Sunday, April 26, 2015

Five Tips for Grilling Rookies, Work Cookout, and Practice Competition Cook

One of the first recipes that I ever grilled up was a tasty flank steak marinated in a mixture of red wine, oil, soy sauce, garlic, salt and pepper.  



To this day it is still one of our favorites, so when I saw that the topic for my April post at Char-Broil Live was "So You're Learning To Grill......", I immediately knew which recipe I was going to use.  I also gave 5 tips for those new to grilling.  

So humor me and hop on over to Char-Broil Live and check out a super simple Grilled Marinated Flank Steak

Work Cookout
Our Knoxville staff wanted to throw a cookout for Spring so we did a "Fire Day Friday" with burgers, dogs, and homemade ice cream.  I swear, this office will find any excuse to do an "everybody bring something" food get together.  That's not a bad thing.


I grilled the burgers and dogs, of course.  Even though we were cooking 3 dozen burgers, no nasty frozen burgers for us - those have a texture of warm wet cardboard.   Wait - I lie, we did use frozen burger patties for the vegetarian burgers.  But we hand made the beef burgers. I used ground chuck seasoned with 1 teaspoon Montreal seasoning, 1/4 teaspoon dried onion flake, and 1/4 teaspoon dried minced garlic per pound.  Then I dusted them with a touch of salt as they finished.  We used 1/4 pound beef hot dogs from Gordon Food Services and they were VERY good.   Good times!

Competition Practice
Our competition team did some practice cooks this weekend for our next competition at Bloomin' BBQ and Bluegrass in Sevierville, TN on May 15-16. 

I swear the poorly aligned burnt ends in the brisket turn in box drives me insane every time I look at it.  Small details like that matter.

Brisket is on point (see what I did there?) and that program is set except for my burnt end presentation flub.  Chicken thighs (not pictured) are very close, John is just doing one small tweak.  Pork is pretty set, just a slight adjustment to the cooking process.   We didn't do ribs, we'll be working on them this coming weekend on our new competition equipment that we just got in - a pair of really nice Grill Dome Infinity Series.  We didn't have time to get them broken in before this weekend's cook but they are now ready for next weekend.  

Hope that you all had a great weekend and have a rocking week.