I love chicken wings.  They are small bite sized morsels of poultry goodness.  I’ve smoked wings lots of time and wanted to give something a little different.

I cranked up one of the Weber Smokey Mountain smokers with some avocado wood.  Avocado wood is a somewhat hard wood that goes great with chicken and pork.  It’s a mild wood that should be treated like you would a fruit wood.

The wings were seasoned with Simply Marvelous Season All and smoked at 225 degrees for about 2 hours.  Because it was a busy day I let the wings cool and put them into the refrigerator for eating at a later date.

After sitting in the refrigerator for a couple of days I took the wings out of the refrigerator and let them come up to room temperature.

After the wings warmed up a little I gave them a little milk dunk and a dust of flour.

After letting the flour set into the Masterbuilt Butterball Indoor Turkey Fryer they went for about 10 minutes.  They came out nice and crisp.

The wings got a coating of Sweet Baby Ray’s new “Original Dipping Sauce”  The sauce has a mild horseradish flavor and complimented the season all and avocado wood.

© 2010, The BBQ Grail. All rights reserved. On republishing this post you must provide link to original post.

On my Facebook page I post a “Topic For Discussion” each morning.  A couple of weeks ago the topic was Egg Nog.  The topic turned into a discussion with Laura of Laura’s Best Recipes on how hard it would be to come up with a couple of recipes that used Egg Nog as an ingredient.  Laura has a recipe she’s working on, mine is Egg Nog Chipotle Battered Fried Shrimp with Jalapeno Cranberry Dipping Sauce.

Jalapeno Cranberry Dipping Sauce

Ingredients:

• 1 can Cranberry Sauce
• 1 Jalapeno, seeded, deveined and finely chopped
• 2 teaspoons cilantro, finely chopped
• 2 teaspoons balsamic vinegar
• 2 tablespoons orange juice

Directions:

Mix all ingredients together and refrigerate for several hours before using so flavors have a chance to mix.

Egg Nog Chipotle Battered Shrimp

Ingredients:

• 12 to 14 ounces Egg Nog
• 2 cups flour
• 1 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 egg
• 1+ teaspoon chipotle powder

Directions:

Beat the egg and add to the flour.  Stir in enough Egg Nog to give you a consistency slightly thinner than pancake batter.  When you have the desired consistency add in baking powder and enough chipotle powder to give you the heat you want. The batter is going to pretty sweet and it won’t take much chipotle powder to change the flavor.  What you want is the batter to be sweet on the front of the tongue and give you just a little heat on the back of the tongue on the way down.

The Egg Nog makes a thick batter so don’t be afraid to add some regular milk if needed to give you a thin consistency.

Batter your shrimp and fry them until done.  Serve with the Jalapeno Cranberry Dipping Sauce.

© 2009 – 2010, The BBQ Grail. All rights reserved. On republishing this post you must provide link to original post.

The history of the MOINK Ball along with the original recipe has been posted on Char-Broil’s “Sizzle On The Grill” website.  Check it out! 

Sizzle On The Grill

Who would have thought…

© 2009 – 2010, The BBQ Grail. All rights reserved. On republishing this post you must provide link to original post.

Bacon and brown sugar!

I can slave over a brisket or pulled pork and my friends will be thankful for a taste.  But if you ask many of them what one item they’d me want to make for them the answer is Pig Candy.  Who would have thought that combining bacon with brown sugar and a little chipotle powder would be such a hit.

Start with a good amount of brown sugar and chipotle powder to taste. Mix it up good, you don't want a clump of chipotle powder to hit your tongue.

I prefer good thick bacon. The thinner stuff works good to, but it cooks really fast so watch it.

Lay your bacon out on the grate

Put a good coating of the brown sugar/chipotle mixture. Cook at your desire temperature until it starts to get a little crisp. I use 245 degrees with apple wood.

When it starts to crisp up I like to turn it over and give it another dose of the sugar mixture.

Let it cool and enjoy!

© 2009, The BBQ Grail. All rights reserved. On republishing this post you must provide link to original post.

My friends at the Dutch BBQ Forum love to make MOINK Balls. This weekend several of them decided they would make MOINK Balls and send their photos to me for the BBQ Grail. (For a history of MOINK Balls click here)

One special note. “Official” MOINK Balls are made with pre-made frozen 100% beef meatballs. Finding pre-made meatbals in the Netherlands is a difficult task sometimes, so you’ll see “homemade” meatballs in most cases here.

Here they are:

Abraham Van de Vuurst (Spakenburg, Holland)

Wrapped and ready to be smoked.

Cooking away!

Sauced and almost ready to eat

"Bram" ready for some MOINK Balls

Peter Eyckmans (Hersett, Belgium)

Ingredients ready for MOINK Ball wrapping

Using indirect smoking

Off to a great start!

Let's eat some MOINK

Frits de Jonge (Oosterhout-Nijmegen, Netherlands)

(Frits will receive the special “Spirit of MOINK” Award. He made his own “pre-made” meatballs by making them three days ahead of time and freezing them. Only to thaw them out on Saturday to make his MOINK Balls.

Meatballs ready for cooking

Pre-cooked, ready for freezing

Assembled and ready to cook

MOINK Balls and a fatty cooking away

Fritz and his MOINK

Robert de Meij (Rhoon, Netherlands)

I'm going to call these "Popsicle" MOINK Balls

On the Weber. Looking good!

Robert and his MOINK Popsicles

“Noskos” (Westland, Netherlands)

MOINK! It's what's for dinner

Sauced and ready

Noskos rocking the BBQ Brethren hat and MOINK Balls

“Spiffs: (Den Helder, Netherlands)

MOINK ingredients

Almost ready

Great looking MOINK Balls

Spiffs showing off his balls.

A special thank you to all my great new friends over at the Dutch BBQ Forum. You guys did MOINK proud.

If any other Dutch BBQ enthusiasts (or anyone else worldwide) that has some MOINK Balls to show up. Email them to me at bbqgrail@earthlink.net

© 2009 – 2010, The BBQ Grail. All rights reserved. On republishing this post you must provide link to original post.

It wasn’t all that long ago that it took quite a bit of luck to become an internet phenom. Today it just takes a funny or inspiring video and one or two well placed emails and you can suddenly find yourself all over the internet. Be it good or be it bad…there you are. And MOINK Balls are a prime example of how easy it is to make a name on the internet.

MOINK is a very minor BBQ and internet story of fame. Because on various BBQ Forums there appears to sometimes be an unhealthy amount of time spent on MOINK Balls I thought I would take a few minutes to tell the story of MOINK!

Last June I had the good fortune to venture out to Wichita, Kansas to spend the weekend at one of my internet friends homes along with a bunch of other bbq enthusiasts cooking and eating our way through the entire meat scale. We ate brisket, chili, ham, brats, spam, pork ribs, and a few other meat items. If it wasn’t for Steve’s wife Linda forcing a salad or two down our throats we would have been pretty much vegetable free for the three days.

A few of us had made plans to fly into the Kansas City airport, rent a car and drive to Wichita, causing untold BBQ havock along the way. For three of us the journey to KC was pretty much uneventful. However, when we all rendezvoused in KC one of us was missing, It seems our Los Angeles brother was kicked off his airplane for wearing blue jeans. (There’s a valid reason, but that’s another story, for another day.)

After talking Neil into catching another flight wearing the appropriate flight attire we had to wait the four hours or so for him to arrive. So what do three BBQ enthusiasts do in KC with a four hour wait? Go find some BBQ, of course. Because we didn’t wish to stray to far from the airport we ended up at a local BBQ establishment, not one of the famous places, that advertised itself as the #1 BBQ Restaurant in KC. (The restaurant shall remain nameless to protect the guilty).

Because this is not a review of the restaurant we won’t discuss how bad the food was. But the beginning of MOINK was born there. As we finished our meal we commented to our waitress about the baby back ribs we ordered. It came as quite a shock to us when she informed us that their baby backs were beef. It was a comment that, of course, we could not just let pass. After laughing about it for a sometime we came up with the term MOINK. Beef = MOO and Pork = OINK. MOINK!

Later in the summer I had the chance to do a little catering for the daughter of a good friend. I wanted something special and decided to wrap a pre-cooked, italian style meatball in bacon, rub it with a little Plowboy’s Yardbird Rub and smoke it for about 90 degrees. As I was plating them up I was asked what they were called. Without really thinking about it I called them MOINK Balls.

The most important thing to remember about MOINK Balls is they are supposed to be simple. Official MOINK Balls are only made with pre-cooked, frozen (but thawed) meatballs. Anything else is a faux MOINK Ball.

© 2009 – 2010, The BBQ Grail. All rights reserved. On republishing this post you must provide link to original post.

When people see my surname I am often confused for someone who subscribes to a particular neopagan religion that worships Gaia or Mother Earth.  But that couldn’t be further from the truth.  My last name GAIAN is only two generations old.  If my great grandmother had not gotten mad at my great grandfather many years ago I would still have my Irish ancestors surname of GAHAN.

My Irish ancestors came to this country through Nova Scotia, Canada just after the turn of the 20th Century.  They eventually found themselves living in and around Lowell, Massachusetts.  They left their homeland in the hope of a better life during the potato famines.

My English ancestors came to this country much earlier as part of the Puritan movement that settled here shortly after the Mayflower first landed.  These ancestors eventually found themselves throughout what became “The South.”   Settling in the Carolinas and Georgia as farmers these people eventually helped to develop the southern cuisine that I love today.

Finding a menu that encompassed these three cultures and still enable me to incorporate bacon in each course proved to be much easier than I had anticipated.  It appears bacon has been a staple of my ancestors for centuries.  Maybe that’s why some people think I might have bacon grease flowing through my veins instead of blood.

It wasn’t hard to find people to share my visionary meal.  I quickly found four other couples to join my wife and I with my theme meal.  With the assistance of two of my favorite cookbooks: The Bacon Cookbook: More than 150 Recipes from Around the World for Everyone’s Favorite Food and Seduced by Bacon: Recipes & Lore about America’s Favorite Indulgence I was able to come up with a menu that I could adapt to my love of BBQ and keep within the theme of my blog.

The menu consisted of:

• MOINK Balls Appetizers (More on MOINK later on)
• Southern Shrimp & Pea Salad w/cracklings
• English Bacon & Cheddar Bread
• Southern Style Smothered Chicken w/bacon and lemon slices
• Southern Style Sauteed Green Beans w/bacon and shallots
• Irish Colcannon
• Southern Red Velvet Cake w/bacon cream cheese frosting
• Pecan, Brown Sugar, Bacon Ice Cream

Utilizing a several types of bacon was critical to trying to get the authenticity of each dish.  The English Bacon & Cheddar Bread and the Irish Colcannon required English/Irish bacon.  Slab bacon was used on the Southern Shrimp & Salad, Ice Cream. And your normal everyday sliced bacon was used on the others.

English/Irish bacon differs from traditional bacons found in the U.S. because it’s made from the meat of the back of the pig instead of the belly meat.  English/Irish bacon closely resembles “canadian bacon.”  But as you can see from this picture it has a layer of fat surrounding it, while canadian bacon is made from the leaner loin of the pig.

English/Irish Bacon

The highlight dish of the evening was the Colcannon.  This traditional Irish potato dish utilizes cabbage to make the potatoes go further.  The English/Irish bacon along with the cabbage gave the dish a great flavor profile. 

The Southern Style Smothered Chicken was my opportunity to incorporate my Traeger smoker into the meal.  Instead of tying the whole chickens I decided to spatchcock and smoke them for an hour with cherry wood.  The smoked but still raw chickens were then transfered to the dutch oven on the stove to finish cooking them.  The smoke flavor along with the bacon and lemon gave the chickens are nice country taste.

Spatchcock chicken

Chicken In The Pot

 The course that generated the most conversation amongst our guests was dessert.  The Red Velvet Cake only had bacon as a garnish on the top of the frosting.  The original idea was to substitute finely chopped crisp bacon for the pecans in the frosting.  After making the ice cream we decided to only sprinkle crumbled bacon on the top of the cake.

The Pecan Brown Sugar Bacon ice cream was good, but the texture of the bacon after being in the ice cream mixture turned a little soft and chewy.  If I were to do this again I’d cook the bacon crispier and use half the amount.

Red Velvet Cake w/Bacon Ice Cream

 Last but not least were MOINK Balls.  I came up with MOINK Balls last summer for a wedding I was asked to cater.  I needed a different type of finger food.  I wrapped a pre-made meatball with bacon, seasoned with one of my bbq rubs and smoked it for about 90 minutes.  They were a hit.  After posting them on the BBQ Brethren Forum you can now find MOINK Balls made all over the world.

The name MOINK comes from a visit I had to a Kansas City BBQ restaurant last June, with Ron L. and Neil T., where our waitress proclaimed their baby back ribs came from  a cow.  Anyone with any bbq knowledge knows that baby backs are pork ribs and not beef ribs.  And with that little mistake MOINK was born.  Beef = MOO, Pork = OINK…MOINK.

MOINK Balls

A few other pictures from the evening:

English Cheddar & Bacon Bread

Lots of Red Food Coloring In the Cake

Green Beans With Bacon & Shallots

Shrimp & Pea Salad with bacon

© 2009 – 2010, The BBQ Grail. All rights reserved. On republishing this post you must provide link to original post.

I had forgotten about these pictures from a BBQ Brethren Bash awhile ago.  What do you do when you’re sitting around all day visiting and cooking and someone breaks out the Oreos and puts them down next to a little leftover bacon.

Bacon wrapped Oreos of course.

Start with an oreo and a piece of bacon.

Wrap it up good and tight and hold with a toothpick.

Every true bacon expert knows that chocolate and bacon were made for each other.  The question was what would happen to the cream filling after two hours in the smoker at 245 degrees.

Nothing…that’s what happened.  Here is the final product after being rubbed with Ddog’s Apple Rub and smoked with almond wood.

Yes, I ate it.  And it tasted pretty darn good.

© 2009 – 2010, The BBQ Grail. All rights reserved. On republishing this post you must provide link to original post.

I recently was thinking about how I could serve pulled pork at my daughter’s wedding in a way that was easy, yet more elegant.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with pulled pork sandwiches but because I was the cater and in the wedding I needed something easy to put together.

I bought some nice sweet french bagettes and cut them into thin slices.  After drizzling the slices with a little olive oil and a sprinkle of Plowboy’s Yardbird Rub I lightly toasted them on one side in the broiler

I had already taken the pulled pork and given it a rough chop.  So all I had to do was place the pulled pork on the crostini and top it with a little cole slaw.  The whole thing was then garnished with a little “Simply Marvelous” BBQ sauce and another dash of Plowboy’s Yardbird.

Hmmmm…..tasty.

© 2008 – 2009, The BBQ Grail. All rights reserved. On republishing this post you must provide link to original post.

I needed something “new” for an event this weekend so after a few conversations with other bbq enthusiasts and reading a couple of recipes I came up with the following:

I smoked a bunch of chicken thighs rubbed with DDog’s “Apple Rub.” After the thighs cooled I removed the skin and pulled the meat off the bones. I then used the food processor to chop the chicken meat into a really fine consistancy.

Threw some neufchatel cheese into a bowl:

Added some onion and a good dose of additional “Apple Rub”

After adding the smoked chicken and mixing very throughly I put the mixture into a mold and let it set. There is also mayo, lemon juice and some tabasco added.

When it was time to serve the “pate” was unmolded and sprinked with a little more “Apple Rub” and then drizzled with “Blue Hog” sauce.

This nice little appetizer was simply fantastic.  Give it a try.

Smoked Chicken Faux Pate

1 1/2 cups smoked chicken thighs, rubbed with your favorite rub.  (Use something sweet) Chopped very, very, fine.

Mix smoked chicken with 8 ounces of Neufchatel Cheese, softened.

Add 3 tbls finely chopped onion

2 tbls  “rub”

2 tbls mayonaise

2 tsps lemon juice

Hot sauce to taste

Combine all the ingredients.  Transfer to a 2 cup mold coated with “cooking spray.”

At serving time, turn out onto serving plate and sprinkle more rub and drizzle with your favorite bbq sauce.

© 2008 – 2009, The BBQ Grail. All rights reserved. On republishing this post you must provide link to original post.