Everyone that's been around here knows we cook lunch mostly every day on our original 1000 series that we just refer to as "the shop's grill". Someone asked me awhile back how do we manage cooking on a wood fired grill with running our normal operations. I replied, well it's easy. Unless you're searing, just use an offset fire or use the firebox. You light your fire, put the food on, set your dampers and go back to work. They reply with, So it's like a crock pot? Well yea, kinda.
They look at me perplexed and ask how do I know it's going to be the temperature I want or when whatever we're cooking will be done when we want it done? I reply with that's a little more complex. But we use it almost everyday. So we know the fuel and how it burns. We know this particular day the weather is whatever temperature and at whatever wind speed. After using it for so long, you just know where to set the dampers and how much wood or charcoal to put in it.
As for what we put on the grill, most of the time it's whatever cheap cut we find at the market. We do have our own cattle on the farm here, so we do eat a lot of beef. But depending on what we're cooking someone goes and lights a fire early in the morning, puts the meat on and by lunch it's done.
And if you haven't noticed, we don't get fancy with lunch most of the time. Chunk of meat, dry rub, probably some kind of sauce. We don't have a full kitchen here nor time, so we just keep it simple.
And if you've read this far I'm going to give you a little tidbit that might open your mind.
Try cooking on a slack grill. And if that term threw you, a slack oven is an oven heated hot, food placed in and the heat gradually dissipates while the food is cooking. But in our case it's a grill, so we call it a slack grill.
Backstory, we get into bubbles, geographic bubbles or social bubbles and sometimes we get stuck in those bubbles. But it's good to look around at other bubbles and see how the other bubbles work. Take grilling and bbq, I heard for decades that you can only cook at 225 degrees and bones are supposed to pull out a certain way and have only a certain amount of meat attached. And that's it, end of story, that is how you slow cook. But then you see other bubbles, like how they cook in other countries. Or, you find a historical piece that goes over how it was cooked in the past and then it gets really interesting. Like cooking in a slack oven, or in our case a slack grill. The image for this post is a couple tri-tips from the farm here cooked on a slack grill. You should try it sometime.
So how was that cooked? We get here at 7am. Someone goes and lights a wood fire on the shops grill. Then goes inside and gets some work done. Grill gets hot, as in 450 degrees hot, season the meat, throw the meat on, maybe throw one more log on the fire, close up the grill up (dampers closed, lids closed) come back at lunch and done.
Chris