For some strange reason I had the urge to create a meal in “honor” of Black Friday.  I have no reason other than sometimes cooking has to be fun and I just needed to do something different.  The only way to represent Black Friday properly would have to create an all black meal.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to find foods that are black?  It’s not all that easy.  So I decided that black beans would do the trick.  And when I was able to locate some black sweet rice at the asian market I knew I had the right formula.

First a little about Black Sweet Rice.  I bought the rice because it was black.  I had no idea what it tasted like or how it would work.  Once I got home I did a little research and learned that Black Sweet Rice is mostly used in Indonesia and Thailand to make sweet deserts like puddings and cakes.  It’s rarely used as the primary rice in a meal.  Black Sweet Rice has a nice nutty flavor and I thought it might still work as a compliment in the black bean recipe I was going to make.

Black Sweet Rice is hard as a rock.  You’ve got to soak this stuff for up to 10 hours before actually cooking it.  It take a long time to make it soft enough to actually eat in a meal like I was preparing.  So if you find yourself wanting to use it leave yourself plenty of cooking time.

This is my standard Red Beans & Rice recipe, except this time I used black beans.  I also normally use a smoked ham hock but I found some smoked pork necks at the store and used them instead.  They worked out great.  I put the whole mixture in the Traeger on the smoke setting for a couple of hours to see if I could get more smoke flavor.  Not really sure how much that worked.

All and all it tasted amazing.  I really liked the sweet rice with the beans.  It actually was a good combination.

BBQ Grail’s Red/Black Beans and Rice

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 cups green onions, chopped
• 2 cups onions, chopped
• 1 cup celery, chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1/4 cup bacon drippings
• 1 pound dried beans, traditionally red (but black works)
• 1 ham bone, ham hock or other smoked pork product
• 1 pound smoked sausage, sliced in 1/2 inch slices
• 3 bay leaves
• 1/2 teaspoons salt
• 1 teaspoon pepper
• 2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
• Hot Sauce to taste
• 1/3 cup cilantro, chopped (or parsley if you prefer)

Directions:

The night before put the beans in a large bowl and cover them with water.  Soak overnight. 

The next morning rinse beans throughly.  In a large dutch oven saute onions, celery and garlic in the bacon drippings until softened.  Add all other ingredients, except cilantro, to the dutch oven.  Add enough water to cover everything.

Bring to a boil.  Reduce heat to low and simmer, partially covered until the beans are tender.  Plan on 2 or 3 hours.  Remove bay leaves and add the cilantro just before serving.  Serve with hot rice.

Start with a 1lb chub of Jimmy Dean Pork Sausage and some Dinosaur Bar-B-Que Cajun Foreplay rub.

Coat the sausage chub with the rub.

Smoke your sausage chub at 225 degrees (or so) until it reaches 165 degrees internal. What was a sausage chub is now a FATTY!

Slice and fry up a couple pieces of fatty, add a toasted English Muffin, poached egg and some Cilantro Chipotle Sauce and you've got a breakfast to be proud of.

Add some fruit, canteloupe so you've got a balanced meal

I have to admit when Char-Broil first contacted me to come out to Memphis In May and do some cooking demonstrations one of the first thoughts I had was that someone was going to pay me to fly out and eat at Interstate Bar-B-Q.

For a BBQ enthusiast there are a select group of “famous” restaurants that are must eat ats.  And for me Interstate Bar-B-Q was high on my list.  And as hard as it is for me to say I’ve got to admit that it may have been one of the biggest BBQ disappointments I’ve ever had.

There are a variety of negative reasons why I don’t eat in BBQ restaurants very often.  And I don’t think Interstate BBQ missed a single reason.  Everything I dislike about most BBQ restaurants was encapulated in one meal.

Go figure…who would have thought that one of America’s most celebrated BBQ establishments was my first Memphis In May disappointment.   Dang, I’m sad writing this.  I so wanted a good BBQ experience and I didn’t get it.

As I am like to do when eating at a BBQ restaurant for the first time I ordered the sample platter.  This was one of the biggest sample platters I’ve ever seen.  It came with chopped pork shoulder, chopped brisket, pork ribs, beef ribs, sausage.  And every bit of it was drenched in bbq sauce.  There was so much bbq sauce on the plate that the plate resembled a little swimming pool of red sauce.  It must have just been ladled over the meat after it had been piled up.

I cannot even begin to describe the disappointment I felt when the plate of luke warm soaking wet meat was sat down in front of me.  Nineteen hundred miles I came to eat at the world famous Interstate Bar-B-Q and I got food that could be purchased at any local, “cook once or twice a week and reheat” BBQ restaurant.

The chopped pork and chopped brisket lacked any flavor outside of the sauce.  I couldn’t taste the smoke at all.  If I had not smelled the smoke when I first walked into the place I would have sworn the meat wasn’t smoked.  The sausage was flavorful and had a nice “bite” to it with the natural casing.

I got two pork ribs and two beef ribs with the sample platter.  The pork ribs were soft, mushy and fall of the bone.  Not the way I like them at all, but probably the way most people want their ribs.  Without a doubt the biggest disappointment of a disappointing meal were the beef ribs.  The beef ribs were not edible at all.  The membrane was not removed and there was not way you could bite into them and the meat was so over cooked you couldn’t even get the meat off the membrane with a knife and fork.

The sides weren’t all the much better.  The beans looked as though they had been kept under a heat lamp for hours in the little white bowls they are served in.  The cole slaw was average at best.

The famous Interstate BBQ spaghetti was tasty, but lacked any real reason to get excited about it.  Over cooked pasta covered in sauce with a little meat isn’t anything to I’d recommend. 

You know you’ve got problems when not one person out of 8 finished their meal.  What do you do when the only thing that tasted like you would expect it to taste like is the plain white bread served with each meal.

Some of the people in our group thought that the reason the food was as bad as it was may have been due to it being the end of the day and everything had been kept in hotel pans all day on a steam table.  Now I don’t know about the steam table, but the food sure had the texture that meat has when it’s been kept “warm” all day.  But even if that was the case doesn’t a restaurant have an obligation to make sure the food served in the evening is the same quality as when they first open?  We paid the same price, we should have gotten the same quality. 

And for the first time ever, we were denied a chance to look at the pits.  I’ve never, ever been told I couldn’t see the pits in a restaurant.  Makes me wonder about things.

So that’s my first Memphis BBQ experience.  I figure it’s going to get better because it certainly can’t get any worse than it was tonight.

I love to smoke ribs with peach wood.  So when Baxter’s Original offered to send me out some chunks of of Georgia peach wood to try out I jumped at the chance.

But how does a person review wood?  Well, let’s see…

The first thing I noticed about the wood chunks I received from Baxter’s is that the wood looked “fresh.”  I don’t mean it was “green” or unseasoned.  It looked fresh.  When purchasing chunks of wood through the normal resellers like Home Depot, hardware stores or other resellers the wood often looks old and dirty.  The Baxter’s wood has the appearance of of having not been left out in the elements.

Now I don’t know with any certainty that new wood burns any differently that older wood,  but I suspect that just like anything with a flavor that, if it’s left out, it looses it’s flavor.  If you are properly smoking your ribs, or any other meat for that matter, you want just a whiff of sweet blue smoke.  By having fresh wood, I believe, you will get a cleaner smoke flavor in your final product.

One thing I did notice is when I lit my Weber Smoky Mountain the smoke became the desired sweet blue smoke much quicker than it has done with store bought wood.  I normally give the WSM 45 minutes for the smoke to calm down and I was able to put the ribs on 30 minutes after lighting the coals.

The pricing for the wood from Baxter’s is pretty much the same as you would pay in your local BBQ store.  With the shipping it’s going to be a little higher, but quality products are the key to successful low and slow BBQ.  So, I’ve got to think it’s worth the little extra cost.

I also received a few bags of wood dust.  I use wood dust in my ProQ Cold Smoke Generator and it was a fantastic treat to find cherry, apple and peach wood dust.  I decided to give some cherry wood dust a try out on some Chicago style sausages from Morant’s Sausage House.

I used the ProQ in my Little Chief to cold smoke the sausages.  Unlike the wood chunks I was able to see an immediate and obvious difference in how the cold smoke generator worked with the Baxter’s wood dust.  The wood dust was finer and lit much easier than the previous brand of wood dust I have been using.  The finer wood dust seemed to burn a little faster than I had been experiencing with other dusts.

Some pictures of the rest of the sausage cook:

After the sausages had smoked for 6 hours in some wispy cherry smoke I grilled them up on the weber.

A couple smoked and grilled sausages with onion rings and tater tots.  It was a great meal.

I used this meal as a chance to give the Big Sid’s Famous BBQ Mustard that I received in my Olympic Hockey bet winnings.  The mustard had a mild mustard flavor with a little sweetness that complimented the cherry wood smoke and seasonings in the sausages.