While trying to make a strong beer barbecue sauce one day it turned out a lot sweeter than I expected. Even though it wasn’t what I was going for, the sauce got great reviews.

The taste was somewhere between a thick beer sauce and a regular sweet and sour sauce. It’s almost like a sweet and sour sauce you would get at a cheap restaurant, but in a good way (if that’s possible). It seems to be the amount of worcestershire sauce that makes it sweeter. For a more sour sauce you can just reduce that.

A plate of ribs with the sweet and sour bbq sauce

This sauce was great on ribs and good on burgers. It works well as a dipping sauce, but letting it cook onto some meat for a few minutes gives it a much richer flavor.

Total time: 45 minutes – 1 1/2 hours (I like to simmer it for a while to get a thick sauce)

Ingredients:

• 2 cups of ketchup
• 1 bottle of beer (I used a local beer that’s similar to a pale ale with a moderately strong flavor)
• 2 tbsp yellow mustard seeds (ground might give it more flavor but whole seeds work too)
• 1/4 – 1/3 cup green onions, mostly white parts if possible, chopped up
• 2 cloves of garlic, minced
• 3 tbsp worcestershire sauce
• 2 tbsp red wine vinegar
• 1-2 tbsp chili powder
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• Salt and pepper

Steps:

1. 

   The beer is boiling away nicely

   Put the beer in a pot on medium-high heat, and turn down the heat once it’s boiling. If the pot is about to overflow, move it off the heat for a bit. Let this boil off for 7-10 minutes. While a lot of recipes don’t boil the beer separately, I wanted a thicker sauce and when you’re cooking for someone who’s pregnant it doesn’t hurt to get it well-cooked! If you want a thinner sauce you can skip this step and mix the beer into the sauce in step 6.

2. While that’s boiling, chop up the green onions and mince the garlic.
3. Heat 2 tbsp of oil in another pot or saucepan on medium-high heat. After a few minutes add the green onions and garlic. Stir frequently for 3-5 minutes until the garlic starts to brown.
4. Add the mustard seeds and let them cook for a minute while you measure out the ketchup. If the mustard seeds start to jump out of the pot, you can add it in.
5. Add the ketchup to the pot (it might bubble up at first since it will heat up fast) along with 3 tbsp worcestershire sauce, 2 tbsp red wine vinegar, 1-2 tbsp chili powder.
6. 

   All the ingredients are mixed together and ready to simmer and thicken

   Once the beer has been boiling for 10 minutes (or if you didn’t boil it), add it to the pot and stir it in.

7. Simmer for 10 – 60 minutes on low heat, stirring a few times. BBQ sauce splashes a lot even on low heat so put a lid on it but leave a gap to let some steam out. After about an hour you’ll have a fairly thick sauce without much extra liquid. The liquid rises to the top when you aren’t stirring, so if there’s barely any liquid at the top you can take it off the heat.
8. Add a bit of salt and pepper to the finished sauce.

The finished sauce, still steaming and ready to use

I still love a barbecue sauce with strong flavors, but this was a surprising alternative that works out well and enhances a lot of meats.

This recipe is brought to you by The Foodha Blog.

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For a long time I wondered why I every burger I cooked had a funny taste, no matter what went in. Everything except the meat changed, and it didn’t make much of a difference. One day recently I put down the store-bought frozen patties and combined some helpful tips with a Mark Bittman recipe to make my own. After that experience I quickly decided I couldn’t eat one more of the over-seasoned boxed bricks when it’s so easy to cook homemade hamburgers.

A maple-smoked garlic pork burger

One of the things that kept me from trying it for so long was the fear or all the meat sliding through the grill and burning up. But homemade hamburgers aren’t as fragile as they look. When you work with raw ground meat it’s naturally sticky. I’ve spent many hours trying to separate ground beef when it’s cooking in a pan, so it will hold together if you let it. A few times I’ve tried homemade patties before and had trouble, probably because I tried to do too much to hold them together by adding ingredients and squeezing them as hard as I could.

You only need to try this once to get the hang of the basics. Then you can start trying different variations. Pork burgers are great (they finally put the “ham” in hamburgers) with a taste similar to ribs but jucier. These jerk turkey burgers are on my list too.

Mark Bittman’s book has another great suggestion. He prefers to take a whole cut of meat and grind it in a food processor so you know exactly what meat it is and what the fat content is. In the book he recommends something around 15-20% fat such as sirloin to get a good flavor. And if you start with a good enough piece of meat, you could cook your burgers rare to make them nice and juicy. I’ll be trying this as soon as I don’t have to cook for someone pregnant!

If you’re wondering how to make homemade hamburgers, here are a few tips:

• Start with about 2lb of meat to make 8-10 burgers, and season it with salt and pepper.
• Add in other ingredients such as onion, garlic, or spinach. These are completely optional since it tastes great with just seasoned meat.
• Mix the other ingredients into the meat gently then form it into loose disks.
• Avoid squeezing them so they stay nice and juicy.
• Press down on the middle of each disk with your finger to make a dent. If you’ve seen homemade burgers before they can start to look like a football when cooked. A good dent in the middle leaves you with a perfect flat burger.
• Pre-heat the grill on high for 10-15 minutes.
• Sear each side for a couple of minutes.
• If using barbecue sauce, add it once to each side once it’s cooked. Turn them over so the sauce can cook on each side if the burgers are holding together well.
• Don’t press down on the burgers while they’re cooking. That only helps if you want to squeeze out the juices and make a dry burger. If you want good grill marks you need to heat the grill well, not press the burgers. All you need to do is put them on the hot grill, watch, and turn them a couple of times. Who knew good cooking is so easy?
• Total length of cooking could be 4-6 minutes if you want rare and juicy burgers, or 10-12 minutes or more if you really want to get them cooked well and don’t mind a bit of dryness.
• You can grill buns after you take the burgers off, cover them with a plate or foil, and let them rest. Getting thrown on a hot grill is hard work!

Cooking homemade hamburgers

After doing this, going back to eating pre-made burgers would be as hard as going back to eating ants (that was a long time ago, ok? And it was only a couple of them). And having great burgers to work with makes other toppings even better, even some unusual ones like smoked salsa.

After all that grilling, if you want to stay outside to make dessert you can try some grilled pineapples too. Just make sure you scrub the grease and sauce off of that part of the grill first!

This post is brought to you by The Foodha Blog.

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With summer coming along now, everyone will naturally start talking about barbecuing. But what is there to be excited about? Too many people are subjected to tasteless food cooked by someone who’s not paying attention until it’s nice and leathery. I’m starting to think that some people get excited about barbecuing because they can’t cook anything more complicated!

Since I can operate a stove I don’t need to live on the deck, unlike the neighbors we once had who wouldn’t cook a meal inside if it was -40 degrees and there was a blizzard. (I’m not exaggerating. We saw it happen.) But recently we’ve had a couple of southern-style BBQ restaurants open around here and I got the chance to taste some really good “low and slow” food. I will never be a fanatic of the grill but if there’s a way to make good food I have to master it. With the strong flavors of good barbecue calling my name, I decided to learn more about it.

I’ve been experimenting with these steps and getting some great results with pork tenderloins and ribs and the occasional burgers:

1. Brining the meat. To do this you dissolve salt and sugar in water, and then soak the meat in it for 2 – 24 hours (refrigerated). You can also add other spices and flavoring like vinegars and make a bit of a marinade. I read that brining does two things: it helps get more flavor into the center of the meat, and it prevents it from drying out when you cook for a long time (even if you overcook it). I always wondered how you could grill meats for hours without removing all the moisture, and brining seems to help.

This can be overdone easily. The first time I added lots of ingredients and let it soak for 24 hours (with a pork tenderloin about 4 inches thick) and it was a bit too salty. Since then I’ve reduced the strength of the brine and used shorter times.

Some meats you can buy are already brined. They’re usually labeled “enhanced” or “seasoned” or have salt and water as ingredients. Sometimes these taste like rubber, but you don’t need to brine it again if it’s already been done.

2. Using a dry rub. After taking the meat out of the brine, rinsing it, and drying it off, the dry rub adds more flavors at the surface. Like the name says you sprinkle it over the meat and then rub it in well. These are easy to make. They usually have some combination of black pepper, salt, paprika, brown sugar, chili powder, and other spices.

3. Adding some wood chips to the barbecue. You can find these at Home Depot or Wal-Mart, and you don’t need a special barbecue, a charcoal grill, or a smoker to use them. Just make foil pouches with a few slits in the bottom and an open top, then put them on the grill or right between the burners if you can. They can take 5-10 minutes to start smoking. You get the best flavor if they’re directly under the food but you need to sprinkle some water on them if they actually start a fire or you’ll start to blacken your food fast.

My home-made smoke pouch hiding in our gas grill and helping with some pork burgers

4. Searing the outside of the meat on maximum heat. Since I learned to sear meats I try to do it any time I can. It just tastes better.

5. Turning down the heat and grilling indirectly (with the flame to the side of the meat). This is the low and slow part. With a temperature between 250-350 degrees F, you let the meat cook slowly. You can also add a drip pan under the meat to avoid fat fires.

6. Adding barbeque sauce once it gets to the right temperature and letting that cook onto the meat for a few minutes on each side.

No need to run to the store, just cook up some barbecue sauce the way you like it!

7. Taking the meat off, covering it up, and letting it rest 5-10 minutes so it retains the juices when you cut it.

This might be too much since I have a habit of doing too many things in one meal and making confused food. You could get great results using just a couple of these steps, but each of them adds its own piece to the food so I’ll keep trying different variations.

None of it is really that complicated and if you master them you’ll have something something to get excited about other than an easier way to turn out leathery bricks!

This post is brought to you by The Foodha Blog.

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