I don’t have the time or inclination to write a long article on the merits of Barbecue Cuisine or why I believe that Texas-Style Barbecued Beef Brisket is a dish befitting royalty. That’s because I’m too busy cooking Texas-Style Barbecued Beef Brisket, and eating like a king. Be thankful I found the time to write this article.

For those who don’t know it already, BBQ is a process of cooking using low temperatures (about 200° F), indirect heat and wood smoke to cook food very slowly. If you’re putting the food over the heat source, you’re grilling. Yes, in the vernacular, a BBQ is the get-together as much as the cooking process, but we’re talking about the process.

My tool of choice for BBQing is my Smokintex Electric Smoker. I’ve discussed this beauty in previous posts, and in the summer it really gets a workout. I know that I may draw the ire of the purists who say that BBQ has to have a wood fire, but I’ve got a busy family life (with a wife and 4 kids) - I BBQ in an electric smoker, and I’m not ashamed. If I had the time to tend a wood fire for a day, I just might. These days, convenience rules. Call me a Good-for-Nothing City-Slicker, I don’t care.

The ingredients for a good BBQ Brisket are very simple: 1 untrimmed, first-cut beef-brisket. That’s it. You can try for the whole brisket (and I have before), but the first cut is more manageable. They usually weigh about 10 pounds. That’s about 8-9 pounds of meat after the fat is trimmed away, but you won’t be doing that until you’re done cooking. All that fat is going to be basting your brisket. It takes about 3/4 pound of meat to feed a hungry adult, so I’m cooking for about 10 people. I made this particular hunk of beef for a family get togther last week.

Saturday Night
It took about half a cup of dry rub to cover all the surfaces of the meat. I use a recipe from Smoke & Spice. Pretty standard affair, with paprika, salt, pepper, chili powder, cayenne pepper, sugar, garlic and onion powder. You’ll note that I trimmed off the tip of my brisket. That’s for space constraints. I’ll be cooking that on the shelf below the big piece, so it can catch the drippings. I put the meat in a plastic zipper-lock bag, and refrigerated it overnight. Make sure you know which side of the meat is the fatty side - it’s harder to recognize after the rub settles in.

5 AM, Sunday Morning
Half an hour before you start smoking, you need to take the meat out and let it come to room temperature. This helps cut down on a bitter tasting compound, called creosote, from adhering to the meat. While the meat was warming up, I went out to prepare the smoker. The floor of and smoking box of the smoker were covered with heavy-duty aluminium foil, to facilitate cleanup. I added 5 ounces of oak to the smoker’s smoke-box. (I purchased a 50-pound sack of oak firewood a few years back, and I chop off a few blocks when I need it for BBQ. Hickory or Mesquite are also good smoking woods for beef, but I like the subtle taste of oak. Yes, at 5:15 in the morning, I was choopping wood logs with an axe and hammer. That’s devotion!) I put a few pieces of charcoal in there because the smoker manual said that I would get a nice smoke-ring on the meat that way. It didn’t work out that way, but it didn’t hurt.

At 5:45 in the morning I put the meat into the smoker. Of course, I had my trusty thermometer probes stuck in the meat. I set the thermostat to 220° and closed the door and went back to sleep.

While we’re waiting for the meat to cook, I’ll give you the recipe for my family’s favorite BBQ side dish. We call them Aunt Ellen Beans (Aunt Ellen actually was a guest at this meal), but you can just call them Enhanced Baked Beans. This is one of those guideline-recipes, it never comes out the same, but it’s never bad:

• Canned Baked Beans - we use the large cans of Bush’s Vegetarian Baked Beans. Sometimes Heinz’s
• Onions
• Ketchup (always Heinz)
• oil for frying

Peel and chop as many onions as you wish (proportional to the amount of beans you’ll be making). Fry them in a small amount of oil, until they are as done as you’d like. We usually go for browned, bordering on burnt. Add the beans to the onions and stir well. Add a few squirts of ketchup and stir well. Heat and serve.

Of course, you can make this with any proportions you want, and I’ve never been dissappointed. What can go wrong?

Sunday Afternoon
By about 6:00PM, the brisket was ready. What’s ready? 210°. That sounds awfully high for beef and you’re right - that’s way overdone. But there’s a rationale. You already know this factoid, but here’s the explanation for the rest of you.

Brisket is a very tough meat, full of connective tissue and the like. If you cooked it to the normal temperature that you like your meat at (145° for medium rare), it would certainly be edible, but it would take a lot of chewing. When brisket is brought up to 210°, the juices have all been cooked out of the meat, but the collagen in the meat has just finished melting. Collagen is the gelatinous substance in meat, and brisket has plenty of it. So while you’ve cooked out all of the juices, the meat is now bathed in collagen juciness. Trust me, it’s better this way.

I took the meat out, and put it on my cutting board. Time to trim off the fat that’s been basting the meat.

Slice the meat thinly, across the grain, and serve with your favorite BBQ sauce, warmed up. My favorite way of eating this is a big brisket sandwich, slathered in BBQ sauce with a big dollop of extra-creamy coleslaw in the sandwich (sort of a tribute to the Pulled Pork Sandwich). Oh, man, is that good eating!

The Fourth of July is coming, and I hope that you’re planing on making a BBQ. It’s an American Tradition. If you end up cooking some real barbecue, let us know!

Would you eat something called “Noah’s Nuggets”? How about “Abraham’s Bossom”? House of David, an online retailer billing itself as the “the world’s premier distributor of biblically based health products“, offers these products and more, in their “Foods of the Bible” line. The products appear to be kosher - or at least the product photos on the website show kosher symbols. Caveat emptor.

My favorite is the Bible Bar:

…a highly effective appetite regulator based on the seven foods from the Book of Deuteronomy 8:8 - “A land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive oil and honey”.

Wouldn’t that be a great treat on Tu B’Shvat? The closest local retailer is a place called Gospel Den - maybe I’ll stick to ordering my bible-foods online.

KosherCritic, a brand-spanking-new blog whose mission it is to review all of Maryland and DC’s kosher restaurants, has just posted a review of Eli’s, DC’s newest restaurant. From their intro:

Harris, Josh and Adam, a friend, ate at Eli’s, the new restaurant which just recently opened up in Dupont Circle. The restaurant was started by Sina Soumekhian, the owner of Sienna’s in Rockville (look for a review of this restaurant soon!). With the exception of the DC JCC, Eli’s is now the only kosher cuisine available in Washington, D.C., as Stacks, the restaurant formerly owned by high-powered lobbyist Jack Abramoff closed its doors a while back.

Restaurants are rated on scale of 1 to 10 “hamburgers” in the following categories: Food Quality, Service Quality, Atmosphere, Cleanliness, Price.

The Shavuot recap is on its way, but in the meantime, I’m all about meat — can’t get enough of it. After catching a whiff of the Chinese take-away near the office, I had my heart set on something Asian for dinner. I decided to crack open a cookbook I’ve had on my shelf for two years and have hardly used — the China Moon Cookbook by Barbara Tropp. The style of the book just oozes “1992,” but it sets some very useful cooking paradigms. The key to the following recipe — which I’ve adapted from “Stir-Fried Chicken in Hot Bean Sauce” — is the “velvet marinade” and poaching of the chicken pieces. This combination of techniques makes for perfectly cooked, tender chicken breast chunks, and even worked okay with only very minimal (15 minutes) marinating. Plus, the sauce ingredients are proportioned very well and produces a thick, spicy coating for chicken and vegetables that isn’t at all gloppy or overwhelming. My adaptation eliminates many of the vegetables called for in the original, with the hope of simplifying the recipe for quicker preparation and paring it down to its most important, and flavorful, components.

HOT STIR-FRIED CHICKEN AND FRENCH BEANS
5-6 servings

Chicken and Marinade
* 2 large egg whites
* 2 Tbsp. dry sherry
* 2 tsp. kosher salt
* 2 lb. boneless, skinless chicken breasts, cut into ribbons 2 inches long and 1/4 inch wide

Aromatics
* 4 cloves of garlic, finely minced/crushed
* 2 Tbsp. finely minced fresh ginger
* 1 small bunch scallions, white and light green parts, sliced

Sauce
* 1 cup chicken consomme
* 2 Tbsp. chili-garlic sauce
* 2 Tbsp. dry sherry
* 2 Tbsp. rice vinegar
* 1 tsp. sugar
* 4 Tbsp. soy sauce

* 12 oz. haricots verts, or thin green beans
* 1 hot green chili, seeded, sliced thinly
* 4 Tbsp. vegetable oil
* 2 Tbsp. cornstarch dissolved in 3 Tbsp. cold water

1. In a large bowl or plastic container with lid, briskly whisk together the marinade ingredients until smooth and thick. Add the chicken and toss well. Seal tightly and marinate for 3 to 24 hours (less if in a pinch).
2. Combine the aromatics in a small bowl, cover until ready to use.
3. Combine all of the sauce ingredients in a bowl. Stir to blend, leaving the spoon in the bowl.
4. About 15 minutes before serving, bring 8 cups of water to a steaming near simmer. Add the marinated chicken, stir gently to separate the shreds, and poach until almost entirely white, 60 to 70 seconds. Drain promptly (a colander is helpful) and set chicken aside. It will be cooked on the outside, but a bit raw in the middle.
5. Heat a large, heavy skillet or wok over high heat until hot enough to evaporate a bead of water on contact. Add 2 tablespoons of the oil and swirl to glaze the pan. Reduce the heat to medium, add the haricots verts, and stir-fry until crisp-tender and slightly browned. Remove from pan and reserve.
6. Add remaining 2 tablespoons of oil to the hot pan, add the aromatics, and stir gently until fully fragrant, 15 to 20 seconds, adjusting the heat so they foam without browning. Add the sliced chili and cook briefly.
7. Stir the sauce ingredients and add to the pan. Raise the heat to high, and bring the sauce to a simmer. Stir the cornstarch mixture to recombine it and add it to the pan. Stir until the sauce turns glossy, 10 to 20 seconds. Add the chicken and beans, and toss gently to cook through, about 30 seconds.
8. Serve at once over hot rice.

As my wife, mother, and mother-in-law are all members of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, I’m no stranger to the monthly Hadassah Magazine, which is full of engaging interviews, exotic travel locales, and reviews of the latest in Jewish culture and media. I was completely caught be surprise, though, when, while noshing a light seudat shlishit this evening, I spotted a delightful little blurb about the Kosher Blog in the June/July issue’s “Brief Reviews” section (page 49).

It was fitting that reviewer Leah Finkelshteyn mentioned our “Tastes Like Treyf” section, as the following page features a witty tale of Adeena Sussman’s foray into the realm of vegetarian bacon. She offers a simple and delicious recipe for Pasta Carbonara — the rich spaghetti dish named for the carbonari (coal vendors) known to make it — and suggests using a tempeh-based “bacon” product from Lightlife called “Smoky Strips.” She describes them as “denser, meatier” with a “deeper smoky flavor” than the soy alternatives. I’ll be sure to try it when I sample the recipe, which I’ve included below.

PASTA CARBONARA
Adeena Sussman, Hadassah Magazine
4 to 6 servings

* 12 oz. linguine
* 2 Tbsp. unsalted butter
* 9 strips vegetarian bacon
* 1/2 cup heavy cream
* 4 egg yolks, lightly beaten
* 1 cup (4 oz.) grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese
* Kosher salt
* Freshly ground black pepper

1. Bring pot of liberally salted water to a boil. Cook linguine until al dente, 8 to 10 minutes.
2. Meanwhile, heat butter in a heavy skillet over medium heat. Add “bacon” and cook until crispy and browned. Remove from skillet to drain on paper towels; crumble when cool. In a bowl, whisk cream, egg yolks, and cheese to combine.
3. Draine linguine, reserving about a cup of water; do not rinse pasta. Return to pot and add cream mixture. Cook, stirring, over low heat until sauce coats pasta nicely. If sauce is too thick, add some reserved pasta water. Add crumbled “bacon,” salt, and pepper.

Sorry for the content drought. Life’s been busy, but fortunately we have a chag to thrust me back into the kitchen. From the first time I had borekas in Israel eight years ago, I loved them. I was at a Shabbos morning kiddush somewhere in Jerusalem and the spread included big, hot potato borkeas — who wouldn’t love the juxteposition of crisp flaky dough and spicy, smooth filling?

So, for Shavuot, I figure I’ll try my hand at cheese borekas. A few choices present themselves. Small, appetizer-sized or large entree size? Phyllo dough, puff pastry, or something else entirely? What combination of cheese?

I haven’t decided on a recipe yet, but I’m leaning toward large borkeas made without phyllo since phyllo can be tough to handle, and I’m willing to be adventurous with the filling.

Please share your suggestions, philosophy, and recipes!

***

I’ve also decided to try out Thomas Keller’s recipe for quiche, but haven’t decided whether to do his roquefort and leek quiche — so long as Gourmet Food Store can get me kosher roquefort in time — or something like his “Caesar Salad” quiche (a parmesan-infused custard with baby romaine lettuce on the side).