Hunting Season

Well I'm not much of a hunter myself. Pretty hypocritical given my tendancy to eat meat in all shapes and sizes! So with this lame introduction I present venison.

A good friend landed himself a deer the other day and provided me with a couple of venison loints. What to do what to do. Since I know that he know's his stuff (bleed out the deer correctly and so forth) I was confident that it wouldn't be too gamey.

I have a pile of blueberries left over from picking this summer so I started to think, why not dry rub and grill the loin, slice it up and serve it with a blueberry sauce. Being a little lazy and not having anything on hand to serve it with I decided to make it in too sandwiches using the home made pita bread I had made the night before.

Overall a winner I would say, like always lots of bold flavored and cooked as we like it!

Without further ado:

Venison Rub

- First salt the loin and let it come up to room temperature. What I mean by this is put an amount of salt on too it that you would put on to the meat if it was sitting in front of you on the table. I leave salt out of all my rubs to better control the component in the final taste. I let these loins come up to room temperature salted for about an hour.

- 2 Tablespoons Juniper Berries
- 1 Tablespoon Granulated Garlic
- 1 Tablespoon Granulated Onion
- 1 Tablespoon Thyme
- 1 Teaspoon Cumin
- 1 Chipotle Pepper Ground
- 1 Teaspoon Aleppo Pepper
- 1/2 Teaspoon Corriander

Toast the whole spices, grind together in a mortar and pestle or spice grinder and mix all the ingredients together.
Blueberry Sauce
1 Large White onion
4 Cloves Garlic
1.5 Cups Blueberries
1 Cup Blueberry WIne
1 Cup Red Wine
1 Cup Chicken Stock
Juice of 1 Lemon
1 Tablespoon Thyme

- Coarsley chop and sautee onion until soft, add chopped garlic for about a minute not allowing it to brown.
- Add blueberries and stir, let cook for about a minute, add wines and stock, bring to a boil and let simmer for at least 30 minutes, allowing to reduce as well - Take off the heat, puree with hand blender and add in lemon juice and stir in the thyme

Time to Eat!

Red Wine And Mushroom Hamburgers On Foccacia Bread

At the Canadian National BBQ Championships in Whistler this summer they held a hamburger competition with no restrictions. After much thought and a couple drams we came up with our solution. Our absolute favorite flavor with beef is red wine. Whether as a braise for short ribs or a sauce for tenderloin, we enjoy nothing more. This led us to the red wine burger. In order to keep with our braise flavors we thought we would add in onions and garlic, both of which are traditional. Then we spiked them with one of our favorite ingredients wild mushrooms! In this case we used chantrelles.

Now one of the most important aspects of a burger is the bun. Unfortunately, like a pizza crust, sometimes this aspect gets over looked. Not by us! We decided to make a loaf of foccacia bread, that we allowed to rise higher than normal, slice it in half and use it for the bun. We topped it with pecorino romano cheese, jalapeno's, and black olives.

Now the funny part of this whole experiment is that we never turned them in at the competition. We got a late start and ended up going for the chili and king of the grill competition instead. So we gave all of these wonderful burgers away to the crowd, not that they seemed to mind! We ended up with a real nice line up!

Anyways here is our method!

Red Wine and Mushroom Hamburgers

I make all my burgers into 1/2 pound burgers

5 Pounds of fresh ground sirloin tip
Loaf of fresh white bread
1 cup of red wine
3 cups of mushrooms diced
1 cup of onions
6 cloves garlic
Brie cheese (or any cheese)
Jarlsberg Cheese

- Grind the beef (or just use ground)
- Take the unsliced loaf of bread and rip the inside (leaving the crust) into small pieces pour the red wine into the mixture and mash with a fork. Do so until you have a saturated paste. (depending on the size of the loaf you may need a little more wine)
- Mix all of the ingredients aside from the cheeses with the paste and form the burgers, placing a piece of brie into the middle of each burger
- Top with Jarlsberg cheese and grill! (Although these we're done high heat on the Weber Smokey Mountain)
Foccacia

The base of this recipe came from Peter Rhineharts a Bread Bakers Apprentice. This is a truely excellent book that I would recomend to everyone.

2 1/2 C Unbleached bread flour
1 1/2 C Water room temp
1/4 t instant yeast

combine and ferment for three or four hours at room temp. You can use then or put in the fridge for up to three days. Make sure to take out at least an hour before you use it, if you do refridgerate it.

2 2/3 C bread flour
2 t salt
1 1/2 t instant yeast
6 T olive oil
3/4 C water lukewarm

Mix dry ingredients, add wet and first mix. form a ball. Knead the dough until it is smooth. This is a wet dough so it is easiest to do this with a wooden spoon and moving the bowl around (I personally do it by hand wetting my hands from time to time which serves two purposes, it keeps your hands clean and increases the doughs hydration). Or else just use a stand mixer. I do it by hand and it usually takes about 6 or 7 minutes of good kneeding. If using a stand mixer mix until the dough is about 80 degrees on an instant read thermometer.

Press into a rectangle and fold three ways like an envelope, flip seam side down. Do this every thirty minutes 5 times. Pour 1/4 cup or so of herb oil on a cookie sheet. Put the dough in cookie sheet covered with parchment and shape to size of the cookie sheet using only your finger tips. Also pour half of the herb oil on it. Let sit 2 hours. Then reshape with fingertips and add the remaining oil, cheeses and any other toppings (olives, jalapenos etc....). Heat oven to 500 F Put in pan and lower to 450. Bake 10 minutes rotate pan and bake 5 - 10 minutes more,

To make the herb oil take about 1/2 c of dried herbs ( I typically use herbes de provence with lavander) or a cup of fresh with 2 cups of olive oil heat in pan to no more than 100 degrees and let sit.

Smoked Tomato Soup With Homemade Crackers

Well the weather has taken a turn. The rain has set in for the winter which means it's time for some good warm food to bring a little pep back to our lives! To me that means soups and braises. Let's start with soup.

One of our favorite soups is tomato soup. When we have a pureed soup we always need crackers! So we got to thinking......And we came up with smoked tomato soup with smoked cheddar and cage aged gruyere crackers. We really enjoyed it so we thought why not share! (remember to keep the smoke mild, it should just add a nice compliment to the soup, not be the main attraction!)

Crackers
1 C Old Cheddar
1 C Gruyere (the better the quality of cheese the better the cracker will be!)

Smoke cheese with a mild wood (We used maple....temps about 100 degrees or under, smoke for an hour) We do all of our smoking on a Weber Smokey Mountain Cooker but any smoker will do!

- Grate cheese, mix with 1.5 cups Flour (Use a low protein flour), and a couple tablespoons of herbs (I used freeze dried chives).

- Mix with 1 cup of buter
- form into balls and squish on cookie sheet (We covered it with silplat)
- Sprinkle a coarse sea salt and smoked paprika on top
- Bake at 350 for 15 minutes or so

Tomato Soup
- 1/2 cup butter
- 3 onions

Dice onions and sweat on med heat with butter

- 6 cloves garlic

Add finely diced garlic for about a minute

- 2 Liters of homemade chicken stock (or a good store bought), or vegetable stock if you are looking for a vegetarian soup.
- 10 smoked roma tomato's (I smoke these at the same time as the cheese. The night before I cut them in half and soak in olive oil. I often add herbs to the marinade but not for the soup. In this case I added 1 C of fresh parmasean. I smoke them for one hour the same as the cheese)

- t Allspice
- Pinch sugar
- T red chili flakes

Put the tomato's with the chicken stock and spices in with the onion and garlic mixture, bring to a boil and simmer for an hour. Take off heat and add:

- 1/2 Cup fresh Thyme (mediteranean, less if using french)
- Salt and pepper

Mix with an immersion blender till a fine puree

Top each bowl with a cracker and serve

Team 58

Big surprise but Team 58 is a competitive bbq team. Our goal is to cook great food while fading into the background. We don't use big cookers, have no fancy tents and don't sell any products. We are simply about good food. The home base for The BBQ Team is Ucluelet BC on Vancouver Island but we have team members in Yorkton Saskatchewan, Calgary Alberta, Tofino BC, and San Jose California. While all competitions focus on traditional low and slow bbq (to a point) we are about foods, of all colors and all creeds! That is what this is all about!

2010 will be the first year for the new fancy team name. In the past we have competed under the name "At Least We Thought It Tasted Good". In 2009 we competed in the Western Canada BBQ Championship in Regina, The Canadian BBQ Championship in Whistler, and the BBQ on the Bypass in Langley.

Here is a picture of our set up in Regina, our fancy tarp was due to some rain at night!
Here is a picture of our cookers in Regina.
And finally a picture of our cookers in Langley.
Our goal is to compete using the simplest means possible! Our first year was much more sucesful than expected. Here's to a great 2010!

What this space will be used for is a few of our cooking endevours. Not that anyone cares!