Andrew Schloss - Fire It Up

Fire It Up

More Than 400 Recipes for Grilling Everything

BY ANDREW SCHLOSS AND DAVID JOACHIM

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALISON MIKSCH

Its been a joy to continue exploring the wide world of grilling. Since the fall of 2007 when we began working on this book, we have become indebted to dozens of people who helped us organize our ideas, develop and test recipes, and find oddball ingredients.

We would especially like to thank all of the local farmers, ranchers, and purveyors who provided ingredients. We grilled everything from T-bone steaks to beef cheeks to pork ribs to whole kid to hearts of palm, watermelon, and eggs. Thank you to Rod Wieder of Backyard Bison for bison chuck, sirloin, ribs, and steaks; Steve Shelly of Gottschell Farm for melons, beets, tomatoes, and carrots; Tom Colbaugh of Happy Farms for geese, chicken, and eggs; Chuck Armitage of Lettuce Alone Farm for Brussels sprouts, radicchio, and eggs; Don and George DeVault of Pheasant Hill Farm for fennel, asparagus, and fava beans; Nathan Thomas of Breakaway Farms for grass-fed beef and pastured pork and poultry; as well as the rest of the vendors at our local Emmaus Farmers Market for inspiring us to fire up the grill as we walk and talk through the market on Sunday afternoons.

Thanks also to Greg Baringer at nearby Baringer Brothers Meats for beef hearts, cheeks, petite shoulder tender, and other oddball cuts of beef and pork; Bill Steele at Mr. Bills Poultry for quail, duck, and other fine birds; Jim and Nicole Lechner at Goat World Farms for goat racks and whole kid; Jon and Sukey Jamison at Jamison Farm for all manner of lamb, including kidneys, liver, and heart; Terry Koch, the fish market manager at our local Wegmans for tracking down mackerel, opakapaka, and other fish when we needed it; and Mike and Jill Polek for the local venison. Other great purveyors around the United States provided quality ingredients, including venison, elk, and antelope from Broken Arrow Ranch, abalone from Estero Bay Abalone, and alligator tail from Viva Gourmet.

A special thank-you to Mark and Jennifer Bitterman of The Meadow for turning us on to salt blocks for grilling, and providing the most exciting array of artisan salts and rare peppers anywhere. Mark, thanks also for your inimitable contributions to Chef Salt, our line of artisanal spice rubs.

We spent months developing, testing, and refining recipes and would like to thank the many testers and tasters who cheerfully helped along the way, especially Debby and Ned Carol; Phil Schulman; Carol Moore; Catherine Ziff; Melissa Hunter; Dina Kunst; Dana, Ben, and Isaac Schloss; Karen Shain Schloss; Christine Bucher; August and Maddox Joachim; Chuck and Jennifer Weaver; Lora and Jacob Bucher; Barry, Dana, and Micah Bucher; Cathy, Ken, Tomias, Nick, and Tessa Peoples; Jill, Mike, Scott, and Brad Polek; Andrew and Kim Brubaker; Tom Aczel and Michelle Raes; Doug Ashby and Danielle Lubene; Bill Melcher; Mark Bowman; and Mark Taylor.

To capture the infinite variety of ingredients available to grill cooks, we shot the photographs in this book over several seasons. Big thanks to photographer Alison Miksch, photo assistant Jada Voigt, food stylist Michael Pedersen, assistant food stylists Donna Land and Sharon Sanders, and prop stylist Barb Fritz. Thanks also to Hopewell Farms for letting us photograph their cattle; Tom Colbaugh from Happy Farms for letting us photograph his lamb, chickens, and geese; and George Devault of Pheasant Hill Farm for allowing us to chase his pigs with a camera.

None of this would have been possible without our agent Lisa Ekus and our editor Bill LeBlond. Thank you both for guiding this project with wise insights from beginning to end. At Chronicle Books, thanks to Sarah Billingsley for expert editing; Anne Donnard for a stunningly simple design; Deborah Kops for incisive copyediting; Peter Perez and David Hawk for creative PR and marketing; and Doug Ogan, Ann Spradlin, Dean Burrell, and Tera Killip for publishing assistance throughout.

Finally, a big thank-you to Christine Bucher and Karen Shain Schloss for cheering instead of fainting in front of the endless parade of spit-roasting goats, bison ribs, football-size stuffed flank steaks, calf fries nailed to a plank, pork bellies, lardo, gator tails, whole rabbits, pheasant, goose, ostrich, raw tuna on red-hot coals, blue crabs, crawfish, abalone, conch, and all manner of animal organs, including calfs liver, veal sweetbreads, hog kidneys, and lambs tongue. A vegetarian was never so accommodating! But they both also enjoyed their share of grilled baby artichokes, beets, flame-kissed nopales and cardoons, whole grill-roasted Romanesco, fiddleheads, grilled poblano-stuffed tamales, cheese-filled panini, grilled banana satay, fruit pizzas, watermelon steaks, grilled figs, caramel smores, and grilled ice-cream sandwiches.

You both light our fires and we thank you for it.

American cooks have rediscovered the joy of good ingredients, simply prepared. Were clamoring for heirloom tomatoes, free-range chicken, and locally grown fingerlings. These days, its all about the ingredients. And thats the focus of this book. We explain the inner workings of more than 290 common and uncommon ingredients and the best ways to grill them. Weve combined Americas oldest cooking occasiongrilling outdoorswith its newest cooking obsession: preserving the integrity of high-quality ingredients.

The ins and outs of buying, preparing, and flavoring your favorite ingredients are explained throughout every chapter. To simplify these details, we created at-a-glance charts, which are master guides to everything you would ever want to grill. The charts show the ingredients different cuts or varieties, alternate names in the marketplace, best grilling methods, and substitutions.

Each chapter opens with a discussion of everything you need to know when buying, handling, and grilling the ingredient youre working with, including straight talk about terms such as wild, farm-raised, ranched, pastured, grass-fed, grain-fed, milk-fed, formula-fed, free-range, water-chilled, air-chilled, natural, organic, and sustainable.

A few other things youll notice are little tidbits scattered throughout the recipes called Know-How and Keep It Simple. Know-How gives you must-have information like how to butterfly flank steak, or clean an octopus, and it includes step-by-step illustrations when necessary. Keep It Simple shows you alternate ways of preparing recipes in less time, using fewer ingredients. We know that some cooks want to be grill masters and some just want dinner on the table. Tips throughout the book can help you accomplish both.

As devoted farmers-market and gourmet-market shoppers, we put a premium on high-quality ingredients. We also know that some ingredients, like beef cheeks, can be hard to find. We offer tips throughout the recipes on sourcing oddball ingredients.

We hope this book shows you a different way of looking at grilled food. Although the ingredient is the star, and not the grill, we dont leave grilling novices hanging out to dry. : How to Build Flavor into Anything Grilled, discusses all manner of marinades, brines, mops, rubs, pastes, and sauces, with 161 mini-recipes and variations, which you can use in the books recipes or in your own creations. The goal in all this is to help you grill every food imaginable, and do it successfully. Grilling can be about so much more than hot dogs and hamburgers. Heres wishing you newfound joy at the grill and the deepest pleasure possible from every dish you share at your table.