Sponsor
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Help keep AmazingRibs free!
With a $25 donation you'll get a 100% cotton, brushed twill, adjustable, low profile cap with the AmazingRibs.com patch sewn on. I'll even toss in a small bag of BBQ'rs Delight excellent wood smoke pellets.
Click for more info and pictures of the hat.
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QUICK LINKS
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Show Me Yours
| I've been getting wonderful comments and pix from you. Man, you folks know how to party! Just go to any page and upload your pix of your masterpieces.
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| Smoke Signals is Free
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About Smoke Signals
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|  Smoke Signals is the free email newsletter from AmazingRibs.com's resident Barbecue Whisperer & Hedonism Evangelist, Meathead. I use it to tell folks about new stuff on the site and whatever else I think might interest you. If you like my website, please click here to . And remember: No rules in the bedroom or dining room! |
| Extreme Steak | | |
 In my article on how to make great steakhouse steaks I discuss the importance of getting a good sear on the exterior. Here are four highly unconventional methods that work amazingly well. There's the Afterburner, The Vigneron, The Caveman, and The Stripsteak. Wild and crazy, and very impressive.
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| When You're Cooking More Than One Hunk of Meat | |
When the whole fam damily is coming over for the July 4 party, you might want to cook more than one pork butt or brisket, or a shoulder and a brisket and some ribs. If you have the space, it's no problem. The question is, how does this impact cooking times? Here are some tips for what to do when you're cooking more than one hunk of meat.
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Secretariat Horseradish Cream Sauce
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The horseradish in my garden is off to the races, so the other night I made up a batch of my Secretariat Horseradish Cream Sauce. This creamy mild horsey sauce recipe starts with the grocery store horseradish in case you don't have any in the garden, but you can make it from scratch if you can get the raw stuff. It works like a champion on the Triple Crown of roast beef sandwiches, smoked salmon, and baked potatoes. You can also use it on corned beef and its cousin, New England Boiled Dinner. We also love it as a dip for carrots, celery, and potato chips.
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Summer Reading: A Landmark New Book
| | Catching Fire, How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham
 Wrangham is a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard, Curator of Primate Behaviorial Biology at the Peabody Museum, and Director of the Kibale Chimpanzee Project in Uganda. He does a remarkable job of telling the fascinating tale, and backing it up with ample research data, of how human evolution was drastically influenced by the capture of fire and the invention of cooking.
He describes in detail how cooking changes the chemistry of food and how that made it easier for proto humans to chew, digest, and extract energy and nutrients, and how that impacted their body shape, lips, jaws, teeth, intestines, and most importantly, brain size, allowing the emergence of Homo erectus, our direct ancestors. He also explains how cooking was largely responsible for the differentiating of male and female roles in early societies.
Despite his impressive credentials, there is nothing academic or textbook about this fascinating read. Witness: "Humans are adapted to eating cooked food in the same essential way as cows ar adapted to eating grass, or fleas to sucking blood, or any other animal to its signature diet. We humans are the cooking apes, the creatures of the flame."
Without being argumentative, Wrangham uses data from the raw food movement and related research to build an irrefutable case for the role of meat in past and present diets.
Wrangham has added a rich new layer to the story of human evolution, an ah ha moment, and a particularly satisfying insight for thos of us who love to hang out at the grill.
This innovative lucid account demonstrates that, not only did humans create cuisine, cuisine created humans. |
Summer Read: A Fun Quick Read
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The Hamburger: A History by Josh Ozersky
 A cleverly written, well researched, fun tale of the history of the hamburger and how it has evolved in step with American culture. Ozersky, a writer for TIME magazine, is an insightful and witty fellow, capable of connecting the rise of McDonald's with the fact that "Conformity, it will be rememered, was a serious social issue in the 1950s." He does a good job of dispelling a few myths, and puts the achievements of such giants as Ray Kroc and Dave Thomas in perspective. There are no recipe or evencooking tips in this book, just a look at how this iconic American sandwich is America and America is a hamburger. If you love burgers, you'll love this juicy book.
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| What's risker than raw hamburger? Raw sprouts! | |  Everybody knows that undercooked ground beef is risky. But there is one innocent looking food that is probably riskier: Raw sprouts. They killed more than 30 people in Germany this month and sickened more than 3000 others, ruining many of their kidneys in the process. Mike Doyle, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia has been quoted as saying "I consider sprouts to be among the most risky foods sold at retail".
How could this be? How could innocent crunchy, juicy, delicious sprouts be dangerous? Because they are grown differently than any other vegetable, in an environment practically ideal for bacteria. Here's an article I wrote for Huffington Post that takes a close look at the problem and offers some some solutions.
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Dreamweaver Help Needed
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OK, you code jockies, when you read this, promise not to laugh out loud. I built AmazingRibs.com with Adobe GoLive way back in 2006, and when Adobe bought Dreamweaver and dropped GL, I never made the move. Well, it's time. I own DW, and I think I can drive it, but I'm afraid of the conversion process. If someone out there is really experienced with DW, especially if you've done the GL to DW conversion, drop me a note, please.
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Another Great Letter from a Reader
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"I adapted your brisket rub recipe this summer and my customers love it (8,000 pounds served in 6 months)! My brisket even won 'best beef' in the Sonoma County Harvest Fair in 2010." Chef Larry Vito of BBQ Smokehouse in Sebastapol, CA
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Where to Stick it
| |  Listen to this email from a reader "I had been clipping the thermometer probe on the underside of the upper rack. That had the probe about 3" to 4" above the top of the meat. My food was taking much longer to cook than your recipes say. So I tried the probe in that location for about 1/2 hour and then moved the probe to the cooking surface, clipping it to the cooking grate about 4" to 5" below the previous location. The difference in temperature was about 25 to 30�F cooler at the cooking grate location! I never would have believed it! So in actuality, when I thought I was cooking at 225 to 230�F, I was actually cooking at 195 to 200�F! No wonder everything was underscooked!"
Moral of the story: Put your digital oven thermometer probe right next to the meat, because that is what you are cooking! Click here for my article on how thermometers work and my recommendations. |
Important: Help Keep AmazingRibs.com Free
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NEW Amazon Link Helps Me a Lot, Please Use it!
 You may have noticed on my site I have links to Amazon. These links have a code in them that tells Amazon you came from this site. If you order anything from Amazon, they pay me a small finder's fee that in no way changes your price. This is a great way to help keep AmazingRibs.com free. Just copy and paste the link below into your "favorites" or "bookmarks" and use it to take you to Amazon. It will tell Amazon I sent you and you help keep me supplied with charcoal and meat!
http://tinyurl.com/3rlglce
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Fun Gifts for the Barbecue Fan
| |  Shop for the barbecue lover at the AmazingRibs.com Gift Shop or just drop in for a chuckle. There are more than 30 BBQ-themed designs, about 30 steak-themed designs, about 20 hotdog-themed designs, and more than 30 wine-themed designs. Order aprons, hats, shirts, sweatshirts, intimate wear, and other apparel for men, women, kids and pets, beer mugs, posters, and other tschotschkes.
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