Slow Cooking:

At the other end of the “burn and serve” spectrum is the slow cooking method. If I’m doing a roast, I usually start cooking early in the morning, and sometimes even the day before. I did a whole Brisket last week that was cooking for 27 hours at 160 F. It was very tender, very tasty, and perfectly cooked.

Before thinking about trying it out, be very sure your oven temperature is what the control dial says it is. It usually isn’t. Oven thermometers are easy to find, cheap, and may just save you from thinking you just can’t cook.

I slow cook in my electric smokehouse, which is outside on a covered patio. I usually want to give it a few hours of smoke, and then just let it cook the rest of the day. Once meat starts cooking-that is, once it reaches an internal temperature of about 115-120 F., it has absorbed all the smoke flavor it’s going to absorb and there’s no point in keeping the smoke going after that.

I often cook a large beef roast, such as a Chuck, whole or half Top Sirloin, or whole or half Rib Eye. (“Boneless” Rib Eye is like saying “round circle.” There’s never been a bone in an Eye of the Rib.) Those will usually weigh from 6 to 15 lbs.

If I’ve aged it, I trim off the very thin and dried outer layer before I rub it down with a pasty mix of Worcestershire, soy sauce, brown sugar, freshly crushed garlic, ground horseradish, and maybe a little balsamic vinegar.

I let it rest for an hour or two at room temperature, insert the meat thermometer, put it in the pre-heated to about 200 F. smoker, and put the hickory or alder chips on the burner. I always put a pot of hot water in the smoker on a shelf below the meat, which keeps the meat from drying out too much. The temperature inside the smoker will drop back to about 110 F., and very slowly creep back up to 160-170 F., where I try to keep it for the next 5-10 hours. A couple hours before serving, if the internal temperature of the beef is about 120-130 F. I’ll take off the wood chip pan and replace it with a pot of boiling water and just let it slowly steam for the last hour or two, until the internal temperature of the meat is about 142 F. If you like your beef well done, you probably want to take the internal temperature up to 150 F. With steam, the internal temperature will go up much more quickly, as much as 10 degrees in an hour. Let it rest at least a half an hour, slice and serve.

You can bow as your guests taste it, swoon and applaud.

I just say, “Aw shucks, nothin' to it.”

Burn and Serve:

An older man commented the other day that he didn’t want to read my book, as he was a “burn and serve” cook--- when he cooked at all.

I think a lot of people fit that category of home cooking in our current society. So many people just didn’t learn enough about cooking at home so that now they’re all but dependent on prepared meals from the grocery store, restaurants and take out restaurants.

Cooking is not part of what many people saw every day while growing up. Now they just don’t think of it as being a part of their daily routine. I remember actually eating in restaurants exactly 3 times before I was 18 and left home. Mom didn’t allow any of the kids in the kitchen while she was cooking, so I knew nothing at all about cooking. Didn’t take me long to learn enough to know I could make better food than I could ever get in a restaurant—unless it was a restaurant I couldn’t afford.

I hear a lot about burn and serve kinds of cooks; “when you smell smoke, it’s done.” If you like burned food, that’s all you need to know. For me, I like my vegetables lightly steamed and I like my meat to be tasty and juicy. I’ll have my steak or roast medium rare, my pork cooked just to 160 F., internal temperature, and my chicken crispy, juicy and well done.

And that’s the first step-knowing what you like, and how you like it. Once you know what you like and how you like it, learning how to prepare it that way is easy.

“Baby steps,” as Bill Murray made famous in the movie, “What about Bob?” is the best way to learn, I think. If you’ve never cooked much, are of the “burn and serve,” persuasion, here’s an easy approach: 1) pick your favorite meat dish 2) Google search a recipe for that dish 3) cook nothing else at all. Just cook that one dish, be it a broiled or fried burger, a beer steamed hot dog, or a breaded and fried pork chop. That will build a little confidence, you’ll want to improve on your first effort, learn how to make it so that it suits you perfectly, and from there you can add another dish to your repertoire. Just keep it simple and easy. Taking on a full 5 course, “Gourmet's Delight,” before knowing how to steam a carrot, is a sure recipe for returning to a “Burn and Serve” kind of cook that prefers a take-out place.

You can always trust what you cook at home.

How To Grind Your Own Meat:

Anyone who read the NY Times article of October 4, 2009, entitled, “E. coli path shows beef inspection flaws,” (click here to read) probably hasn’t bought or eaten much ground beef or hamburgers since then.And that’s too bad, because most of us love a great hamburger now and then.

It’s easy to make ground beef safely, if you have a way to grind your own. You can buy a chuck roast, bone-in or boneless, or some portion of beef round if you want it completely fat free. Simply un-wrap the beef, rinse it under cold water to remove most of any surface bacteria that might be there, cut it into strips and refrigerate it for a few hours or overnight. Of course if you get a bone-in roast, you have to remove them, but that’s not very intimidating for anyone who cooks. Most food processors have an attachment for grinding, and that’s all you need. You can also buy an excellent electric stainless steel grinder for about $100 that should last a lifetime.

Once it’s been ground through the medium grinding plate, you can grind it again through the fine plate, if you like. I never do that. I like it just coarsely ground; and nobody has ever even noticed that it wasn’t finely ground---they just rave about how it’s incredibly good stuff. However you like it, the next thing to do is dissolve about half teaspoon of salt per pound of meat in ¼ cup of ice cold water per 2 lbs. of meat. Pour the salty ice water evenly over the ground beef, thoroughly mix it with a long handled fork or spoon, and refrigerate it for at least an hour. When you make patties, you’ll find they form up rather easily. That’s because the salt has broken down enough of the cell walls that the meat adheres to itself better.

What’s the advantage of grinding your own? You know: it’s clean; it’s been under refrigeration constantly since you bought it; and any bacteria that might have been on the meat were on the surface only. The difference is that after the meat has been ground, it has an infinite number of surfaces for bacteria to multiply on. In one large piece, the meat has only a relatively small surface area for breeding bacteria. Bacteria don’t multiply at temperatures below 40 F. If you’ve kept your beef below that, (most refrigerators are set at 38 F.) taken it out of the package and rinsed off the surface as soon as you got it home, you have no chance of ever making anyone sick. In 52 years, I’ve yet to make anyone sick through my mishandling of meat. If you follow the above, you won’t either.

Now you can have a Happy Hamburger!

(And if you’ve followed safe meat handling practices, you can have it rare or medium rare without the threat of death as a side dish.)