Day long marinades and lightly smoked wings and ribs
I’ve not had a lot of time for fun cooking recently, but I’ve bene really enjoying simply cooked meat on the BBQ with fresh salad. Today though I had the time and headspace to have a play. I realised that I could buy meat at lunchtime, marinade it in the fridge at work and then BBQ it when I get home, after it’s 6 hour marinade. Nothing smart, now I write it down, but I was chuffed with myself.
Thus, today I set off to work with a bag of marinade (surprisingly stinky), and popped to the brilliant Block&Bottle and bought chicken wings (3 bone) and a fat slice of pork belly (on the bone). Joel weighed them and then I dropped them straight into my bag of marinade. B&B don’t use plastic bags, but if they did, this would have saved a few.
Once I was back in the office I popped the whole lot into the fridge and picked it up at the end of the day. 2 hours of low BBQ later and it was amazing.
This year I’ve been using my gas BBQ a lot more than my ProQ after a lot of problems keeping the coals topped up. Slow, slow and smoky on gas is surprisingly easy, if a little inauthentic.
You will need
- A couple of tablespoons of hot suace - I used Encona Original
- A heaped teaspoon or two of minced garlic
- A heaped teaspoon or two of minced ginger
- A heaped teaspoon or two of runny honey
- Chicken wings (3 bone are my favorite because they have the wing tip)
- A chunk of pork belly on the bone (like a mega rib)
- A big handful of smoking chips (I used apple wood )
Do
- Mix all the marinade ingrediants
- Stick the meat in the same bag and fridge it for as long as you can (6 hours was fine)
- Put the meat on one side of the BBQ, light the gas on low on the other
- Pop a handful of wood chips into a smoke box on above the heat
- Pop a drip tray under the meat (tinfoil for me. This stops the drips burnt on the hot plate underneith)
- Watch of 2 hours. Adjust the heat so it’s stilling at about 150 oC. Move meat around so that nothing is burning.
- Turn up the heat at the end for 2 minutes to crisp up the edges if needed.
Result
Sweet on the lips. Burning heat when bitten. 2 hours is long enough to start rendering the fat in the pork belly. The smoke is gentle but deep. I should have scored the pork fat every 5mm to make it easier to cut, it went very hard (but delicious)
