Barbecues
66 recipes found
Pulled Lamb Shoulder
This pulled lamb is an homage to the barbecued mutton of Western Kentucky. Smoke the meat over charcoal and wood, not gas. It’s bonkers delicious. Or at least make the dry rub that covers the meat and use it to cook something else.
Gochujang BBQ Sauce
The chef Tory Miller dreamed up this spicy, sweet barbecue sauce during the pandemic when he was running his Miller Family Meat & Three pop-up in Madison, Wis. It’s an ode to his family’s love of grilling and his Korean heritage, which, as an adoptee, he has been exploring more in recent years. Mr. Miller uses this as he would any other barbecue sauce: for basting meats as they finish grilling and for dipping nuggets. He loves the smokiness the bacon adds to the sauce, but here it’s optional. (Though if using, you can add the drained bacon to a sandwich with white bread, coleslaw and pickles, or simply keep in the sauce).
Spice-Rubbed Baby Back Ribs With Chipotle-Bourbon BBQ Sauce
The baby back (sometimes called top loin) is the perfect rib for neophytes. Cut from high on the hog — literally, it abuts the backbone — it’s intrinsically tender and generously marbled, which keeps it moist during smoking. Thanks to these attributes, you can cook it at a higher temperature than the low-and-slow heat favored in the American barbecue belt. This shortens the cooking time and lets you cook the ribs on a common charcoal kettle grill. (However, you can certainly smoke these ribs low and slow at 250 degrees, in which case, you’ll need 3 1/2 to 4 hours of cooking time — and a smoker.) The higher heat and shorter cooking time produce ribs with a firmer, meatier consistency. Add a chile-stung spice rub and a sweet, spicy chipotle-bourbon barbecue sauce, and you wind up with textbook barbecued ribs with a distinctive sweet, hot, smoky finish.
Grilled Pork With Whole Spices and Garlic Bread
Deeply flavored from a rub of fennel, coriander, caraway and cumin, and crisp-edged from the grill, this pork feeds a crowd, and most of the work can be done in advance. You can use either boneless loin or shoulder here: The shoulder is chewier, brawnier and more irregular in shape, while the loin is neater to slice and softer to eat. But both are delicious, especially when showered with fresh lemon or lime juice at the end to cut the richness. You don’t have to make the buttery garlic bread, but its herbal flavors go well with the smoke and char of the meat. If you do skip it (your loss), serve the pork strewn with plenty of fresh, bright herbs. If you’re not grilling, you can roast the pork in a 500-degree oven for 20 to 30 minutes, flipping it halfway. Then run it under the broiler at the end to sear the fat.
Kuku Paka (Chicken With Coconut)
This rich dish of chicken in a spiced coconut sauce comes from Kenya's coast, though creative cooks now produce variations of it all over the country. This simple version was adapted from many of them, including Kirti Patel, Agnes Kalyonge and the author Madhur Jaffrey. It requires slowly grilling the marinated chicken, ideally over charcoal — a little extra work that lends the finished kuku paka a wonderful smoky flavor — though in a pinch, you can use a grill pan on the stove. Note: The coconut sauce should be creamy but not flat, so be sure to spike it at the end with enough lemon juice to give it the edge of sourness that is one of this great dish's defining characteristics.
Smoky Pork Shoulder With Chile Paste
A well-seasoned, chile-paste-slathered pork shoulder is already going to win, no matter what you do to it. Which seems to me like the ideal reason to try a new technique: slow roasting, off-flame, with ambient heat, using your outdoor grill as a coal-fired oven in the off-season of dead winter. Even if your live coals snuff out, or smoke too heavily, or you get bored of the snow-muffled silence or feel lonely in the winter solitude of your backyard, even if you miscalculate sunset and find yourself in the dark with a cellphone flashlight trying to read the internal temperature of the meat to discover it’s still raw in the center — all you have to do is close up shop out back, come inside and shove the thing in your conventional oven and then read the newspaper until dinner.
BBQ Bacon Brisket Flat
Packer brisket is what you order at a barbecue restaurant. The brisket flat (the leaner, flatter of the two muscles that comprise a whole brisket) is what you’re more likely to find at the supermarket. Lacking the generous marbling of a packer, the flat tends to toughen and dry out during a long slow cook on your grill or smoker. But two simple techniques deliver a moist, tender brisket flat every time. The first is to cook the flat in a foil pan to shield the lean meat from the heat. The second is to drape the brisket flat with a layer of bacon, which renders its fat during cooking, basting the meat and keeping it moist. Then there’s the bonus: You get to eat barbecued bacon along with your brisket.
Grilled Sausages, Onions and Peppers
There is no more reliable guest at a cookout than sausage, roasted over the open fire. But before you grill the meat, get some peppers and onions soft and dark and fragrant in the heat, and use these as a bed on which to serve the links. Italian sausage works beautifully here, as do hot links and bratwurst. If cooking brats, think about simmering them first in beer and onions, then finishing them on the fire.
Glazed Pork
This grilled (or broiled) slab of pork resembles Chinese roast pork. It is a vital component of arroz gordo, a dish from Macau. But it can easily stand on its own. Just be sure the meat is at least 2 inches thick so it will brown nicely without overcooking. Slice it to serve as an appetizer with strong mustard, or add it at the last minute to stir-fried mushrooms. You could substitute pork loin for the shoulder.
Grilled Clams and Mussels with Garlic, Almonds and Mint
Grilling clams and mussels gives them a smokiness you can’t get inside on your stove. Use hardwood charcoal if you can; it gives the best, smokiest flavor. The cooking time may vary depending upon your grill and the temperature of the shellfish when you put it in the pan. (Very cold seafood may take a few minutes longer.) Keep checking, pulling out the open clams and mussels with tongs as you go. And don’t forget to pour the heady pan juices on top of the shellfish; dunking grilled bread into that garlicky pool may be the best part of the dish.
Sweet Potato and Apple Hobo Pack
The hobo pack, a self-contained, foil-wrapped meal cooked in hot coals, is an easy option for outdoor cooking. Though this recipe includes a lot of fall flavors, it is great for summer cookouts, a change from the usual suspects. The key to success is to be sure the foil packet is tightly sealed so no juices leak out. Be aware that the intense heat of the coals will deeply char some of the food that’s right up against the foil, but to us that’s the best-tasting part.
Sous-Vide Rib Steaks With Spicy Salsa Verde
When you invest in really good rib steaks, you don’t want to mess things up. Cooking them with a sous-vide machine until they are done to taste, then searing them on the grill until charred at the edges gives you the ultimate control.
Chris Schlesinger’s Pulled Pork
Mr. Schlesinger is the chef and an owner of the East Coast Grill in Cambridge, Mass., which he opened in 1985. He is also the author, with John Willoughby, of six cookbooks that relate somehow to the pleasures of fire. This is an adaptation of his recipe that calls for slowly cooking the pork over coals for almost 14 hours, but that's largely unattended, and your patience will be rewarded.
Chinese-Style BBQ Ribs
These are the best oven-roasted ribs ever, and they can also be finished on a grill for extra smoky flavor. Creating steam in the oven is the key to tender meat. The ingredients here are close to the ones used by traditional Cantonese barbecue masters to produce sticky-salty-sweet meat that has a reddish, caramelized crust — with ketchup standing in for Chinese red fermented tofu. (It can be left out if desired.) Although these ribs are presented as an appetizer in many American Chinese restaurants, barbecued meat is traditionally a main course, served with freshly cooked rice and a green side like smashed cucumber salad or stir-fried bok choy.
Maple Chicken ‘n’ Ribs
If meat is involved, you can find me covering it in flavor-enhancing tenderizing liquids before grilling, broiling, baking or roasting it. The more you do to the meat before you cook it, the less you have to do during or after. In this case apple juice or cider gives tang and wards off stringiness, a small amount of oil keeps things juicy and maple syrup, soy, star anise, cinnamon and garlic impart deep, luscious flavor. These two meats work well in conjunction: the relatively lean chicken is enhanced in taste and texture by the pork ribs, which give off flavorsome fat as they roast. You can use whatever ribs you like; meaty ones are best, but as long as the ribs are separated, rather than in a slab, they'll do just fine. As for the chicken, I implore you to use thighs, bone-in, skin-on because the meat is more tender and the taste infinitely better. (Make sure you use a large enough roasting pan so you don't have to crowd the pan. If the pan is crowded, the meat will steam, not brown.)
Brined Chicken With White Sauce
The cooking method here is direct heat. Suggested wood: hickory, pecan, oak.
Barbecued Baby Chicken With Corn Pudding
Grilled Leg of Lamb, Sam's Way
This lamb recipe comes from a feast that Mark Bittman and Sam Sifton prepared in Charleston, S.C. They found good lamb and decided to cook it two different ways, braised and grilled, to bring different textures and flavors to the plate — and also to nod to the tradition of the paschal lamb in Jewish and Christian springtime traditions.