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A few months ago I used my charcoal chimney and a small cooking grate to grill some sausages.  Cooking directly on the chimney worked perfectly and I’ve used it a couple of more times to grill small amounts of meat.

The thought came to me that I could use the charcoal chimney to heat the cast iron skillet and fry my catfish.  I lit half a chimney of Kingsford charcoal and let it ash over.  I knew the charcoal would get the cast iron skillet hot, but I wasn’t sure how long it would burn so added five or six unlit briquettes to the already hot charcoal.

This worked well but the one thing I would do differently next time is find something to raise the chimney up off the flat surface it was one.  This will allow more airflow and keep the temperature steady through out the whole fish fry.

Preheating the cast iron skillet.

While the skillet was preheating I breaded the catfish in a little corn meal seasoned with a great seasoned salt I purchased at Granville Market in Vancouver, Canada called “Smoked Garlic Chipotle Salt” from Oddball Organics.

When I was growing up my mom used to fry fish breaded with corn meal and even now after many, many years of eating fish breaded with different methods corn meal is still my favorite way of doing it.

Once the cast iron skillet was heated and the oil up to temperature I was ready to fry some catfish.  It was no problem getting the oil heated to over 350 degrees.  The only real problem with cooking this way is there isn’t any way to control the temp.  There is no higher or lower.  You’ve just got to hope you get the right amount of briquettes.  Trial and error is the best way to learn this method.

The catfish fried without a hitch.

A big baked potato, tartar sauce and corn makes for a great Friday evening meal.  Clean up is simple and I didn’t have to worry about lighting candles or opening windows to air the house out.

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

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

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

So let’s get the hyperbole out of the way.  Phat Matt’s BBQ is the second best BBQ restaurant I’ve ever eaten at.  I’ve eaten a lot of really bad restaurant BBQ,  I’ve eaten  a lot of mediocre restaurant BBQ.  But only twice have I eaten great restaurant BBQ.   Up until this week the only other place I have eaten great restaurant BBQ was Dinosaur BBQ in Rochester, New York.  Dinosaur may remain my all time favorite BBQ restaurant but Phat Matt’s is a close second.

There are a couple of things that make a BBQ restaurant great.  Certainly the food is critical, and we’ll get to that in a minute, but atmosphere is important.  I’ve eaten at a lot of BBQ restaurants and most of the them are decorated as you would expect a regional cuisine type restaurant to be decorated.  But the staff and cooks are all pretty sterile.  Phat Matt’s has a rather sterile decor but it’s more than made up by the friendliness of the staff.

Charlotte and Matt Gonzales, the owners, are the perfect BBQ hosts.  They took the time to explain everything to my lunch companion (The famous LandarcBBQ of Twitter fame) and basically made us feel at home.  A BBQ restaurant can have great food, but if it doesn’t have that backyard, family type atmosphere then it just can’t be considered great.  And Charlotte and Matt have insured that atmosphere with their friendly, outgoing nature.

But what about the food…

I rarely eat a a BBQ restaurant more than once.  For this reason I like to try a couple of different meats.  At Phat Matt’s they have have single meat plates, 2 ways, 3 ways and a 4 way.  LandarcBBQ and I each ordered the 3 way with brisket, pulled pork and pork spare ribs.  Our two sides were collard greens and beans.  Toss in some plain sliced bread and we had a complete meal.

As you can see from the picture above this was a serious plate of meat.  Normally in restaurants when you order a combination plate you get smaller portions of each of the meat, but not at Phat Matt’s.  When you order a combo plate you get a full order of each meat.  We got three large, thick slices of brisket, four rib bones and a huge portion of pulled pork.  It was unbelievable how much meat we got.

Okay the atmosphere was great and the portions were extreme but best of all the food was outstanding.  Because of some dietary restrictions of one of the owners they use no salt in their cooking.  I know this sounds really stupid.  Salt in BBQ rubs is thought by most everybody to be essential to getting the best flavor out of the meat, especially brisket.  But without a doubt you couldn’t tell there was no salt.

The pulled pork was seasoned with a light vinegar sauce that enhanced the flavor to a point where you just wanted to gobble down a whole plate full.  The pork spare ribs were done the right way.  No “fall off the bone” meat at Phat Matt’s.  The meat came off the bone with just a light tug of the teeth.  The ribs were just a tab undercooked for my preference.  Don’t get me wrong they weren’t raw, I just like them a little “doner.”  Lightly sauced the ribs had a flavor that was again superb.

The brisket!  Look at the bark on this brisket.  Not only do they not trim all the fat (flavor) of their brisket but they also rub it with a secret rub (we make a token effort to find out what it was) that gives the brisket the most outstanding bark I’ve ever seen in restaurant brisket.  Next time I’m at Phat Matt’s I’m eating a plate of brisket.  It was that good.

We also had a taste of the deserts.  It wouldn’t be BBQ without some peach cobbler.  The peach cobbler was good enough that you might just want to go there just for the desert.  We also split a slice of the best pecan pie I’ve ever eaten.  I’m not a pecan pie expert but I do know I liked this one.  It’s make with no corn syrup.  It had a nice sweet flavor that didn’t overpower the pecans on the top.  All the deserts are made at Phat Matt’s by Charlotte.  No store bought, already made stuff at Phat Matt’s.

Phat Matt’s is open six days a week (closed on Monday) and is located at 3415 Telegraph Ave, Oakland, California (510) 879-7294.  You can follow them on Twitter.

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

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

Grilled beef tenderloin tacos was on the menu tonight.  I picked up some great tortillas at the local Bel Air grocery store.  These great tortillas from La Tortilla Factory in Santa Rosa have a fantastic flavor.  The green chili tortillas, which oddly enough aren’t listed on the companies website, have just enough green chili flavor to enhance the meat without overpowering everything else.  The combination of corn and wheat gluten gave the tortillas a nice texture.  They grilled/heated up great on the grill grates of my Weber kettle.  Unlike most commercially produced tortillas these are “hand made style” and are thick enough that you don’t need two tortillas to hold your taco fillings.

I seasoned the beef tenderloin with Fajita Seasoning from Lantana of Texas.  I received this seasoning in a BBQ trade with a fellow member of the BBQ Brethren.  I have not been able to locate any information about the company on the internet.  There are some listings for places that sell it, but nothing on the actually company.

Anyway, the seasoning is good but nothing really special.  You can probably find a fajita seasoning in your local store that is just as good and won’t have to worry about tracking it down and paying a shipping fee.

I left the seasoning on the meet for about 30 minutes while the charcoal was being lit in the chimney.  Once the charcoal was in the kettle and ashed over I grilled the tenderloin pieces for a couple of minutes on each side and them moved them to indirect until they were medium rare.

I heated the tortillas right on the Weber kettle while the meat was resting.  They didn’t dry out or curl on the ends like a lot of cheaper commercial tortillas will.  The tortillas from La Tortilla Factory are great.  At $2.5o for 8 tortillas they are a tad pricey and I doubt I’d use them for normal everyday tacos but when you’re breaking out the beef tenderloin a few extra pennies for a quality tortilla is worth it.

Just a simple taco with meat, avocado, tomato and cilantro.  These were outstanding tacos.  Tender and full of great flavor.  Here’s a couple shots of dinner with a River City Root Beer from Vine Park Brewing Company in St. Paul, Minnesota.

What’s really funny about the root beer is that I live near Sacramento, California.  Sacramento is located at the confluence of the Sacramento and American rivers and is known as River City.  I thought I was buying a local product, only to get it home and find out it’s from Minnesota.

Another shot of the final plated meal.

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When I attended the Winter Fancy Food Show I got a chance to visit with the people from Johnny’s Fine Foods.  I’ve used their French Dip Au Jus Sauce concentrate for years for a variety of different cooking  uses.

I was able to come away from the show with a bottle of their new French Onion flavored Au Jus Sauce.  The main purpose of this product is to make French Onion Soup but I knew immediately when I saw it that it was going to end up as a brisket injection.

The thought of having a different type of injection flavor for my brisket was something I’ve wanted to try for quite some time.  But it wasn’t brisket that ended up getting the French Onion injection.  It was beef shank.  And as you’ll see this may have been the highlight of this meal.

Beef shank is part of the leg of a heifer or steer.  Because of the nature of this cut of beef it is very sinewy and tough.  It’s very lean and hard to cook.  This may be the hardest to cook cut of beef on the entire cow.  And it’s pretty darn ugly too.

There was a lot of trimming that needed to be done.  The shank has more of the consistency of muscle than meat and it had a layer of “skin” and fat that needed to be trimmed off.

I mixed up 2 cups of the the French Onion au jus and injected the shank. What was interesting was how much liquid went into this small 6 pound shank. Because of the muscle I was injecting into at times it was like the injection was under pressure. Instead of just running back out it would shoot liquid up in the air a foot or two. It made for some exciting prep time.

Because the shank is so tough the only way I was going to get it tender was to braise it.  But since this is blog is all about BBQ I had to put it on the smoker for a couple of hours after the injection.  225 degrees for three hours gave it just the right amount of smoke flavor.

You can see the nice color the hickory and cherry wood gave the shank.   Even after three hours in the heat and with 2 cups of injection the shank released  very little liquid.  I was really surprised at this.

After smoking the shank went into a braising liquid of beef broth, onions, carrots, parsnips and turnips for four more hours. You can see in the picture how much the meat pulled back from the bone.

Parsnips, turnips and carrots with the beef shank ready to put on the table.

And plated with the Smoked Brisket Risotto

So here’s the story.  The shank meat was just okay.  You’d think that after so long in the whole cooking process that it would just be falling off the bone but it wasn’t.  It was still a little tough.  The flavor wasn’t all that appealing either.  It had a very gamey flavor to it.  To be honest this may have been the first and last beef shank I  ever cook.

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

Usually I keep the brisket liquid and inject the next brisket with it.  This time out I decided to give making risotto with the brisket liquid.  The brisket juice is very concentrated so you need to add a water to it.  Just add enough water to the brisket juice to give you enough broth for whatever  risotto recipe you use.

After you saute the onions and mushrooms you need to brown the rice a little. Once the rice has been browned you add a ladle or two to the rice and start stirring.

Keep adding liquid and stirring as the rice cooks and absorbs the brisket broth.

When it's almost done added the mushrooms into the risotto.

Okay, I know it's not the most attractive but it sure did taste good.

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Foodie Feeds is the latest website in the BBQ Grail family of food related sites.  Foodie Feeds is a place where you can easily see the latest posts on Food Blog sites. The sites with the newest posts are shown first, and you can click the link to open a new window that will display that food blog post. It’s quite easy to use — just view the page, and click on the link you want. Since a new window (or tab) is opened for each site, you can easily return back to FoodieFeeds to click on more food blog sites.

We use a customized process to look at the RSS feed of each participating food blog site. This process runs many times a day, and stores information about each food blog’s latest entries in our database. When you view the main FoodieFeeds page, that information is quickly extracted from the database and displayed on the page. The food blogs with the most recent entries are displayed first, so you can easily see which ones that you would like to read. Just click on the link, and a new browser tab will display that selected food blog’s latest post.

If you own a blog about foods, you need to get your blog on FoodieFeeds. It’s quite easy, just fill out our FoodieFeeds form. And if you want your food blog to have a higher position on the FoodieFeeds page, or want to have an ad displayed on FoodieFeeds, let us know via the comment form.

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