Don’t want to kick my smoking habit

I’ve got it bad, real bad. I guess it’s been going on since we moved into our first house and I got my first charcoal/gas grill as a Father’s Day present. It started out with those little charcoal smoke pellets, you know, the Jack Daniels ones. I realize now that those were just a gateway. I’d toss a few on top of the coals while I was grilling dinner – just for the flavor. It wasn’t long before I discovered that I could set up the grill to do some ribs or chicken with indirect heat and I switched over to actually smoking low and slow.

By that time I’d moved on to the heavier stuff, wood chips sometimes even chunks. Mostly hickory, I crave hickory. A couple of years later I got myself a Brinkmann cabinet smoker and was getting a little more serious – pork butt, brisket, a whole turkey. I couldn’t help myself, it tasted so damn good. (this is where the madness creeps in)

I was never really satisfied with the results I got from the cabinet smoker – the design just didn’t work right for me – no ventilation to the charcoal pan, it was always either too hot or too cold. I found myself ripping apart the side burner from my gas grill to retrofit a propane burner in the bottom of the cabinet. After too many ruined pieces of meat I decided that I needed to get serious. So for Father’s Day this year I asked for some better hardware, a Char-Griller Smokin’ Pro with a side fire box. Now I can burn whole pieces of wood and use all 830 square inches of grill space to cook a hell of a lot of meat.

You might have noticed that I’ve neglected publishing posts here for a while, that’s because ever since I got the new pit I’ve been on a sort of a smoking bender. But don’t worry, I’ll bring you up to speed. The first weekend out I smoked some chicken and figured while I was at it I’d make some chicken kielbasa and hot smoke it. Both came out great although I had a bit of a learning curve on controlling the temperature of the pit so I burst the kielbasa casing. No worries – instead of freezing all of it like I planned, we ate half of it next night for dinner and froze the other half.

I’ve been disappointed using ground turkey, even the less lean stuff for sausage as it always comes out kind of dry and rubbery. This time I tried a pretty standard kielbasa recipe: salt, pepper, marjoram and lots of garlic with boneless chicken thighs that I ground with my trusty KitchenAid sausage grinder attachment. It worked out pretty well except for the fact that the chicken was not quite cold enough during stuffing and was a sloppy mess to work with. With the intense garlic and smoke flavor I would even say that I couldn’t tell the difference between pork and chicken and despite using less fat than I’d get with pork it was pretty moist. I’ll definitely be using chicken thighs for sausage again as they’re a slightly healthier alternative to pork.

I’ve had the idea of curing and smoking rolling around in my head for a while. While I didn’t have any sodium nitrate on hand, I figured I could tackle a wet cured ham pretty safely since I was going to hot smoke it anyway. I was a little concerned about not using nitrates but after scouring the web for a while felt reassured that since I wasn’t going to leave the thing hanging around in my basement for a year I’d be OK. Plus a lot of people seem to be foregoing nitrates nowadays without killing themselves with botulism. (They are more afraid of the cancer that might come from the nitrates.)

I went with Ruhlman’s basic ham brine (minus the pink salt) (BTW really WANT his book Charcuterie) and soaked the ham for about three days. After that I dried it out for a couple of hours and smoked it with with a mixture of hardwoods (I started out with apple chips and ended up just using some unidentified hardwood firewood I had around after I realized that I’d never make it seven hours on chips alone).

When I pulled the ham and brought it in to the cutting board (I couldn’t wait long enough for it to rest) I was floored – I actually made ham! It tasted like ham, and pretty good ham at that. I guess the brine really did the trick because I figured that worst case scenario I’d have barbeque, but it really was a ham! I couldn’t stop eating it, salty and sweet with perfect smoky balance. Granted, after slicing, the inner most depths were a little more porky than ham flavored - I preferred the charred smoky outside the most. I think that more time in the brine would take care of the flavor throughout. Also, I had never realized up until then how much of the flavor profile of ham comes from the smoke itself. This is definitely something I’ll be doing again.

OK, so I’m starting to get a little cocky. Fresh off making ham I decided that I need to make bacon (of course). But I understand that I needed to learn some more before I tackle it. The first thing I needed to figure out was the cold smoke situation. I’ve looked around and discovered that a lot of people are curing pork bellies and hot smoking their bacon. But to me that’s just not right, it’s supposed to be cold smoked, not pre-cooked. A while back while poking around ebay I came across this guy (WARNING – he’s got loud music on his homepage) who is selling a cold smoke generator that bolts on to just about anything you want to use as a smoker. The drawback was that he wanted $100 for one. Since I just laid out a bunch of cash on a new pit I figured now was not the time to buy this guy’s contraption too. But I really want bacon so I studied what he’s selling and realized that I could make one myself (OK, maybe not as pretty or lightweight as his). So I headed off to Lowe’s to browse the plumbing section. I was able to cobble together 2” diameter black pipe and some heavy screening for the inside with a 1/2 x 5 inch pipe for the outlet tube. After a few nights in the shop I had something ready to bolt on to the smoker, so out came the drill and I blasted a 1/2” hole through the side of my brand new pit.

I’ve finally learned over the years that I can’t just jump right in to doing something as complex as making bacon without ruining $20 worth of meat and potentially poisoning myself in the process so I figured cheese was safe practice for cold smoking – it is pretty forgiving – the worse case scenarios consisted of: a) melted, b) ashy, or c) over-smoked. I got my hands on some cheddar and gave it a try. The result was pretty decent. The cold smoker kept choking itself out and required several re-lightings so I probably ended up smoking the cheese for way too long but it gave me a chance to tweak the design and work out the bugs and I think that only downside was that it was a little heavy on the smoke flavor. I decided to practice more on some gouda and more cheddar and it all came out pretty respectable so I felt confident enough to move on to something a little harder.

When Carrie and I first got married we struggled with figuring out what holiday traditions we’d adopt. Since my most salient childhood food memories of Christmas revolved around some Norwegian foods that my grandmother made, we’ve landed on those traditions over the years. In recent years I’ve attempted to branch out from my grandmother’s repertoire and add some new Norwegian dishes to the tradition. Last Christmas this experimentation led me to my first curing experience - gravlax.

I’ve never been a big salmon fan, but I know that Carrie loves it and thought since it fit with the Norwegian theme I’d have a go at it. Naturally I was concerned with the raw fish and the curing process but found a really great tutorial here and ended up with a surprisingly tasty product that didn’t poison us. Long story short, I’m no longer as worried about curing and since it went so well last Christmas I figured I’d extend the experiment to cold smoked lox.

I did some research and found some good tips at Kasilof Seafoods on how to make lox. Since I dry cured the Gravlax and plan to dry cure my bacon I decided to try a more Scottish approach of dry cured salmon rather than the wet cure many use for lox. I followed the same basic process as the gravlax tutorial above for packing the fish with salt and sugar and wrapping it in plastic wrap and putting it in the refrigerator for about three days. After that I pulled it out, rinsed it and soaked or “freshened it” in clean water for a few hours. Next I put it on a baking rack and placed it back in the fridge for another 24 hours to dry out again.

Last night I got the fish in the smoker and smoked it with some apple chips for about six or seven hours. When we got up this morning we had some pretty great lox with cream cheese and red onion on bagels for breakfast. And guess what, even I loved it!

I’m feeling pretty confident in tacking bacon now. I called Steigerwald’s last week to place an order for five pounds of pork belly. Stay tuned for more . . .

Grab a Bite at Sharkey’s

I recently got to take a quick road trip with the missus minus the munchkins which means that we got the opportunity stop at a less family-friendly roadfood destination. Living in Central New York, we’ve traveled through Binghamton dozens of times and even lived in the Southern Tier for about a year but never seemed to get a chance to sample many of the various interpretations of spiedies available from the local establishments. Most famous of these are Lupo’s and the Spiedie and Rib Pit although many people make them at backyard barbeques too using store bought marinade, often Salamida’s Original State Fair Spiedie Sauce.

However, Sharkey’s is an altogether different experience. The provenance of spiedies is unclear and locals dispute whether Peter Sharak of Sharkey’s invented the spiedie or not. But one thing is certain, stepping into Sharkey’s is like stepping back in time and you know that the food and the experience today is close to what the patrons who first tried the spiedies there in 1947 must have encountered when this family-run establishment first opened.

The place itself is the best of breed, what anyone would describe as a dive - barroom in front, dark cavernous dining room in back with ancient wooden booths and scarred formica tables. It’s a working class bar in a working class neighborhood and you can’t get any more authentic than that. But the best part of course is the food. If spiedies are what you came for, then spiedies you can have. Order them from the menu by the skewer and you’ll get them chargrilled and served on a paper plate with a slice of bread to make your sandwich.

Although the menu differentiates between speidies, pork spiedies, and chicken spiedies, it’s not clear to me whether the standard “spiedie” is made from pork or lamb. Traditionally, the first spiedies in the Tri-City area were made from lamb only but that has changed over the years. To me, my spiedie tasted more like lamb than pork but I’ve read that Sharkey’s stopped serving lamb a while back due to its high price. Whatever the case, with the strong flavor of the marinade, it is difficult to tell what kind of meat you’re getting, but what really matters is that they tasted amazing - tangy, juicy, and seasoned to perfection.

Sharkey’s is well known for it’s fresh seafood too with mussel and clam steamers on the menu. Other notable menu items include “City Chicken” which we did not get to try but the waitress described it as a spiedie skewer deep fried which sounded pretty good. They also have some nice Polish selections including a platter with pierogies and holupki. We decided to split the platter, served with a pre-buttered dinner roll and were glad we’d made the decision. The pierogies were good, but the holupkis were melt-in-your mouth awesome!

I’m glad we finally decided to stop and sample some of the fare at Sharkey’s. Whether spiedies were invented there or not, it is certain that they have a home at Sharkey’s and are here to stay. Personally, I will make sure that I don’t let too much time go by before we stop at this great roadfood shrine again.

Sharkey's

56 Glenwood Ave

Binghamton, NY 13905

(607) 729-9201