Recently in BBQ Category
Yours truly and friend Chef Scott Savoie of the Culinary Adventure Company will be hanging out on Monday July 16th at Fuel House Restaurant (53 Clinton St. Toronto) Dishing about all things BBQ, and the folks at Fuel have roasted a whole pig for us to consume. Come by and learn about BBQ, drink a few beers and chow down on some pork. Tickets are on $95, (I think there's only a few left) and available here:
I'll be doing an ALL PORK! dinner at The Depanneur on Saturday February 18th, at 7:30 pm. 3 starters, 3 mains and 3 Deserts, all made with our favorite animal the noble pig. Tickets are $40, and seating is very limited. More Details here
Menu:
First Course - Pork Cheek 3 ways:
Served on mixed bitter greens with a home made smoked apple balsamic drizzle
Braised Pork Cheek
Guanciale Carbonarra on an edible spiced Chinese soup spoon
Guanciale Brushetta on brioche
Second Course - Pork Sliders 3 ways:
Served with Slaw and Mac 'n Cheese
BBQ Competition Style
North Carolina (vinegary)
South Carolina (mustard)
Third Course - Bacon Dessert Trio:
Piggy Cupcakes
Candied Bacon Cheese Cake Ice Cream
Pig candy with chocolate
Things have a been a little quiet around the blog here for the past few week, as I've been busy at various competitions. Tonight is the first friday in over a month where i'm not building a fire in one of my weber smokey mountain cookers and contemplating if i'm going to get any sleep at all over the next 8 hours. So here I am in front of my computer, for the first time in about 6 week happily doing laundry and organizing my severely neglected home. The last month has been a fun and learning experience. The KCBS contest circuit is HARD! and a whole lot of fun, it's very strange to turn in food to judges that all of my friends and family claim is the best they've ever tasted and have it barely get a mention. Certified organic free range happy animals does not seem to help get better results in a bbq contest, but we are going to keep cooking this way anyway and see if we can tweak our technique to see if it's possible to win with this stuff. If it wasn't hard it would not be worth doing right? My pulled pork got a 3rd place last weekend, which is the best it's ever done, and my chicken is slowly getting more and more popular with the judges.
We competed at our very first KCBS & NEBS contest this past weekend at the Roc City Rib Fest, and with some amazing help & guidance from DivaQ we managed to take home a trophy (second place bacon, 6th overall nebs) and enough cash to pay the entry to our next contest, The Crossborder Blues, Brews & Que. We sure learned a lot at this contest, it's amazing how easily something that's been practiced over and over is a whole new ball game when it's during a competition. We'll be working hard to bring up our kcbs scores for the next contest. Full results can be found here
I Somehow forgot to post about this weekend's BBQ Competition in Rochester NY! After a number of false starts, the BBQBlog.ca "Pork Ninjas" will be making their debut this weekend. We're cooking every contest that's offered at Roc City (Ribs, KCBS, NEBS, Kids) and we've been really looking forward to it all winter! 2 members of our team (myself and Jamie P) attended last year and became certified KCBS judges, and had a blast eating. If you are in the area of Ontario Beach Park in Rochester pop by and say hi! 
I'm headed down to Memphis in May again this year, I had a blast last year, and hoped I could return again this year, and I'm going to be able to do it! This year's trip started out with similar planning as last year, except this year I'm driving down with my friend and brother in fire Jamie P. We had already signed up and payed for the VIP program again this year, even though the price had increased.. I should really look into selling my vip pass to someone, as it' looks like I'm not going to have much of a chance to use it this year as I've been invited by Yazoo's Delta Q (last years Memphis in May Grand Champion!) to help them cook the ancillary categories. It should be an interesting week, and I hope I'll learn lots by being in such great company. As always you can follow me on twitter.
I wrote an article on creating your own signature rub in the latest issue (#6) of Smoke Signals Magazine There's also an article on the stufz burger press, of which I'm also a new owner of. if you have never read this online publication, check it out!
It's true, you can make a stuffed burger without any actual gadgets. I used various sized ramekins to press and make the pockets to stuff my burgers today, and they were yummy as you can see from the photo. If you've been reading my blog for any length of time, you'll know that I never use just one kind of meat when making meatballs, or anything with a red sauce. Burgers are no exception to this rule. I like the 3-2-1 method. 3 parts beef, 2 parts pork , and 1 part lamb. sometimes i mix it up and switch the lamb and pork, and sometimes i take the pork out and use veal. I'm really digging keeping leftover uncooked brisket and using that as my burgers these days, seems to make for a tasty burger. You want your burgers to contain around 30% fatty meat, so that it stays nice and juice on the grill and does not dry out
Recipe after the Jump
Continue reading Stuffed Bacon, Onion, Cheese & Prosciutto Burgers! .
This week I'm off to Greenville, SC, to the NBBQA BBQ Bash,.Road tripping down with the infamous Danielle Dimovski aka DivaQ. We'll be showing our fellow bbqers how to use this new fangled invention called the internet while we're down there, feel free to follow my tweets and Danileele's tweets as It's destined to be a culinary extravaganza.
I somehow missed that there's another decent bbq store in the GTA, I was hunting for yet another smoker recently, something that i'll be reviewing in the coming weeks, and stumbled upon Barbecues Galore, they have a few stores in Canada, and were very helpful when I emailed and called. Check them out : http://www.barbecuesgalore.ca/
