dot com has the absolute best Prime Rib Recipe.  There are illustrations to tell the how and the why and well, we wish Aunt Linda (see her here) would have read that way back when.

Good luck!

Italian Sausage Ferrante Wins

My wife is super picky about our sausage.  She is Italian so she makes me buy the best stuff around. Unlike some food vendors I don't serve slop.  We have tested and sampled tons of sausage.  Just recently we were given a sample from Roma Foods who made a rope just for us.  The taste was out of this world but the amount of grease and fat coming from it would have surely been heart attack in a bun.  So, we nixed it.

Here is a photo of us testing two different links. On the left is original Nick's Sausage Ferrante' Brothers brand, now made by Hatfield. On the right is Hatfield's own brand called Prima Porter.   As you can tell, the Prima Porter is bigger, but in this case bigger is not necessarily better.  My wife pointed out the Prima Porter was more fatty, had more gristle, and less fennel flavor.  Nick's won hands down. Looks like we are sticking with this sausage again this year folks!

Nick's Sausage was proudly made in Baltimore where I was born and bred, and we've been using this exclusively for many years now.  They have sold out and it is now made by Hatfield.  I wanted to make sure the taste was the same, because sometimes once a big conglomerate gets their hands on it, the recipe changes.  Believe it or not, we are extremely happy with it still.

Yum Yum.

Nascar Scrapbook BBQ Devolver and More

The Monster Mile

The Nascar Experience

So this past weekend I'm at Nascar selling barbecue.  We used to sell in Home Depot Parking Lot, but for the past two years I've been outside the track--near the 5 Hour Energy Fan Zone. This is what you would see if you looked in the window.

Window of Big Fat Daddy's in Nascar

Unfortunately, the wind was not cooperating and our giant signs were blowing down. This causes some havoc on us.  There was a bad storm but thankfully after hours of operation.  A fan stole my wooden turkey leg display sign but the security guard got it back.

Now we weren't smart like other concessions stands who have just one or two items in their tents--they have lower signs and they weren't blowing anywhere. We had Texas Beef and Pork BBQ, Texas Cheesesteaks, Hatfield Quarter lb franks, Texas Burgers and our Giant Turkey Legs plus fries and drinks.

How to Sell Food at Nascar

If you are wondering how to sell food at Nascar, good luck. We were invited by Paige, the old Vendor Coordinator. Nascar used to allow a certain number of vendors into Nascar other than DJ's Concessions who used to have the majority of the food. That all changed in 2011 when Nascar gave DJ's Concessions all the food. Not only did DJ's wait until the last minute to send us a contract, (who does that) but he upped the rent from exorbitant 30% of gross sales that Nascar charged you to a whopping to 35% of gross sales even though Nascar assured us it would be the same. Oh, he expected you to buy soda direct from him, and ice, but there was no delivery of such items like there are at most festivals. My wife was out of product.  On top of that, he slapped us with inventory sheets when we got there and wanted us (each day) to count every single roll we sold and balance our inventory. He also didn't like our guys hats being sideways, and told my wife to tell them to turn them around. Guess he didn't like the way my guys have tattoos.  He asked my wife if she had a three pan wash was although it was set up right in front of him and she's a certified food manager.  Needless to say I would rather throw my barbeque into the Back River for the crabs to eat than go and deal with him again.  He expects your stands to look like this (one item and whitey white)

Sorry, bbq guys that sell 20 items out of one tent don't look like this!

Camping at Nascar

Now part of the whole "Nascar" experience is the campground. You never know what you are going to find or what you may see. There were five guys in a kiddie pool drinking with a big sign, "Honk and we'll drink." I didn't see them after the first day. I can only imagine they were down for the count.  There's no running water, but you can fill your camper with tanks or pay to have it filled. There's also portable showers to the tune of $6 each.  They have onsite ice trucks and Giant sets up a giant tented store just for the event. My wife managed to make her way to the casinos, tattoo parlor, local bars and restaurants and see a live concert in the campground during this short stay.

Devolver and Red Angel Perform in Campground

Lot 10 of Nascar Campground Nando Garza, Lead Singer of Red Angel is rocking right now.

Now what no one will believe is the fact that on Saturday night, a full fledged soundstage was set up by local talents like Devolver and Red Angel and 13:1 were in the lineup.  All are local rock bands. If I told you in the middle of Lot 10, there were smoke machines, stage lighting and Marshall amps set up for all to see you'd probably think I had one too many Ricky Bobby Brews. First up was Red Angel, you can find them on Facebook (listen to them here)  on their Red Angel Band Facebook Page or on Twitter. They are from the Delmarva area, and we talked a bit to the lead singer Fernando Garza!

Last but not least we watched Devolver, Delaware's fresh new talent!  They were rocking the stage at nightfall and they kicked ass. See their profile on Reverb Nation here, connect with them on Facebook  or follow them on DevolverRock on twitter!  My wife was a big fan of this group and I am glad we got a chance to see them!  You can also check out their website right here.

Local band 13:1 closed out the show but we missed them, busy getting ready for race day catching some zzz's tucked away in our bunks.

Thanks guys for making Nascar such a blast!

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