The post Tons Of New BBQ Products In The Store appeared first on .

I don’t know if it’s good or bad. Our wallets suggest it’s bad – winning a few bucks here and there would be nice. On the other hand, our taste buds and guests aren’t so sure. On contest weekends, most of our guests would rather come out Friday for a relaxing dinner, a few beers, and in the case of the American Royal, crimes against nature. That’s because unlike competition barbecuers, most people prefer to spend their Saturdays doing something other than stressing out while arguing over which overcooked rack of ribs is least likely to disintegrate when a knife touches it or whether or not someone mistook salt for sugar in the brisket rub. “It tastes like salted horse. It’s like something 18th century sailors would take on a voyage around Cape Horn because of it’s preservative qualities.” So maybe it’s good that our best food sometimes shows up on Friday night. But still.

We’ve done it forever, too. At a contest in Marshall, Mo. back in the ’90s, I made a pot of jambalaya with stock made from crawdad heads that was just spectacular. Then everything I touched Saturday turned to crap. Through the years, we’ve had Friday night dinners featuring pork loin stuffed with jalapeno poppers, Thai satay chicken, barbecued baloney, award-winning chili, and tempura fried bacon that still makes me weep when I think about it. These were awesome dishes that were followed the next day with steaming piles of sadness. Like if Springsteen closed the first set with Thunder Road, then covered Friday as an encore.

So guess what happened at the North Kansas City Rotary Club contest last month?

The contest was on Snake Saturday, NKC’s annual Irish celebration the Saturday before St. Patrick’s Day.  I thought it’d be proper for the occasion to cook something Friday with at least a little Celt in it, so I came up with an inverted cottage pie – basically a pork loin roulade with cottage pie-like stuffing.

So I brined a half pork loin the night before. Pork loin has all the moisture of a dirt clod and half the flavor, so I brine, usually with a concoction of about two quarts of water, ¾ cup of sugar, ¾ cup kosher salt, and whatever looks good. For this one, I tossed in some black pepper, a lot of garlic and a couple bay leaves. There may have been some allspice in there, and probably some beer, because there’s always beer.

I brined it overnight, and then carved it out flat to stuff and roll. If you haven’t done this, just start carving it open on one side and kind of roll it out as you cut. I’d post a video, but I’m not that technologically advanced. Anyway, it’s actually pretty easy once you’ve done it a couple times. It also helps to have a knife that’s sharper than a cinderblock. Mine are not, but BBQFansKC.com loaned me a 10” Forschner, saving both the pork lion and my digits.

I laid it out flat and seasoned it liberally (liberal is always better than conservative) with a Montreal-style steak seasoning. I didn’t use a pork barbecue rub because this ain’t barbecue. It’s cottage pie. Different flavors.

Next, I put on a layer of mashed cheesy potatoes. Nothing out of the ordinary – just potatoes mashed with plenty of butter, cheese and roasted garlic. The layer was about half an inch thick – maybe a little thicker.

I then sprinkled a little extra shredded cheddar on top of the taters, because more cheese is always a good thing. Always. (I know what you’re thinking, and that’s funny, but wrong)  Then came the veggies. Remember, this is supposed to be a cottage pie, so I mixed:

• 8-10 ounces of frozen vegetables (corn, peas, carrots, green beans)
• Half a medium onion, chopped and caramelized
• One jar of pork gravy (I’d have used beef gravy so it’d have been more cottage pie-like, but a psychotic old lady in the aisle wouldn’t get out of the way. Seriously. I was lucky I got out of there with the pork gravy and my life)
• Two heaping tablespoons of Boetje’s mustard (it’s this grainy brown Dutch-style stuff. People love it. I do not. It’s weird. And I’m not Dutch. But it was perfect in this recipe.)

I mixed all of that up and spread it evenly over the layer of potatoes. Then came the fun part: roll it up. With help from BBQFans’ Nate Teeter, I rolled it up and secured it with a Stainless Steel Food Loop Flame by Fusionbrands. Screw butcher’s twine – these little buggers are much cooler. And easier – you don’t have to pretend you know all those fancy butcher’s knots. Just clip ‘em on. And they’re dishwasher safe. Everything should be dishwasher safe, from gadgets and tools to pets and human offspring. (Side note: could you use the dishwasher to sous vide? Note to self: get some fish, lemons, Foodsaver bags and be ready to call a plumber.)

Anyway, we threw that sucker on the Fast Eddy by Cookshack at 350 degrees for about six hours. Of course, it was done several hours earlier, but I kind of forgot. The thing is, even though it got up to about 180 degrees (160 would have been more than high enough), it was still excellent. Moist, loads of flavor, and kind of cool to look at.  Still, if you make one, take it off sooner than I did.

So that was Friday.  Another great meal. Then came Saturday. Another great fail.

Actually, that’s not true. Al’s chicken came in 12th out of 104 teams, and his ribs finished 13th, even though I tried to get him to ruin them. My pork – the same recipe that did so well last year – came in 39th. It wasn’t done enough. And if the judges thought that pork was undercooked, hooboy! The brisket was just downright embarrassing. It was like biting into a bungee cord. A bungee cord with too much pepper on it. Brisket came in 92nd.

It had happened again. Great food Friday night, a rubbery mess on Saturday. I blame the weather, maybe. I’d like to say it was like batting in baseball. Friday is like practicing in the batting cage – you think about what you’re doing and make adjustments. Saturday is the game, when you don’t think – you have to react on instinct. I’d like to say that’s what I did wrong (it sounds cool), but I can’t because I oughta be making adjustments the entire time we’re at the contest, from when the meat gets rubbed to the moment it’s handed to the judges. At NKC, I just struck out on Saturday.

So what’s the solution? I don’t know. But until I figure it out, I’ll embrace the masterpieces, polish the turds, and search for that jambalaya recipe.

–Pat McSparin, Gremlin Grill

The post TGIF? appeared first on .

You see, about 20 years ago, producing competition-grade barbecue was a challenge. A newbie couldn’t go online, buy a pit, plug it in and set the temperature. You had to carve your own smoker out of solid rock mined from a cave protected by flesh eating trolls, or at least buy a Brinkmann Smoke’n Grill, which was only slightly more efficient.

And thermometers for those pits? No, no, no. Back in the day, you gauged the temperature inside the smoker by kissing the grates. It was all about love, baby. If your lips blistered immediately, you cut the fire down and called an ambulance. Oh, that Brinkmann had a thermometer in the dome, but its only reading was “How the hell would I know?”

As crazy as it sounds, wood came from trees back then. I mean directly from trees, without stopping in a facility to be ground-up, compressed and bagged. Well, a few people used old pallets for smoke, but for most of us, getting wood for the smoker meant hiring a Lakota scout and wandering out into the woods with a chain saw, a pouch of Johnny cakes, three days supply of water and your wits. Then you’d cut hickory, which was slightly harder than the solid rock you mined to build your pit. And cherry was considered exotic, although a guy at the American Royal once told us, “I use hedge. I can get it up to 800 degrees in half an hour.” I’m not sure if he was smoking brisket or smelting ore. I hope the judges could tell.

Then there’s dry rubs. They didn’t always come in big plastic jars, you know. Years ago, you had to actually buy a whole bunch of little plastic jars and then mix the contents. Sounds difficult, I know, but as long as you had a recipe, you were fine, right? Not so fast, smart guy. Rub recipes were few and far between back then. BBQ Fans has buttloads (yes, buttloads) of stuff written by everyone from Steve “Mr. Excitement” Raichlen to notes I scribbled on the back of a paper towel while I was eating their Slabs Stephy Style seasoned peanuts. The only barbecue cookbooks that existed years ago were from Betty Crocker and the Kansas City Barbecue Society Cookbook (which didn’t just help members make a profit, but actually taught people how to cook). You created your own rubs.

And it goes without saying that you had to make your own sauces. There were a few local brands, and you could use Open Pit or Kraft. Or you could take the seasoning pouches from a few dozen boxes of barbecue-flavored Shake-n-Bake and just add water or schmaltz or something, but that’s not how most people did it. Most people started with about forty gallons of ketchup, fifteen pounds of brown sugar and enough hot sauce to melt all the lake effect snow in Buffalo. You’d fire up the stove, dump those basics in a pot with about $400 worth of other ingredients, and then trash the kitchen experimenting. If you were lucky, you’d have a tolerable sauce when you were done. But most people weren’t lucky. Most people just wound up broke and freckled with little barbecue sauce burn marks on their arms, face and kitchen cabinets.

So, once you had your smoker built, wood cut, and rubs and sauces created, you’re ready to barbecue. Well, you would need to know some techniques. But unlike the smoker, rub, wood, etc., learning the techniques was easy. Because that was a time when rather than trying to make money by answering new barbecuers’ questions, you just gave them the answers for free. Out of your love for the craft of barbecuing, you’d tell people how to do it and not charge them a dime. Crazy, I know.

And here we are. Years ago, the barbecue monkeys started hammering on their keyboards write the Hamlet of barbecue. But unlike the typewriter monkeys, these monkeys didn’t settle for random luck and patience. They developed ideas (and stole good ones from each other), invested heavily, wrote down what they were doing, and evolved. Today, any monkey – we don’t need an infinite number – any one monkey can create great barbecue, and he doesn’t need an infinite amount of time to get it done.

You don’t think so? Do this: go to the Kansas City BBQ Fans store. Buy a smoker and fuel, a thermometer, a bottle of sauce and a jar of rub. Now buy a pork butt. Rub the butt liberally with the dry rub. Fire the smoker up to 240 degrees.  Smoke the butt at that temp until it’s 190 degrees. Pull it off the smoker, let it sit for half an hour, throw some sauce on it, then eat it. It’ll be excellent. Oh, there are a few competition tricks out there, but even monkeys don’t need tricks to create excellent barbecue. And that’s the way it should be. That was the point of all this barbecue society stuff in the first place – to teach everyone what great barbecue is, and to make it easy enough that everyone can do it. We’re there.

–Pat McSparin

Gremlin Grill

The post Monkey See, Monkey Smoke appeared first on .

If we can fill one of the Harvesters collection drum to the top we’ll raffle off a MAVERICK ET-73 Redi Chek Remote Smoker Thermometer. There’s no need to be present to win but we’d really like to go back to Kookers Kare with a full drum to show our commitment to their effort.

<a href=”http://www.kookerskare.com/”>Kookers Kare </a>Inc.(501(c)(3)) is a group of charitable volunteers aiding those in need! Theyprovide freshly cooked and non-perishable food to food pantries such as the <a href=”http://www.harvesters.org/”>Harvesters Food Network</a>. We are also an integral part of the Kansas City Barbeque Society.

Their mission is to serve as a beacon of hope to end hunger in the Kansas City Community by providing food assistance through fun, laughter, and a lot of smoke.

The post BBQ Fans Partners With Kookers Kare appeared first on .

Here is a brief schedule of the day’s events:

9:00am

• Pork Prep

• Brisket Prep

Approximately 10:30am

• Brisket wrap, and burnt ends demo & on the grill

11:00am Tailgate Chow-Down officially begins…

• Pulled Pork Sandwiches

• Brisket Sandwiches

• Beans & Slaw

• Tortilla Chips & Spinach Rotel Dip

Pork On The Kamado!

11:30 Mizzou vs. KU Game Kick-Off

• Pork Pulling Demo(bear claws)

1:00pm Halftime

• 1st Drawing for Mizzou or KU Gift Basket

We will have drawings throughout the afternoon and specials all day long! Hope to see you all there!

The post BBQ Fans Saturday Bash… appeared first on .

BBQ Fans has put together a BBQ gift registry. Just stop in our store, scan the items that you like and then your significant other can get your list and decide from there.

Unable to make it into the store? We have you covered there as well. Click Here to create an account at  and add items to your “Wishlist”. Then items can be bought online or they can stop in and print out the list here.

Lastly, don’t forget that we offer FREE SHIPPING to the KC Metro area and $4.99 flat-rate shipping to the rest of the contiguous united states.

The post BBQ Fans Gift Registry appeared first on .

The tailgate party starts at 9 am with donuts, coffee (or bring your own beer if that’s your breakfast of choice) and a pork butt prep demonstration by Gremlin Grill competition barbecue team. Then, we’ll be grilling, barbecuing and BS’ing all day.

• Traeger, Kamado Joe,  and Medina River grill and smoker demonstrations
• Sauce and dry rub samples
• Chicken and pulled pork samples
• Chips, dip and tailgate tips
• Product specials throughout the store
• Mizzou and Kansas BBQ merchandise drawing after the game

This is a great chance to pick the brains of an “old school” KCBS barbecue team. Gremlin Grill has been cooking competitions since 1994 – NFL announcer and Hall of Famer John Madden called their recipes his favorites in his 1998 book Ultimate Tailgating. Steal a few barbecue and tailgate secrets from them, or just tell them what they’re doing wrong.

Saturday, November 27

BBQ Fans
312 E. US Highway 69
Kansas City, MO 64119

Questions? Give us a call at 816-326-7122

The post BBQ Fans Grand Opening Party! appeared first on .