Barbecues
66 recipes found
BBQ Pulled Chicken
Almost nothing beats a barbecue pulled pork sandwich, but this faster and leaner spin, which is made with roasted chicken thighs and breasts and a quick barbecue sauce, is a delicious alternative that only tastes like it took all day to cook. Serve on buns with a vinegary slaw and ranch or buttermilk dressing, if you like. For a smokier flavor, use a combination of sweet and smoked paprika. Like most barbecue recipes, this is even better reheated the next day.
Slow Cooker BBQ Pork and Beans
Pork and beans are cooked together in a slow cooker for mutually beneficial results (If you don't have a slow cooker, you can do it in a pot in the oven.) As the pork shoulder and barbecue sauce braise in the oven, the sauce soaks up the pork juices while the pork tenderizes. Then, beans are added to soak up the deeply concentrated sauce. The recipe uses store-bought barbecue sauce enhanced with the smoky heat of canned chipotles in adobo and brown sugar, which helps glaze the pork. Because every barbecue sauce is different, taste and adjust yours as needed. (For a more acidic sauce, add apple cider vinegar with the beans, or you can increase the sweetness with added sugar.) To serve, slice the pork or shred it into pulled pork.
Elotes (Grilled Corn With Cheese, Lime and Chile)
Whole ears of corn are a classic street food in Mexico, where they are either grilled or boiled, then often dressed with some combination of lime, chile, mayonnaise and grated cheese. This grilled version calls for all of the above, which get mixed together into a creamy, bracing topping, and slathered all over the hot, sweet ears. It's not strictly traditional, but it does make it easier to assemble the corn and its dressing before serving. Or place the various topping in small bowls and let guests have the fun of garnishing their own. And if you don’t have a grill, the broiler works too though watch the ears carefully so they don’t burn.
Grilled or Oven-Roasted Santa Maria Tri-Tip
You might need to ask your butcher (assuming you have one) or even a store meat manager to order in a tri-tip roast. Two pounds is a good size, but if you come across a larger one, by all means grab it as the extra meat makes amazing sandwiches. The trick is to carve the tri-tip against the grain, which can change directions in this cut. So before you rub it and roast it, take a look at the raw meat and see which direction the long strands of muscle fiber are running on each part of the roast. After the roast has been cooked, and it has rested for 15 minutes or so, slice the roast in two at the place where the fibers change direction. Carve each piece separately.
BBQ Chicken
Barbecued chicken isn’t, really: It’s grilled rather than smoke-roasted at low temperature. But it requires a similar attention to technique. You’ll want to move the pieces around on the grill to keep them from burning, and flip them often as well. Cooking barbecued chicken benefits from a basting technique used by the chef and outdoor cooking maven Adam Perry Lang, who thins out his sauce with water, then paints it onto the meat he’s cooking coat after coat, allowing it to reduce and intensify rather than seize up and burn.
Roasted Potato Salad With BBQ Dressing
If barbecue potato chips were a salad, then this would be it. It’s hard to pick which component of this picnic dish is the greater star: the crispy roasted potatoes or the smoky, paprika-tinged barbecue sauce dressing. Bejeweled with crunchy red onions, which are soaked in water to mellow their bite, and showered with fresh dill, this colorful side dish is the savory crowd-pleaser you’ll want to bring to any cookout or potluck.
Charred Scallion Dip With Lemon and Herbs
This creamy scallion dip could be the cooler cousin of ranch dressing or sour cream and onion dip. Grilled scallions add smokiness, while fresh chives and raw scallions lend brightness to the tangy, herb-flecked dip. If you don’t have a grill or grill pan, you can broil the scallions in your oven. Once assembled, the dip benefits from chilling to round out the flavors. At least an hour works, but it's better after a day. It needs nothing more than potato chips alongside, but it’s also great with crudités, crackers, grilled vegetables, fried chicken or slathered on sandwiches.
Huli Huli Chicken
In 1955, Ernest Morgado, a Honolulu businessman, served a group of farmers grilled chicken that had been marinated in his mother’s teriyaki-style sauce. It was such a hit that he decided to market it with the name “huli huli.” Huli means “turn” in Hawaiian and refers to how it’s prepared: grilled between two racks and turned halfway through cooking. This simplified version calls for chicken pieces and a standard grill. The original recipe is a trade secret, but you can find many slightly different variations on the internet, typically including ginger, garlic, soy sauce, something sweet (honey, brown sugar or maple syrup) and something acidic (vinegar, white wine, lime juice or pineapple juice). This recipe is adapted from “Aloha Kitchen: Recipes from Hawai‘i” by Alana Kysar (Ten Speed, March 2019). It also works beautifully with boneless chicken thighs, but adjust your cooking time accordingly.
Memphis Dry-Rub Ribs
This Juneteenth showstopper, using a dry rub from Greg Collier, the chef and co-owner of Leah & Louise in Charlotte, N.C., is an ode to the flavors of the Mississippi Delta. The smoky, sweet, salty pork ribs slow roast in the oven, yielding tender meat seasoned with a traditional barbecue dry rub. You can substitute the pork for slab beef spareribs with equally good results, or use mushrooms for a vegetarian approach. Crushed peanuts and sweet-potato pikliz make the ribs a meal.
Memphis Dry-Rub Mushrooms
This showstopper — using a dry rub adapted from Greg Collier, the chef and co-owner of Leah & Louise in Charlotte, N.C. — is an opportunity to explore different mushroom varieties. Black oyster mushrooms give a brawny bite, and effortlessly hold the soulful seasoning while getting the crispest, crunchiest edges. Fuzzy white lion’s mane or even portobellos work, too; just buy the biggest mushrooms you can find. This recipe uses Worcestershire sauce, which typically includes anchovies, so be sure to seek out vegan Worcestershire if you'd like to make the dish vegan. Serve with sweet potato pikliz.
Spiedies
Spiedies are a mainstay sandwich of Binghamton, N.Y., and its surrounding boroughs. They’re made of meat marinated for a long time in what amounts to Italian dressing, then threaded onto skewers, grilled, and slid into a cheap sub roll, sometimes with a drizzle of fresh marinade or hot sauce. The recipe that follows calls for beef, but pork or venison can be used almost interchangeably. Marinate for a long time: a full 24 to 36 hours is not uncommon, and results in chunks of meat that are so deeply flavored that they taste great even when slightly overcooked. (If you use chicken, however, reduce the length of time in the marinade, since the meat starts to break down after 12 hours or so.) Serve the spiedies with an additional drizzle of lemon juice and olive oil, on top of Italian bread or alongside rice.
Texas Hill Country-Style Smoked Brisket
The packer brisket, so called because that’s how it’s labeled by the packing house, is the Mount Everest of barbecue: magnificent, imposing and intimidating. It’s challenging on account of its size (12 to 14 pounds) and its anatomy: two distinct muscles (one lean, one fat), both loaded with collagen, a tough connective tissue. To do it justice, season the meat assertively. You’ll smoke it low and slow for a period that can last up to 12 hours, then let it rest in an insulated cooler for 1 to 2 hours to allow the meat to relax and the juices to redistribute. Get all the details right and you’ll be rewarded with the ultimate brisket: spicy bark (the crusty exterior); moist, luscious, tender meat; and a smoke flavor that seems to go on forever.
Lamb Chops Scottadito With Crispy Kale
The word scottadito means burned fingers in Italian; these lamb chops are best eaten with one's fingers soon after they come off the grill. The recipe comes from Rachael Ray, who serves these at her homes in upstate New York and Manhattan. The lamb chops are best if they marinate for several hours, but turn out just fine with an hour or two under the anchovy and garlic paste. Ms. Ray's method for preparing kale produces crispy leaves; key elements are the lightest spray of oil, and baking racks to get them really crisp. They need to be made in batches, but a hot oven makes the job quick, and they can also be done a little bit ahead of time and served at room temperature. Don’t skip grilling the lemon: the slightly charred, acidic flavor adds an essential layer.
"BBQ" Brisket
Brisket simply cannot be grilled over direct heat no matter how careful you are; it absolutely requires long, slow cooking. In fact, it’s difficult to grill (or broil) without some form of precooking, whether in aluminum foil (a venerable trick that makes sense) or in a barbecue pit. The slow braising phase of cooking the beef, in a ketchup-and-chile-based sauce, may take a while — it doesn’t surprise me when brisket takes three hours or even longer to become really tender — but the final browning can take as little as 10 minutes and produces fork-tender brisket.
Braised and Grilled or Broiled Pork Ribs
The barbecued ribs I like best are cooked all the way through, using moist, relatively low heat, then finished over a high flame for a final browning. And you can nicely, if imperfectly, replicate this process by braising the ribs and then finishing them over the grill or in the broiler. Of course the broiler won’t add wood flavor, but then neither will a gas grill or briquettes. What I did for the ribs in the recipe here was brown them, then slowly braise them in the oven (the top of the stove would work as well). When they were nearly falling off the bone I took them straight from the braising liquid and ran them under the broiler, just until they crisped up.
Seekh Kebab With Mint Chutney
Served at most traditional Indian restaurants, seekh kebabs are made with ground lamb that’s been seasoned with garam masala, cumin seeds, fresh ginger and fresh cilantro, then grilled and served with raw red onion and bright mint chutney to offset the richness and heat. This recipe comes from Chintan Pandya, the executive chef at Adda Indian Canteen, a New York restaurant that specializes in homestyle Indian food. You’ll need to purchase deggi mirch, an Indian chile powder that tastes somewhat like a smoky paprika, but is mild enough to be used in a quantity large enough to color the meat red. The spiced meat mixture benefits from chilling to help retain its shape on the grill, but you could also roll it into meatballs and pan-sear them on the stovetop or roast them in the oven, if the season dictates.
Beef Suya
Suya is a popular Nigerian street food made of thin strips of meat that are seasoned, skewered and grilled. The term “suya” can refer to the preparation technique or the resulting dish, and can apply to other meats, such as goat and chicken. This recipe is similar in style to the suya made from a fattier cut of beef called tozo, which comes from the hump of the zebu cattle, found in northern Nigeria. A well-marbled piece of boneless short rib is a great substitute. Ask your butcher to thinly slice the meat into strips, or pop it into your freezer for 30 minutes and use a sharp knife to slice. Suya spice, or yaji, is available online or at African groceries, or you can make your own (see Tip).
Simplest Grilled Peaches
Grilled peaches may be summer’s greatest joy. Cook them over a medium to low gas grill or a dying charcoal fire, and serve them with ice cream, whipped cream or nothing at all.
One-Pot BBQ Pork and Beans
Two beloved barbecue staples are cooked together in one pot (or a slow cooker) for mutually beneficial results. As the pork shoulder braises, the pork juices flavor the barbecue sauce and the sauce tenderizes the pork. Beans are then added to soak up the deeply concentrated sauce. The recipe uses store-bought barbecue sauce enhanced with the smoky heat of canned chipotles in adobo and brown sugar, which helps glaze the pork. Because every barbecue sauce is different, taste and adjust yours as needed. (To mimic a North Carolina-style sauce, add apple cider vinegar with the beans, or yellow mustard for a South Carolina-style sauce, or even gochujang and soy sauce for a Korean-inspired take.) To serve, slice the pork or shred it into pulled pork. Cornbread, biscuits or Texas toast are great additions.
Grilled Soy-Basted Chicken Thighs With Spicy Cashews
Here's a hack I performed on a recipe for an appetizer portion of skewered chunked chicken thighs that the great live-fire cooks and cookbook writers Chris Schlesinger and John Willoughby wrote many years ago, and that I have slowly altered into a main-course grilled dinner. The skinless chicken browns nicely over a medium flame, and the sugary soy basting sauce lacquers it beautifully in the final few minutes of cooking. It's terrific with rice, or as a topping for a salad of sturdy greens. You may wish to double the recipe for Sriracha-roasted cashews. Those are addictive, and for them you will find many delicious uses.
Pulled Pork Sandwiches
This recipe takes a good deal of time, but it yields a lot of sandwiches, more than enough for a sloppy, spicy dinner party feast. You’ll roast a dry-rubbed pork shoulder in the oven until it’s pull-apart tender, 3 or 4 hours that you can spend doing other things while your kitchen fills with the aroma of the cooking meat. Then you’ll assemble a quick slaw and simmer a tangy barbecue sauce for about 10 minutes before putting it all out on the table with soft rolls. Serve the combination warm, at any time of the year, for a weekend project well worth an afternoon’s work.
Gochujang BBQ Ribs With Peanuts and Scallions
The simplest dishes are the hardest to get right, and barbecue ribs are no exception. That is why the chef Joseph Lenn, of J.C. Holdway in Knoxville, Tenn., always quick-cures the ribs with an overnight rub of salt, black pepper and brown sugar. This ensures the meat is seasoned evenly throughout, and is something he recommends for any slow-cooked or braised meat. Mr. Lenn’s mop sauce, a homage to the Dixie Sweet sauce at Martin’s Bar-B-Que Joint in Nashville, is fired up with gochujang, a Korean chile paste. It works equally well on bone-in chicken breasts and wings.
Grilled Baby Back Ribs
We think of ribs as an all-day affair, the meat cooked in smoke and low heat until it begins to pull from the bone. But baby backs are quicker and can be grilled as well, and the result is delicious. This recipe benefits from a basting technique used by the chef and barbecue madman Adam Perry Lang, who thins out his barbecue sauce with water, then paints it onto the meat he’s cooking in coat after coat, allowing it to reduce and intensify rather than seize up and burn.
Smoked Chicken Wings
If you have an offset smoker, even a leaky old fellow with rust spots and broken wheels, this recipe will provide one of its finest uses. Smoking chicken wings for 15 minutes or so before grilling or roasting them under thin bastings of barbecue sauce yields meat that is smoky but not aggressively so, deeply flavorful, with a marvelous crust. But you don’t need a smoker! Simply set up your grill for indirect cooking, with a fairly small fire, and use soaked wood chips to create a plume of smoke. Put the wings on the cool side of the grill, then cover it and allow the smoke to perform its magic. You’ll get wings that are pale gold, the color of chamois that you can cook into perfection over the direct heat of the fire.