Smoked Turkey Wild Rice Soup

I should really work on my photography skills. Also food styling skills because those green onions are a sad, sad garnish. It may not be the most appealing visually, but I promise it is worth every second it takes to make. I love soup. Basically all of them, and this is probably my favorite. Earlier in the week I smoked a whole turkey and had the leftover carcass to work with, but it is as delicious with a roasted turkey or chicken. Just do whatever you need to do to eat this soup. I seriously ate it for two meals one day.

6 tbsp butter
1 large chopped onion
3 stalks of chopped celery
3 chopped carrots
6 qts poultry stock
1 1\2 tsp dried thyme
1 tbsp salt
1tsp ground pepper
1/4 C flour
1 C uncooked wild rice
3 C water or stock
1 C heavy cream
a pinch of green onion if you want a sad, sad garnish

The most important part of this soup (or any soup really) is the stock. Don't bother using store bought stock, broth, or base. If you're going to make soup, you're going to have to roast some bones. Even if you have an already roasted (or smoked) turkey or chicken, I still roast the carcass before making stock. You want to make sure most of the meat is removed first because it will get pretty dried out after roasting and simmering for a few hours, but after that just roast them in a 400 degree oven until they're really golden brown; about an hour. It's going to add tons of flavor.

After roasting I add a whole bunch of water, scrape up any delicious bits stuck to the pan, and let it simmer for at least four hours. I always add pepper to my stock, but never salt. I season the dish that it goes into as needed because if you season the stock before adding it to the dish you have to worry about how much the liquid reduces. Enough talk of stock; let's get into soup making.

First you need to chop your veg. I try to keep the chunks at maybe 3/16 of an inch. That sounds specific, but in my head an 1/8th is too small and 1/4 is too big. This soup also requires a roux, which means I start by browning some butter. Butter is delicious. Brown butter is like gilding the lily that is butter. If I'm frying something in butter, I almost always brown it first. It is possible to burn the butter, but if you watch carefully, it's pretty easy to tell when the butter is browned. Don't keep cooking it past that point. When your butter is browned, add the veg and let it sweat until the celery and onion are translucent. A little longer than the picture above. Next add the flour and let it cook for a minute. Some might stick to the bottom of the pot. Don't worry about it. After the minute has passed, add a few cups of stock. You don't want to add all of the liquid at once or it can get lumpy. Add a few cups. Stir. Add some more. Stir. Add the rest. Hope you didn't screw it up because if you did there's no way to fix it.

Now you can just let this simmer for a couple hours on low. Add salt and pepper to taste along with thyme. It's too hard to give estimates. I tend to prefer dishes saltier, I love lots of herbs, my mom adds crazy amounts of pepper to everything. The numbers I gave are a guide. Just taste it and add more salt, pepper, or herbs as you desire. Stir it every once in a while, and make sure it doesn't stick. While this is simmering, you can cook the wild rice. Add one cup wild rice to three cups water or stock. Let it boil then add a cover and reduce to a simmer. The rice will sort of pop inside out kind of like popcorn. It takes around 30-40 minutes. I didn't take pictures of it, but the change should be obvious. One minute, you have dark, riced shaped grain. The next, you have a weird, grayish, arched grain.

When the rice is done, drain any remaining water and add the rice to your soup pot along with the meat from the turkey or chicken carcass. Let that simmer for another 30 minutes. Adjust seasoning if necessary, then add cream and let the soup heat to a satisfactory temperature.

Even with the pathetic garnish, I wish I was eating a bowl of this right now. It is unbelievably delicious. If you've never had wild rice, make an effort to try some. The texture is completely different from traditional rice, and it is much more satisfying. You can also add different vegetables if you like. I know some people like mushrooms and some like red pepper. You can also add bacon and chipotle powder if you want something a little smoky and spicy. I can't say it enough, make this it's amazing. 

Super Bowl Brisket

So this is the ridiculously enormous piece of meat that I prepared for myself and some friends to celebrate America's favorite holiday, the Super Bowl. This is a 16.62 lb beef brisket. The chef's knife – included for scale – has a blade that is eight inches long and is about a foot in total, which means the brisket was about two feet wide. I trimmed off a fair amount of fat and it shrinks around 30%, but it is still a lot of meat. Five large dudes and one average sized finished about half of it, so with a few side dishes one of these could probably feed around 12-15 people.

There are many ways to cook a brisket, but one of my favorite techniques for cooking anything is smoking. Something unbelievable happens when you put a large chunk of meat in a heated box filled with wood smoke for a few hours (actually more like 16 in this case). The smoke flavor that penetrates the meat when you cook with wood is incomparable. That being said, you can still make a delicious version of this in the oven.

As you can see from the photo, the entire top of the roast is a thick layer of fat. A significant amount of that needs to be trimmed off, but an 1/8 of an inch left on is still desirable because the flesh itself is very lean and has little marbling. For the most part, you should be able to visually see how thick the layer of fat is, but when that isn't the case I usually try to take off more. It won't be a tremendous problem if you trim down to the meat in small patches.

Here is the trimmed brisket with the fat that I removed. Although it's hard to see on the actual roast, you can see from the pile of fat above the brisket that it was quite a bit. I'm not sure why the color looks weird on some of the trimmed fat. It looked completely normal in person, so maybe something weird happened with the color. PSA: save that fat. You can either render it and cook with delicious beef fat, or save it as is and grind it if you make your own ground beef.

As I mentioned earlier, this whole piece was about two feet wide. That presents a problem for me because my smoker is only slightly wider than a foot. Thankfully brisket is actually two pieces of meat usually referred to as the flat and the point. The flat runs the entire length of the brisket whereas the point is only about a foot long and ends near the middle. I cut it pretty much right down the middle. You can tell where the point ends because that section is much thicker than the part that has only the flat. The issue with this method is that the two halves are going to cook differently. The half with both flat and point is considerably larger and takes longer to cook.

Brisket ingredients:
1 whole packer brisket
4 tbsp kosher salt
1 entire batch brisket rub (recipe follows)

Brisket rub:
2 tbsp brown sugar
2 tbsp garlic powder
2 tbsp smoked paprika
2 tbsp ancho chile powder
2 tbsp fresh ground black pepper
1 tbsp chipotle powder

I put all four tablespoons of salt on the brisket, but I always apply more to the meat than the fat cap. The salt isn't going to absorb into the fat as well as it will into the meat. I also put the entire batch of rub on there even though it sounds like a lot. I don't just sprinkle the rub onto the meat I actually rub it in because it helps it stick to the brisket rather than just falling off when you lift it or turn it over. Ideally at this point the brisket should sit with the salt and spices overnight so the salt can absorb into the flesh.

I didn't have time to let it sit overnight, so here is the roast after the rub was applied right before it went in the smoker. I used hickory because it is my favorite wood when smoking, and I smoked it for 16 hours at 225 degrees. I wanted to smoke it until the internal temperature reached 203 degrees, but unfortunately that was not a possibility. It was 4 PM on Super Bowl Sunday, and I needed to get this brisket to the party I was attending because it was supposed to be the main dish.

This is the section that contained the point and the flat. When I removed it from the smoker it was at 170 degrees, and before I sliced it I allowed it to rest wrapped in aluminum foil in a cooler for 2 hours. 

After it's sliced, it looks and tastes pretty incredible. On the right you can see the separation between the flat and the point. The grain runs in opposite directions, so you can see the point where there are long lines, the flat where there are small sections, and a layer of fat between them. 

I feel the need to write a disclaimer here. Everything I've ever read about brisket has talked about how easy it is to screw up, and how it can be dry and chewy. This is the fifth time I've ever smoked a brisket and every time it's been delicious even though I have never done it like the experts who have far more experience than I do claim it should be done. I don't know if that is a fluke, or if I just have a different idea of what brisket should be than they do. All I can say is that this was unquestionably juicy and tender and it was removed from heat about 30 degrees lower than barbecue experts say it should be. If I'd had the time I certainly would have done it their way, but I am in no way disappointed with this result.

Alright here's another theory: barbecue pitmasters don't want regular folk to know how easy it is to make delicious brisket! If everybody knew, they'd be buying briskets like crazy and the price would go up. Brisket is like the cheapest cut of beef you can get. I paid $2.99/lb for this roast, which is cheaper than ground beef. It's not like this was low quality either. It was USDA Choice and Certified Angus beef. Let's make this a thing. We can call it the Great Brisket Conspiracy of 2014. 

Braised Beef Ragù

Are you drooling yet? NO?! What's wrong with you? Alright I'll admit my pics are a little blurry, but just ignore the quality and get excited about how easy and delicious this is. If you enjoy: naps, movies, poker, imbibing alcohol, or any activity that will make you unavailable for several hours, this is perfect for you.

Here's a list of what you'll need:

1 large chopped yellow onion
1 1 3-4 lb chuck roast
4 minced garlic cloves
3 tbsp tomato paste
1 C red wine
1 bay leaf
5 thyme sprigs
2 14oz cans crushed tomatoes
1 tbsp chopped fresh basil plus more for garnish
1 lb fettuccine pasta

Take a 14ish inch heavy bottomed skillet and add olive oil over medium heat until it's nice and hot. You don't want a gray lump of meat; you want a nice hot pan so that you can create a beautifully caramelized golden brown roast. Pics of that later in this post. Basically, put some salt and pepper on the roast and let it sit in the pan without touching it for a few minutes. Seriously, don't move it. After 5 minutes, check the color, and if it's a nice dark brown, flip it. Do the same thing on the other side, then place the meat on a plate.

Time for some onions. If there's too much grease in the pan, get rid of some until it barely coats the bottom. Add the chopped onion and let it sweat for a few minutes at medium heat. Next add the minced garlic until it's fragrant (maybe a minute).

This part is important. Don't skip it. Add the tomato paste and let it brown in the bottom of the pan for a few minutes. The flavor you get from browning the tomato paste is absolutely worth the time it takes. Please enjoy this picture of that process happening.

All of that brown stuff you see on the bottom of the pan in the picture above is what will help flavor the delicious sauce, so to get it off the pan into the sauce I deglazed with the wine.

This is right after the wine has been added, the delicious bits stuck to the pan were scraped off, and the tomato paste was mixed in with the wine. At this point I added the bay leaf, the thyme sprigs, the chopped and let the sauce reduce about half before adding the crushed tomatoes.

There it is. Just take a moment to enjoy that gorgeous color. I happened to go to my local butcher shop where bone-in chuck roasts were on sale, so this roast has a bone. I can't recall ever seeing one in a grocery store, which was really the reason I decided to get one, but a boneless chuck roast would work just as well. 

Good news. At this point you heat your oven to 300 degrees, and forget about the roast for a few hours. Those big white pieces of fat in the picture are bad news though. After about three hours I took the roast out to test its tenderness. It was getting tender, but there was a thick layer of grease on top of the sauce. I used paper towels to remove as much as I could. I then took a knife and removed the now tender chunks of fat. The roast wasn't done, however, so I let it continue to cook for another two hours before I pulled this out of the oven...

Shrinkage is real, guys. This is without the bones and the pieces of fat removed, but even if I'd removed them before cooking, you still lose a significant amount of volume from the roast. To serve the roast I just sliced it into a few semi-large chunks. It's tender enough that you can cut it with a fork, so serving it in large pieces is not a problem.

When the roast is finally tender put a large pot of salted water on to boil, and cook the pasta according to package instructions except drain it a minute earlier than suggested. You want to finish the pasta in the sauce so that it has a chance to absorb the flavors.

Is it bothering you yet that I've been switching which side of the picture the yellow tea kettle is on? Seriously though, how delicious does that pasta look? Time for some honesty. The ingredient list just said fettuccine, but this is actually fresh pasta that I made. Making pasta is a recent experiment, so I don't have a lot of experience and didn't want to include it. If any of you are interested I used Mario Batali's recipe for basic pasta, which you can find here. Video is included. Anyway, once your pasta is drained, add it to the sauce and stir until sauce and pasta are combined. When they are combined and the pasta is al dente, you are ready to serve up this delicious masterpiece. Don't forget to top it with fresh basil and grated parmesan. In case you've forgotten, this is how delicious it looks.