Welcome to the EGGhead Forum - a great place to visit and packed with tips and EGGspert advice! You can also join the conversation and get more information and amazing kamado recipes by following Big Green Egg to Experience our World of Flavor™ at:
Facebook  |  Twitter  |  Instagram  |  Pinterest  |  Youtube  |  Vimeo
Share your photos by tagging us and using the hashtag #BigGreenEgg.

Want to see how the EGG is made? Click to Watch

A foot of snow and a lot of food PICS

WiltOnTilt
WiltOnTilt Posts: 102
edited February 2013 in EggHead Forum
So here in the midwest we have been getting hammered with snow.  Last week around a foot and this week another 9-12 inches.  Since I knew I'd be snowed in, I decided to prepare to cook on the egg all day in the snow, so here's what I did:

1. Stuffed chicken thighs.  I found the recipe here: http://italian.food.com/recipe/chicken-legs-with-ricotta-and-bacon-stuffing-61303

The stuffing is essentially made of ricotta cheese, bacon, onion, parsley, and garlic.  I put in double bacon and double garlic but it still could have used some more of each.  After I stuffed the thighs I got worried that it would all melt out during the cook so I tied them up with some dental floss.  It worked out pretty well.  I went 375 indirect since that did well with the spatchcock chicken last time. They only took about 45-50 minutes to get to about 175-180 internal. The results were good but with the amount of prep work involved, I probably won't do this one again in the near future.  Also I think I put too much stuffing inside the chicken because it was more cheese than meat in some of them.  One of the pics has my son "painting" the thighs with butter.  He loves to help.

2. Next on the menu - chicken wings.  I've read here that people tend to do these different methods: raised direct, normal direct, normal indirect, whatever.  I sort of wanted to do raised direct given that I was following @NecessaryIndulg 's recipe here: http://eggheadforum.com/discussion/1145643/sweet-spicy-sticky-wings/p1 , which looked amazing and different.  Given that I like to hedge my bets when trying some new food, I decided to do half with this recipe and half with frank's buffalo sauce.  Both turned out great.  I was able to marinate the wings in the fish sauce mixture overnight.  The only thing I might do different next time is to add corn starch right before putting them on and cook them with direct heat.  I feel that the skin was a bit too rubbery and with those changes I think it would be more crisp.  Either way, the flavor on her recipe is excellent.  Another thing to note on this recipe, when I was boiling/reducing the marinade down, I was a bit worried because I never got much of a syrup texture.  I did use a slightly different mixture (Chili Garlic Sauce instead of Roasted Red Pepper paste, which I couldn't find at the store).  I tried adding some more water and sugar since I had boiled off most of the moisture at one point, but it never really went syrupy.  When I did end up adding it to the wings though, they were still sticky as a result of the marinade they were in overnight, so everything worked out in the end.

Last, ABTs aka Jalapeno poppers.

Given that my wife being pregnant and unable to eat too much spicy stuff, I also decided to stuff some yellow and orange peppers (along with the standard jalapenos) and wrap them in bacon.  The stuffing has a 50/50 mix of ricotta cheese and cream cheese (I just used what was left of the ricotta from the thigh recipe), plus some shredded taco cheese, green onion, and hot italian sausage.  I had high hopes for these poppers, and they were good, but I think I could do them better.  By this time, the fire in the egg was really starting to die off and I wasn't sure whether or not I should be cooking these things direct or indirect.  Given that I was already set up for indirect, I stuck with that and about 300 degrees was all I could get out of my fire with both vents 100% open.  In hindsight, I should have just added more coal and cooked them direct because the result was kind of a soggy pepper by the time the bacon got crisp.  Next time I will cook them at a higher temp and direct and I think this should solve that issue.  The flavor was still good but not amazing.  I think they were actually better as leftovers today.

That's all I got for now.  Thanks for reading.

Comments