Roasting and Grill with WFO in the Big Easy, New Orleans!

[V-wiz]

Re: Roasting and Grill with WFO in the Big Easy, New Orleans!

Man im loving everything posted, this is my kind of cooking. Keep em coming

[trippy_ale]

Re: Roasting and Grill with WFO in the Big Easy, New Orleans!

Hey Tu, your food post and WFO built is super inspiring. A dream to build my own WFO is coming together slowly in my head. Thank you for the great post.

[Kurtloup]

Re: Roasting and Grill with WFO in the Big Easy, New Orleans!

Tu,

How much you weigh, if you eat everything you cook you must look like K Paul.

I met Tu Friday. He's got a ways to go to catch up to Paul Prudhomme.

[banhxeo76]

Re: Roasting and Grill with WFO in the Big Easy, New Orleans!

Tu,

How much you weigh, if you eat everything you cook you must look like K Paul.

Do you trust a skinny Chef? I am not fat, just very round in the middle.

Tu,

Tu, thanks for sharing your recipes they are certainly inspirational.

KD, I am just trying to keep up with your wonderful cooking skill. Thanks for the compliment.

[Bacterium]

Re: Roasting and Grill with WFO in the Big Easy, New Orleans!

Tu, just gotta second Dougs comments.....thanks for posting these pics.

[UtahBeehiver]

Re: Roasting and Grill with WFO in the Big Easy, New Orleans!

Tu,

How much you weigh, if you eat everything you cook you must look like K Paul. Btw, I quite enjoyed his resturant when I was there last.

You dishes look scrumptous.............

[banhxeo76]

Re: Roasting and Grill with WFO in the Big Easy, New Orleans!

....and some jumbo gulf shrimps with the head on of course. I removed the shrimp shell but keep the tail section and the head on. By keeping the head on, it gave a lot of great favor. I used the great New Orleans Chef Paul Prudhomme's seasoning for shrimp called Shrimp Magic to marinate the shrimp. This shrimp tasted great with grits. I just love sucking the head like you do with crawfish. Okay, that sounds dirty but if you live in the south, you know what I am talking about.

[banhxeo76]

Re: Roasting and Grill with WFO in the Big Easy, New Orleans!

About one month ago, I cook some ribeyes directly on the heated firebrick just to see what will happen. I was not happy with the result because it seemed like firebrick was steaming the steak rather than searing like it would with a cast iron.

On Saturaday, my older brother dropped by and saw that we had WFO on for pizza. He left and came back with some fatty ribeyes. After we done with the pizza, I moved some of the ember to the opposite side and create a path in the middle. Put a little bit more wood to charge up the hearth. Heat up the cast iron and cook the ribeyes. You ready don't need to flip the steak over when you cooking this method because the flare from the top will cook the steak on the top like when you are cooking pizza. My weber is looking more loney everyday.

[banhxeo76]

Re: Roasting and Grill with WFO in the Big Easy, New Orleans!

I may try this roasted cauliflower for Thanksgiving. At 55 second, you will get to see this a really cool pizza oven because the hearth floor is spinning which make it easy to load stuff in and out of the oven. This guy the video is Alon Shaya who is head chef at Domenica (New Orleans) and they make a very good traditional thin crust Italian pizza.

http://www.nola.com/dining/index.ssf/2012/11/vegetables_arent_an_afterthoug.html#incart_flyout_living

scroll down and click to play the video from nola.com

[Gulf]

Re: Roasting and Grill with WFO in the Big Easy, New Orleans!

Great recipee and an excelent description Tu,

I will definately be trying this in the near future. One funny thing about "pork belly". On one of the cooking channels recently, I saw a BBQ competition. One in which the competitors were given an "surprise" cut of meat to cook on charcoal grills. One of the competitors was a past Grand Champion BBQ Chef. I am sure hat he had eaten bacon all of his life but, for some reason, he did not know from what cut of pork it was cured. .

[banhxeo76]

Re: Roasting and Grill with WFO in the Big Easy, New Orleans!

Remove all of the aluminum foil and push it back in with the skin side up to get the skin cracklin. After 4 minutes of boiled, I checked on it. At first, not all of the skin did its cracklin like I would like. I had to do some more poking on the area of skin that didn’t have enough cracklin. For the area that has enough cracklin already, I placed the aluminum foil to cover that area to prevent being burnt. Pop it back into the oven and for another 3 to 4 minutes and it was prefect.

As you can see, portion of the skin was burnt. I got knife and scrapped off the burnt section like you would do with burnt toast.

I know it is a lot of work just to get the skin cracklin but it is so worth of it. If I didn’t do this, the skin would have a consistency of fatty rubber and that is a waste of pork belly's skin.

Let it rest for 10 minutes and cut it up in smaller pieces. I served the roasted pork belly with vermicelli rice noodle and fish sauce. Taste very good with cold beer. Boy, I was a happy camper on Saturday night.

[banhxeo76]

Re: Roasting and Grill with WFO in the Big Easy, New Orleans!

One of my favorite things to eat is Roasted pork belly with vermicelli rice noodle. It is traditional eaten during a Vietnamese’s engagement party or a big celebration. However, this is dish is just too delicious to wait for an engagement party.

I started with the brining process by soaking the pork belly (meat candy) for about 24 hours so that the favor can be penetrated inside of the meat.

I let the pork belly rest on a wire rack at room temperature for 60 minutes. I poured two cups of water into the pan so that it could help the pork belly to cook evenly and loaded it inside of the WFO when the door temperature was at 350 degree F.

After 60 minutes, I checked on the pork and the thickest section of the belly was reading 170 degree F. I took it out and started poking on the skin. As the liquid fat began to ooze out of the skin, I wiped with paper towel.

I poured coarse salt over the skin and let the salt absorbed any additional liquid fat that may ooze out during this resting period which will last about 60 minutes. It is important to get the skin to dry during the resting period so that you can get the skin to cracklin during the final stage of cooking.

After 60 minutes, I would scrapped most of the salt off of the skin and poked some more holes on the skin and wiped any liquid fat that may ooze out.

At this point, instead of putting more wood to recharge WFO to get the temperature to about 550 degree F. I decided just to use the gas oven inside of my house for the last portion of the cook since it only took about 15 minutes to caramelize the meet and cracklin up the skin. No point of wasting any wood and time.

I set the gas oven on boil, and applied a thin coat of soy-sauce, hoisin sauce, water, and this premix package from the Asian store.

I applied three thin coats of sauce while it is being char boiled about 6 inches from the fire. As you can see, I wrapped some aluminum foil to cover the skin because I don’t want the skin on the edge to cracklin up at this point yet so the edge of the skin won’t be burnt when it is time to cracklin the skin side. When the meat side of the belly was caramelized to my desire, I flipped it over to have the skin side up.

[banhxeo76]

Re: Roasting and Grill with WFO in the Big Easy, New Orleans!

My wife told me that she was in the mood for beef stew. Since dat WFO was still hot from Sunday fire and I had some meat in the freezer, I figured....sure, why not!? My house is only 10 minutes from my work. I went home and prep the stew. I placed the pot into the WFO when the door temp was reading at 325 degree F and went back to work. After 3 ? hours, I took it out of WFO and dinner was almost done. Put some saut? mushrooms and pearl onions into the stew and dinner was ready. I used Julia Child?s recipe. Not bad for a Monday night meal.

[banhxeo76]

Re: Roasting and Grill with WFO in the Big Easy, New Orleans!

......... Because they will eat anything

Well....I am not going to disagree with that......

[Gulf]

Re: Roasting and Grill with WFO in the Big Easy, New Orleans!

......... Because they will eat anything