It has now been almost a month since I fixed the auger on my pellet grill and I am back in love with that thing. I have been cooking most of our lunches during the week for Baby A and me and then on Saturday and Sunday I made dinner out there. I have figure out some new things to do to protect the auger from having the same thing happen again. First off, I burn off all the pellets in the auger after each grill and it would seem like I am wasting them, but I have learned to time things just right.
Most weekdays, I am just cooking two pieces of meat, so I go out and dump enough pellets to fill maybe a third of the hopper and turn it on. I have to wait about ten minutes for the pellets to make their way to the burn box and heat up the grill, on low, it gets to about 380 degrees. This is plenty hot to sear the meat, but I usually start by placing the meat on the upper most rack for about five minutes on each side. This gets the meat cooking, and as we approach 12:30pm, BabyA's lunch hour, I will then put the meat on the grill right above the heat. This would probably burn the meat if I did it for 4-5 minutes, it gets the job of searing done within 1-2 minutes, I then flip the meat and wait another 2 minutes and call it done. By the time, I start searing the meat, I open the hopper bottom and the extra pellets fall back into the container that holds them for storage. The sear is done with the pellets that are clearing out of the tube. If I time it right, I can then turn the knob over to "off", where it starts a clean cycle which burns off any remaining pellets in the burn box, and then turns itself off. I am careful to monitor the ash afterwards and make sure it falls through and out of the burn box.
Saturday, I made some lamb steaks (I believe they were the T-bone but from lambs, little tiny snack sizes), some sirloin which was oh so great, and sausages. These cooked for maybe twenty minutes and it was ready. Sunday, we made fajitas, chicken thighs and sausages. I cut everything up for tacos and mixed the meat up since we didn't buy as many beef fajitas as we thought we did. Still, we were left with a big container for a couple of meals during the week. I guess I don't have to defrost meat tonight for tomorrow. Sam's, which we hadn't been going to much lately, because of Covid-19, has some beautiful cuts of meat, you can see the butcher area right there, so the meat is cut and put out right there. The sirloins we cooked were a great find at $6.98/pound. I noticed that the packages were crazy expensive, like $45.00 and up. When I read the label, they were wrong, ribeyes had a sign going for $13.98 and these steaks said they were ribeyes and priced at the higher price. I mentioned it to one of the butchers and he corrected it, bringing the pack down more than half what was marked on it. Sometimes it helps to look at fine details. We will be buying more of our meat from there, it is all much nicer looking and the taste of both the lamb and the sirloins was just too good. I thank Boy mostly, for coming up with the idea and making it happen, this has been a great gift.
WEEKDAY MEALS:
Chuck-eye steak (called the poor man's ribeye, but one of the best meals I have ever eaten)
WEEKEND MEALS
I am staying very basic, brisket and sausage (grass fed is the worst, even if it is the priciest, USDA choice and USDA prime are both great).
No comments:
Post a Comment