Dessert | The BBQ Grail

Grilled Apples with Sour Cream Caramel Sauce

It is Fall and Apple season so an apple desert was in order.

Started with four Granny Smith apples. They were peeled, cored and cut into 1/2 inch slices.

The apple slices were brushed with melted butter and placed on the grill.

The apples were grilled 1 minute on each side then rotated 90 degrees and cooked 1 more minute. The same procedure was followed on the second side.

Topping is 1/2 cup sour cream, 1/2 cup heavy whipping cream and 1/3 cup Caramel Ice Cream sauce. Mix them all together in a blender or food processor until just thick. Top the apple slices and enjoy. Plating wasn't quite as nice as I had hoped.

OINK! OINK! Pig Candy!

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

Putting 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.

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!

Tri-Tip Helper!

I have a freezer full of smoked meats. Everyone once in awhile I’m told that we really need to eat more of the meat so it doesn’t go bad. After helping my oldest daughter move into a new apartment and doing some yard work I wasn’t feeling like whipping up a big meal. I remembered once, on the BBQ Brethren Forum, that someone used some meat in Hamburger Helper and decided that this would be an interesting thing to try. An experiment you might say.

Fortunately, I can say we didn’t have a box of Hamburger Helper lying around, so I made a quick trip to the Super Wally World for some supplies. Mostly strawberries for desert, but also a box of Hamburger Helper. Picking our a “flavor” that would work with smoked beef was a little challenging. I decided on Philly Cheesesteak Hamburger Helper.

As you can tell, this was a really nice piece of smoked, then grilled tri-tip. I had seasoned this with Todd’s Dirt.

The tri-tip was diced up.

After adding all the Hamburger Helper ingredients and bringing to a boil, per the instructions, I tasted the sauce. It needed something. I new immediately that what it needed was bacon, but I didn’t have any so I used the next best thing. Bacon Salt…

That did the trick. After cooking, per the instructions, I plated it up with some salad and fresh french bread. It wasn’t the worse thing I’ve ever eaten, but for a quick meal it was satisfying. The smoked flavor and bacon salt complimented the “cheese” sauce very nicely.

FoodBuzz 24, 24, 24: My Heritage In Bacon!

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

Bacon Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ooh you tasty little things…: Experiments in deliciousness: Bacon chocolate chip cookies with maple cinnamon glaze.

I’m not sure I’ll ever try these. Okay, I will probably for the BYU game this weekend. Either way this cookies has everything that is good in the world on it.