A few weeks ago, I’d been running around craving pizza ALL FRIGGIN DAY, but the thought of an overloaded pie with an underdone crust disgusted me more than usual, enough to defeat my sloth even. Solution? Grill it up son! I started doing this last year, after grilling flat bread and using that as a crust. Pretty good, but not actual pizza, per se.Homemade pizza dough is just too much trouble for the payoff, except for those few souls who are absolutely committed to perfecting it. I eventually found that some pizza places are willing to sell you balls of their pizza dough, which makes the process a whole lot simpler. My go-to spot is Angelo’s in Hampden, where a large dough ball is $3.50 (they also make a very good [UPDATE: The quality of Angelo's cheeseteaks has taken a brutal nosedive! Dry meat and not a lot of it... So bad I thought it must have been anomolous just a few days ago, but conversations with other fans confirm that for now, Angelo's has officially fallen off, as the kids used to say], if not very Philly-esque, cheesesteak). [UPDATE: Frozen dough balls are less than 2 bucks, work just as well, and can be found at most area Italian delis and many plain old supermarkets]

This size ball is good for two large thin-crust pizzas, and the dough keeps incredibly well, more than a week no problem:

After starting your charcoal get the toppings ready – we used some dry salami, arugula, fresh mozzarella, smoked mushrooms, roasted pepper, and a can of chopped tomatoes:

To roast the pepper, place it directly on the coals, wait til the down side chars, and turn. I generally use hardwood, not briquettes for grilling, but this was spur of the moment. Was that a douchebaggy thing to say? :

While this is happening, get some smoke into the mushrooms and soften the onion [UPDATE: It's a much better idea to saute some moisture out of the onions and mushrooms first. This seems to help smoke absorption while mor importantly preventing excess moisture from making the crust soggy.]

Season up the greens and shrooms, I used oil, lemon juice, and salt:

When the toppings are ready, prepare the dough by cutting the ball in half, and gently stretching the dough over a cutting board 11/17:

Brush with olive oil and add and pepper:

Carefully transfer to your hot grill, oiled-side down, then salt, pepper and oil the up side. When bubbles appear, it’s time to flip:

Then add toppings:

Add a small chunk of wood and close the lid. [UPDATE: Protip- move the pizza off  of directheat after about 3 minutes. Then inspect the bottom and rotate underdone areas back onto direct heat as necessary, closing the lid between adustments] 8 minutes later, dinner time. Easy as pie, no? (Disclaimer: pie is NOT in fact, easy). Note to be more careful than when removing your pizza from the grill:

Before things get too crazy, I believe introductions are in order. I’m a 30-something guy living in Baltimore who started cooking for real mainly to impress girls. (Fellas – remember not to set the bar too high on the first meal!) The neighborhood I live in has only one small grocery store within easy walking distance and I don’t own a car. Plus, I’m pretty lazy. Consequently, I often have to make do with a painfully limited selection of items for my culinary adventures. On the plus side, this lack of choice forces a bit of creativity to stave off boredom and/or full blown Five Guys addiction. By no means do I think of myself a master chef, I routinely “discover” basic herbs like they were the dead sea scrolls and use them with reckless abandon for weeks at a time, but I’ve made some things that I am pretty proud of, and I am always learning. Of course, I would like to use nothing but the freshest and highest quality ingredients, but due to the aforementioned lack of options and laziness, plus an occasional bout of penny-pinching, I sometimes cut a corner or two.

Henry has graciously allowed me to post chronicles of my triumphs and failures in the kitchen. I would have liked to present these feats as normal recipes with a nice bulleted list of ingredients and such, but unfortunately, I am terrible with measurements because I never use them. I season and cook by eye and by feel, so any attempt by me to assign units of measurement to anything that I’ve made would most likely end up in disaster. Also, I usually drink when I cook, so I can never remember exactly how much of what I put into any given dish. Every meal is an adventure!

One day at work, where these things usually happen, I decided out of the blue that I was going to attempt some sort of pasta bake with my brand new Pyrex baking dish. I did a little research online to get the general idea of the standard cooking times, techniques, ingredients, etc., and stopped by the store on my way home.

Foolishly eschewing a list, and thereby almost certainly guaranteeing that I would forget something important, I gathered my ingredients with well-honed market-ninja skills. In no particular order, I picked up a medium yellow onion, a large green pepper, garlic, a large can of crushed tomatoes, sausage, and cheese. The idea had previously occurred to me to put one layer of sausage and one layer of pepperoni in the pasta bake, but all such thoughts were washed away when I saw the package of prosciutto ham glowing among its lesser deli meat brethren. That’s right, shit was about to get fancy! Everything else I needed I already had at home.

After some liquid courage to get me through this daunting new cooking challenge, I prepped everything that needed chopping, preheated the oven to 350 degrees, set a large skillet to medium heat, and put a pot of salted water on to boil.

First step was to brown up the sausage in the skillet. My local Italian sausage options are limited, so I ended up using a classic orange tube of Eskay pork sausage. I picked up the hot variety, partially because I always like a little kick, but mostly because I am always working to covertly build up my girlfriend’s tolerance for spicy foods. When the sausage was just browned, out went the fat into the special “sausage/bacon grease that I’ll probably never use for anything because there are little sausage bits in it and that is gross” coffee can that I keep in the fridge.

Next to join the sausage in the pan was the can of crushed tomatoes, about half a cup of olive oil, five or so cloves of minced garlic, the whole diced onion, half the diced green pepper, salt, pepper, Italian seasoning (oregano and thyme), sugar (just a shake), and red pepper flakes (amount depending on desired spiciness level). I let this simmer at medium heat, occasionally stirring and tasting, and adding more of this or that as necessary while I prepared the pasta.

I used whatever pasta I had at home, which happened to be egg noodles and thin spaghetti. It was kind of a weird combination for something like this, but they did the job. While the sauce and meat mixture simmered, I cooked the noodles per the instructions. The spaghetti took a little longer for al dente so it went in first.

When the pasta was ready, the tomato and sausage mixture had been simmering for about 20 minutes. Ideally, I would have liked to let it cook out for much longer, like I would if I was making spaghetti sauce, but I was getting pretty goddam hungry. I spread the cooked pasta on the bottom of the baking dish as the first layer. In retrospect, I should have mixed the pasta and sauce mix together before adding both to the pan. Instead, I added the sauce mix over the noodle layer. Unfortunately, this created patches of dried up noodles on the bottom where the sauce didn’t settle through during baking.

With the base layers down, next came a layer of cheese. I used the Sargento Italian Cheese Blend, which consists of shredded mozzarella, provolone, asiago, romano, fontina, and parmesan. It took almost the whole package to cover the entire dish.

Next up: the big guns! I can’t attest to the quality of the prosciutto brand that I used because I am far from a connoisseur, but I thought it was quite tasty. The lovely strips of meat went on top of the cheese layer as shown below.

Finally, I covered the prosciutto with the rest of the cheese and a sprinkling of Italian-style bread crumbs, just because it seemed like the right thing to do.

To cover or not to cover? I couldn’t find a majority consensus online. This quickly proved to be a moot point because I discovered that my list-snubbing ways had caused me to forget the aluminum foil. The matter settled, I popped the whole thing into the over for about 20 minutes. When it was ready, the top was nicely brown and the cheese was bubbling.

The results? Not too shabby! I was pretty happy with how it turned out, and there were no complaints from the little lady. Good thing, because I made enough to live on for a week. Thanks to my lack of foil, I had to cram the leftovers into multiple square Gladware containers.

How it could have been better: I thought the sauce was a little bland. This I attribute to the short cooking time before I added it to the bake. Also, I would have liked the sauce to be a little saucier, I may need to add more liquid next time. Finally, more meat! That tube of sausage was stretched a little thin when spread around the whole dish. Maybe that additional layer of pepperoni shouldn’t have been omitted after all….

I definitely considered this dish a success for a first try. Next time, allotting more time for the sauce, adding a bit more substance, and using a more traditional pasta should really smooth out the rough edges. Any comments or suggestions are welcome.

God I suck at the interweb. To compound my general aversion to perform web related tasks, I am apparently emitting some sort of EM field that causes computing devices to keel over and die. Anyway, this week Citypaper ran my pastrami article, of course drastically edited down for space. Here’s a taste (nyuk):

If you live in Baltimore, you eventually resign yourself to the fact that certain food joneses just aren’t going to get resolved. That’s why it pays to have transplant friends, who you can wheedle into being grub mules when they visit home. So thanks, Reuben, for taking the train all the way to New York to get pastrami from Katz’s, and then not eating it on the train ride back here.

The pinnacle of pastrami artistry for me is Katz’s in New York. Theirs is really transcendent – smoky, spicy, tender yet with a compact grain, well-lubricated with rendered fat and hewn by hand into thick slabs. But it’s $24/lb. not including the 8 hours travel time, and the grub mule (my term for friends that bring me food during their travels) system is unreliable. I once considered pastrami too holy, too mystical, too difficult for one as lowly (and lazy) as I to attempt. But emboldened by a string of smoked/cured meat successes last year (due in no small part to acquiring a massive Tiernan “Son of Brisket” smoker), I decided to suck it up and give it a go.

Two factors needed to be addressed initially, the cut of beef and the curing process. I searched high and low for the so-called plate cuts, i.e. navel plate or pastrami cut, favored by hardcore enthusiasts for higher fat content. Wasserman’s kosher butcher on Reisterstown could get some special order, but the price I was quoted – $7.99/lb. – convinced me to stick with the more readily available brisket.

Butchers usually carry fresh brisket, with the dependable JA Regan in lexington market on the low price end with $3.79/lb and Whole Foods/Cierello’s/Eddie’s on the high end at 5.99. Yet again, Amish butcher guy was the best solution to my meat quandaries, with his grass-fed local brisket priced at $4.39. Be wary of prepackaged supermarket briskets, since they are almost always pre-brined with a nitrite solution, that typically accounts for a fifth of total weight.

As far as cuts, generally the “first cut” of flat brisket is what is most readily available. This is the typical flat, rectangular cut with a cap of fat on top. Preferable is a whole brisket, which is the flat with the cap or “deckel” attached. This piece of beef is very savory and has great texture – some feel it’s the best cut of the cow outright. Then there is the point cut brisket, which comes from further up (towards the head) of the cow, and generally includes both cap and flat, and is more irregularly shaped. Some pre-packaged briskets use this cut, which has more fat than a flat cut. I also believe grass-fed to be particularly tasty for brisket.

Anyways, here is the full, uncut, overly long pastrami project, with lots of pretty pictures of meat. Enjoy!

Two whole briskets from my trusty Amish butcher:

This is the meat cure available at Bass Pro Shops. It’s actually sodium nitrite, as opposed to nitrate, but really these produce the same result – a brief explanation:

The brine, with kosher salt added until a raw egg floats (about 12 cup for 1 gallon):

Flavoring agents, in this case bay leaves, pepper, coriander, garlic, and thyme:

This is the traditional wet cure, which was injected once a day:

This is the wet cure under vacuum, using a standard home model Foodsaver:

(Note that the vacuum must be in a rigid container, otherwise it’s not a vacuum at all, as far as atmospheric pressure)

Injecting the beef (nudge nudge wink wink):

This is a pre-packaged brisket – you can kinda see how the grain is ‘looser’, perhaps due to the inclusion of papaicin, a fruit-derivied enzyme that breaks down portein, as a tenderizer:

The label – as you can see, much cheaper than fresh brisket, but then about of a 1/4 of the weight is simply added water:

Curing beef array – must be a band’s name somewhere:

After curing, the briskets are purged in fresh water to remove excess salts:

Aromatic spice coating:

Dry cure on the left, wet on the right – big difference in color:

A rather homespun solution for weighing the meat down before cooking:

Into the maw of my Tiernan smoker:

(Note the strips of fat on top of the meat – this is a trick I started using on smoked brisket last year. Instead of leaving a thick cap of fat on the meat, I trim it and then use the fat to self – baste. Since the meat surface is exposed, it gets more smoke and browning, while still retaining the benefit of increased moisture from the rendering fat, which I reposition periodically.)

Hour 1:

Hour 3, about the upper limit for smoke ‘absorption’ for beef:

A few river rocks for lift:

Meat in the steamer:

Here is the unsmoked brisket, sitting atop some crumpled foil:

The unsmoked after 3.5 hours:

The smoked after about 4 hours:

A sampling plate of 5 homemade, Katz’s, and Attman’s pastramied beef:

Deep concentration:

Some pastrami portraits, first the great Katz’s:

Attman’s:

And my own Dry/Smoked:

I use a modified version of the popular and widely cited “Senator Mikulski Recipe”, which in turn closely resembles the recipe printed on Old Bay Seasoning cans. Oddly, there used to be an original, slightly different Mikulski recipe, published in the “Maryland Way” cookbook, but I can’t seem to locate it. They all share the most common seasoning component: mustard. I’ve found Dijon adds unnecessary complexity, and dry mustard lacks the balancing acid component of prepared yellow, which I prefer.

My recipe yields a pretty loose mixture that’s a bit difficult to work with, so I’ve developed some extra steps designed to bolster cake structural integrity. I highly recommend frying over broiling, since broiling seems to lead to dryer, blander crab cakes at home. Depending on the output of your stove, you may need to adjust burner strength or broiler distance, so note any deficiencies and adjust accordingly the next time.

The full, super-long crab cake article

1 lb. jumbo lump crab meat (domestic > imported)

1 tsp. yellow mustard

1 egg

1 ½ slices Wonder bread (or any soft commercial white bread)

2 tbs. mayonnaise (use light or fat free at your own peril)

2 tsp. Old Bay

1 small dash Worcestershire sauce

A little milk

Optional: a little ground white pepper, no more than 1 tsp. chopped parsley*

1. Open and invert the container of meat onto a cutting board and tap firmly, releasing the meat. This minimizes potentially harmful handling. You’ll be left with a container-shaped mound of meat, a la canned cranberry sauce.

2. Very gently separate the meat, making every effort to keep lumps and lump clusters intact, and look for shell pieces (discard). Each individual lump need not be separated, just do a cursory inspection.

3. Gently transfer meat to a large mixing bowl. Using a knife, scrape any residual meat and liquid into the bowl as well. Sprinkle ½ of the Old Bay onto the meat and fold, using your hand to scoop from the bottom of the bowl and lifting, gently mixing in a vertical motion t(fig. 1).

4. Tear or cut bread, including crusts, into small pieces, about 1” square. In a small bowl, combine bread with enough milk to soak.

5. In yet another bowl, thoroughly mix the egg, mustard, mayonnaise, Worcestershire, remaining Old Bay, white pepper and parsley.

6. Squeeze excess milk from bread pieces and add them to egg mixture. Taste for seasoning, add salt or Old Bay as necessary. A little raw egg won’t kill you, but if you must, nuke a small bit for 30 seconds, then taste.

7. Pour the mixture over the crab meat, and fold to incorporate. Try to be thorough, but be extra careful not to break up the lumps. Go slow.

8. If the crab cake mixture is very pretty loose, cover the bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate for about 20 minutes to tighten it up.

a) To fry, carefully shape into 4 flat cakes (I’ve found the shape and size should correspond closely to that of a White Castle slider, if that helps). If they aren’t keeping their shape well, place the cakes in pairs on a piece of plastic wrap (fig. 2), then wrap securely. Go to step 9.

b) If broiling, then shape into 4 cakes, place on a plate, and cover, and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes. Go to step 12.

9. Refrigerate for at least another half hour, turning them over once halfway through. This helps flatten both sides of the cakes.

10. Heat a nonstick or well-seasoned cast iron pan (doesn’t seem to make a difference) to medium-low, and add either butter or a neutral-flavored oil like canola or safflower. Do not use olive oil. Unwrap the cakes and slide them into the pan, two at a time (a crowded pan makes flipping more difficult).

11. Fry uncovered until a brown crust has formed, then carefully and slowly flip (leaving them uncovered helps the cakes to self-heal if damaged during flipping). If the cakes break, gather them back together and knock on wood. When the second side is browned sufficiently, remove to a plate. End.

12. To broil, carefully transfer the cakes to an oven-safe pan or baking sheet, and place on oven rack fitted to the highest rung (i.e. closest to top). Keep the oven door open and broil until browned, turning the cakes to allow for even cooking. If you have an oven-safe pan, you can lightly fry the cakes (just the bottoms) before broiling them, thus achieving more complete browning. Endif.

* I recommend using curly instead of the more intensely flavored flat-leaf. It’s hard to use an entire bunch of parsley before it goes bad, so try the following:

Curly parsley is generally grit-free, but if you get a dirty bunch, rinse under running water. Remove as much stem as possible from the parsley by either cutting with a knife or pulling the tops off by hand.

Chop the leaves finely. Place in the center of a clean kitchen towel, then grasp the corners and gather the parsley into a ball. Twist the ends of the towel so the bal gets tighter and tighter, and eventually you will squeeze water out of the parsley. When you’ve squeezed the parsley relatively dry, fluff it up a bit and place in a lidded container. It’ll keep a whole lot longer this way.