Developing Grilling Technique Keeps Me Sane In These Times

Yogurt marinated chicken breasts and fennel
grilled in the gloom of night time.

If you're like me, you probably feel like you've been living in a dystopian novel since November 8th when Donald Trump won the Presidential Election. For me, this moment actually came a little sooner as my beloved Cubs won the World Series the week before. The win was thrilling, but also ominous. It seemed to signal something critical in the very fabric of space-time had torn and some serious shit was starting to go down. Life seems rather surreal these days. Sure, I'm one of those damn liberals, but a lot of people who either voted for Trump or really didn't like Hillary are rather apprehensive right now. The whole nation seems to be holding its breath.

(Exhale.)

Writing on things like beer, running, and grilling seems so trivial in times like these. But yet, these activities can be very critical to keeping one's sanity, and take on a new-found importance. So I've found a certain solace in slowly developing new grilling techniques on my back patio. Grill masters may brag about secret ingredients and killer recipes, but it's really technique that separates the good from the great. It's about understanding how heat circulates on the grill, how marinades interact with the meat or vegetables, and developing the timing to remove the food from the grill at the correct time to achieve the best flavor. I've been experimenting around with yogurt based marinades on shrimp and chicken, two proteins which can easily dry out from the high heat on the grill. The yogurt helps keep the moisture in, and I'm finding it's ridiculously easy to make something good on the grill using a decent yogurt marinade.  Achieving greatness with a yogurt marinade is something I'm still working on.

I'm going to share this Tandoori Marinade from the book Paul Kirk's Championship Barbecue Sauces. If we can heal our country's divisions over plates of grilled food, I'm all for it.

Tandoori Marinade

Makes about 1 1/2 cups

1 cup plain yogurt
1/4 peanut oil
1 small onion, minced
2 tablespoons paprika
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 tablespoon grated fresh gingerroot
2 tablespoons curry powder
4 garlic cloves, pressed
1 teaspoon ground coriander
1 teaspoon ground cardamom
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin

Combine all of the ingredients in a nonreactive bowl, and blend until smooth. Use immediately.

Marinate pieces of chicken for kabobs for 1 to 2 hours, chicken parts for 2 to 4 hours. Fish can be marinated for about 1 hour.

Grilled Vegetables Are Easy

A recent plate of grilled veggies looming in the darkness

It's pretty damn difficult to screw up grilled vegetables. That's the only conclusion I can possibly reach after spending a few evenings mucking around on the grill and still serving up good plates of grilled vegetables. In fact, as we head into winter it's been getting so dark during the evening that I can barely see the vegetables I'm grilling and they still come out pretty good.

Grilling vegetables is pretty easy. Take some olive oil, add salt and pepper, throw in some other spices like oregano and hot pepper flakes, brush that on the sliced vegetables and throw them on the grill. Once you have nice grill marks on both sides they're done.

You can buy books on the subject, and they certainly help, but you don't need to. I consult my well worn copy of Steve Raichlen's "How to Grill", on of my earliest grilling inspirations from time to time. And you can get fancy with all sorts of more complicated marinades or rubs and extra ingredients, although it's not really necessary.  Just about whatever you do with grilled vegetables will taste good.

Grilled vegetables are as underrated as they are easy.

Remember those grilling posts I said you'll be seeing...

A third and perhaps final attempt at grilled guacamole

You may recall my enthusiastic announcement last August about adding a grilling dimension to this blog. And yes, a couple posts on grilling followed.  But since then, it's been rather quiet on the grilling front. No doubt, you've been spending sleepless nights, tossing and turning in bed wondering what happened. Well, let me try to ease your mind: This grilling thing, like most everything else, is a little more complicated than it initially looks.

Take for example, my attempt at grilled guacamole. The idea is pretty simple. Instead of chopping and mashing fresh vegetables, I put some grill char on them and caramelized the onions a bit, to give the guacamole some extra depth and smokiness. My first attempt at this was pretty promising, but needed some refinement. However, a couple subsequent efforts foisted on my friends on college football weekends were steps backwards. At least my friends were polite enough to say "Well, it's good". There's also the small matter of the darkening char on the vegetables giving the final product the look of....well, guacamole barf.

I smoked some salmon on the grill for dinner a week ago and it tasted awesome. I'd love to show you pictures, but problem is, all you'd see is a night time photo of a faint pink monolith perched on the grill, looming in the darkness. As the days get shorter, I'm finding myself doing more and more grilling at night, and my camera either doesn't have a flash, or I haven't figured out how to activate it. There wasn't much to the smoked salmon, I just sprinkled salt and pepper on top and used apple wood, then spent the evening playing around with the heat controls all night controls until I got it done. A post that goes like "I didn't do a lot to prepare it, I don't remember exactly how I made it, and I can't even show it to you, but that smoked salmon really tasted awesome" is rather pointless.

And then there's something else I learned about gas grills: They're not as predictable as you might think. When the propane tank is full, the heat level is noticeably lower, too low to get good grill marks on the food. When roughly half the tank is full, there's plenty of good heat which I can control using the grill knobs. When the tank is nearly empty, the heat level starts to decline again. None of this is rather surprising, but of course, it's something I need to get a better handle on with more experience. It's led to a couple grilling efforts being moved to the stove top in order to get dinner on the table before everyone starved.

It has been said "Anything worth doing is worth doing badly".  So I'll be keeping at it. The good news for you is that I won't bore you with my grilling failures. Unless they're funny, like creating "guacamole barf".  I'll deal with the failures, you'll just read the good stuff.

Smoked Pork Chops with Cherry Balsamic Sauce

The apple smoked pork chops are ready

Sometimes our family has a "Chopped" dinner. You know the show "Chopped" where the contestants have to make an appetizer, entree' or dessert from the ingredients in the mystery baskets? Well, my wife and kids pick four ingredients at the grocery store without telling me what they are in advance, bring them home and my challenge is to dinner must be made from these four ingredients. It's fun challenge and since everyone must actually eat whatever I cook, stuff  the normally befuddle the Chopped contestants like sea urchin roe or lamb brains never show up in the mystery basket.

One evening, the mystery ingredients were cherries, ham, okra, and pistachios. I figured a cherrird would taste good on the ham, so I whipped up a cherry sauce. As we ate dinner, I'm thinking, this sauce would taste even better on some smoked pork chops.

So the Cherry Balsamic Sauce recipe  below is based on that summer evening of improvising a sauce from a bag of fresh cherries on Chopped night. Use fresh cherries in season if you can get them, but frozen cherries work too. Feel free to play around a bit with the levels of sweetness, spiciness, and saltiness of the sauce and tweak it to your liking.

For smoking the pork chops, I use thicker chops and put them edge down on the grill, maximizing the surface area to capture the smoke flavors. Apple wood works for me here, but you could use also cherry, pecan or another lighter fruity wood.  In my opinion hickory or mesquite smoke would be a little too strong. Smoking the chops indirectly at 300-350 degrees on my Weber gas grill for roughly 45 minutes, I get a pretty juicy pork chop.

I'm a beer guy, but if you ask my, smoked pork chops with cherry balsamic sauce spooned on top scream out for a good glass of Pinot.  Enjoy!


Cherry Balsamic Sauce

1 cup pitted fresh cherries ( 1 1/4 cup frozen cherries)
1 cup water
1 tablespoon sugar
1 1/2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
pinch of cayenne pepper


Bring the ingredients to a simmer on a stove top reducing it to a syrup. Spoon over four 1/2 pound pork chops smoked with apple, cherry, or pecan wood at 300-500 degrees for approximately 45 minutes and serve.

Adding a grilling dimension to all the ramblings

I started this blog naively enough. I wanted to write about beer and running, nothing more, nothing less. I really didn’t know where it would take me and figured I might even get bored with it after six months and quit. But in a surprisingly short time, I started meeting all sorts of interesting people and learning all sorts of new things writing away in my little corner of the Internet. While this was personally rewarding, the content noticeably improved and more people started coming over, so presumably others were getting something out of it too.

After more than seven years of that, the blog certainly evolved. I don’t write much about running as I used to, since there's nothing more tiresome than a runner continually talking about their running. The writing on beer became more technical, the more I learned about the subject. No longer do I see any urgency in breathlessly writing about each new beer consumed or brewpub visited. I’ve spoken to quite a lot of brewers and others in the beer industry, building an increasing reservoir of beer knowledge to tap into for each story. Learning and writing about how beer is made, where it comes from, and the cultural and economic forces that shape it, is what really drives this blog. In many ways, beer is a specialized form of food.  

So with that in mind, I’m adding a new dimension to this blog. This summer, I bought a Weber Spirit E-310 gas grill and reignited my love of grilling. There's something about careful management of the raging fire activating the chemical reactions within the food on to create the distinctive flavors we all love that appeals to the techie scientist in me. Of course, there's an art and intuition required for those grilled flavors to come alive which simply cannot be reduced to a set of rules and formulas. It's this art and science of grilling I'll be exploring through new recipes, techniques and discussions I'll be sharing here. 

Grilling and beer are pretty complimentary activities, so I don’t think this is too dramatic of a shift. Since I’m still doing the running thing, don’t expect many stories about big hamburgers or barbecuing huge cuts of meat. I’ll make no claims you'll be reading about super-duper healthy grilling here, but expect more about fish, chicken, vegetables than you’ll find in other grilling sites out there. I just hope you enjoy reading about what I'm up to at the grill and will literally savor the results.

So moving forward, expect to see a post on grilling once or twice a month, starting tomorrow. Not sure where it will all lead to, but then that’s all part of the fun.