Hello and welcome back to The Stone Soup Cook–so glad you’re here!
Last week, I announced that for the next few weeks (months?), I am going to focusing my blog on California Cuisine, which has had a huge impact on the way we eat. Please see my posts from last week and this week: An Introduction to California Cuisine; The Roots and Emergence of California Cuisine.
Today, I’m making my first official food post about the California Cuisine revolution, and I couldn’t be more excited! For my next few posts, I will be taking a dive into grilled foods, which was one of the most prominent techniques embraced by California Cuisine chefs. Early in the movement, restauranteurs like Alice Waters and Wolfgang Puck installed large wood-fired ovens in their restaurants and grilled meats and, notably, pizzas in these ovens as customers watched with delight.
For the next couple of weeks, I’ll be featuring recipes cooked on the grill. However, since I don’t have a wood-fired oven, I’ll be cooking on my brand new Big Green Egg!
To celebrate our wedding anniversary a few weeks ago, Mr. Stone Soup and I acquired this bad boy:
It’s the “large” size. The extra-large and extra-extra large are ginormous and I frankly didn’t think I could lift the lid on them. So far, the large seems to fit all our needs. It’s big enough to accommodate two chickens, a 20-lb turkey or 12 burgers. It’s heavy–almost 200 lbs, and very solidly built. The Egg is made out of porcelain and you can heat it up to about 750*, which is hot enough to fire some rudimentary ceramics. I probably shouldn’t admit to this, but I left it unattended for too long after firing it up the other day, and it went up to about 950*. The dial only goes up to about 750*, and when I checked it, it read 200*. I thought this odd until I figured out that it had spun all the way around the dial. Anyway–I don’t recommend doing that and I don’t quite know what I’d do with a fire that hot, but–the Egg can get pretty hot!
The Egg only uses lump hardwood charcoal (never briquettes, which I’m told can leave the interior of the Egg moldy) so you can get nice smoke flavors depending on the type of wood you use. It’s also possible to dial the temperature in on the Egg very precisely, and keep it there. In fact, you’re supposed to be able to bake a cake on it! This sounds a little crazy, but, yes–I do intend to try it at some point.
We chose the Egg because it is an all-purpose solution. It acts as a grill, a smoker and an oven–and, importantly to us–it requires no electricity. We have a lot of power outages where we live and I was tired of not having an oven during these numerous outages. I’m looking forward to testing out everything it will do. For now, I’m going to concentrate on grilling because that’s the focus of the next few posts: food on fire! While it is not the wood-fired ovens seen in the restaurants at the forefront of the California Cuisine movement, the Egg is the closest I’m going to get in my tiny, little Silicon Valley home–and so far, it’s terrific! The lump charcoal I’m using is Oak because it was the what came with the Egg, but we’re going to branch out (so to speak!) starting this weekend.
The first thing I put on the Egg was a roast chicken. When Eggs are new, they need to be run at about 350* for their first few cooks in order to make sure the seal between the top and bottom parts has a chance to fully “cure,” and this recipe grills the chicken at 350-375 for an hour (or a little more). The recommended method I found for grilling a chicken was to “spatchcock” it so it can be grilled flat. Trust me–regardless of what you’ve heard, spatchcocking IS NOT HARD TO DO. If you can spell spatchcock, you can do it. Click here to learn how.
The chicken itself came out tender and juicy, but be aware that it needs a good 10-12 (and up to 24) hours to prep. I normally roast a chicken at about 400*, but for this recipe, I grilled the bird at somewhere between 350*-375* for about an hour and 10 minutes. My chicken was about 5.5 lbs. The recipe I first consulted recommended generously coating the bird with hot sauce and then seasoning it. Since chicken is pretty bland, I tried this approach and while the meat was tender and juicy, it was way, way too spicy to enjoy. I have done several more birds with this technique since, but have moderated the seasonings to be a pleasingly, but only mildly spicy final product. Since the cook is on the grill, using oils is tricky, as the oil will ignite the flames. This recipe produces good, juicy meat and a crispy skin, which is achieved by sprinkling the skin of the bird generously with salt for up to 24 hours before the cook. The salt draws moisture out of the skin and helps to render the fat, which will produce flavorful, juicy meat.
By the way–all was not lost with regard to that over-spiced chicken test-run. I made the best street tacos I’ve ever had out of the meat the next day–I heated the meat back up and made a salsa of mango, red onion, red bell pepper, cilantro, some lime and jalapeño, wrapped it up in corn tortillas and–wow! I’ll be featuring that recipe next week!
For now, here is the recipe for grilled chicken:
Tune in tomorrow when I will be sharing a recipe for grilled lamb chops.
Until then,
Peace, love and good food!
Keri
