It's a grill, it's a smoker, it's a ... pizza oven!

The weeks topics include teaching an old grill new tricks, homemade pizza, a review of Bachi Burger in Las Vegas, and I flirt with culinary nirvana. 

Restaurant Review – Bachi Burger in Las Vegas.  I recently watched an episode of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives where the host went to Bachi Burger in Las Vegas.  I thought “I’ll be there in a couple of weeks.  I should try it.”

First, the setting.  Bachi is a couple miles south of the Strip in a nondescript strip mall surrounded by residential neighborhoods.  Check out the strip mall.  There are thousands of these in Vegas, and none of them would likely strike your culinary fancy.  However, in my experience, some of the best food in Vegas is in strip malls. 

As I walk in, I notice the special board.  Check out the Shogun burger.  Wagyu beef, unagi, and foie gras in a burger?  Talk about decadent.  What kind of evil culinary genius comes up with something like that?! 

I walk in and there’s a 10 minute wait on a Monday night for just me.  This place is either really good or overhyped.  I look around and note a significant lack of tourists.  We’re well off the strip and a tourist would never find this place unless there were told to go here.  This is most definitely a locals place, and I like it! 

I start off my meal with some fries with parmesan reggiano, black truffle porcini cream, and sun dried tomato aioli, along with a 22 oz. bottle of Dogfish Head Pilsner.  Yes.  22 oz.  I know what you’re thinking and don’t judge.  I was thirsty. 

The fries were pretty good.  I expected awesome, but they weren’t.  Not cooked enough for my taste and I could barely taste the truffle in the cream.  However, the aioli was great.  Slightly tart from the sundries tomatoes, which paired nicely with the saltiness of the cheese on the fries. 

A side note.  Aioli is just a fancy word for mayonnaise with stuff mixed in.  Sometimes the mayonnaise is homemade.   Sometimes not.  Most people wouldn’t dip fries in mayo.  However, call it aioli and hell yes I’ll dip my fries in it!

Next came my burger, the Banh Mi burger.  Check out the food porn.  The patty is made of Angus beef, Duroc pork, and shrimp, all cooked in a nauc mam sauce and topped with grilled lemon grass, pork pate, and pickled vegetables.  This is not a burger that I would have even tried 10 or 15 years ago.  Thank god I’m not a picky eater anymore!

I threw everything into the bun so I could as the chef intended. 

The review?  In short, absolutely frickin awesome and the best burger I’ve ever had.  Ever. 

 

First, check out the bun.  Incredibly fresh and spongy.  You could serve anything on that bun and it would be good.  Second, the burger was cooked to absolute medium perfection, which is an art I have yet to master. 

However, what truly set this burger apart was that it was a complete dish.  Every element was supposed to be there.  The spongy bun, the crunch and tanginess of the pickled veggies, the slight heat of the pickled jalapeno, the curry aioli, and the slightly charred flavor of the burger all melded into a perfect bite.  I’ve had many burgers with various toppings. I’ve never had one with toppings that were so well chosen to accent each other.

 

It reminded me of a good bowl of noodles, where everything is there to accent other things in the dish.  The crunch of the sprouts accents the soft noodles, the hot of the peppers accents the saltiness of the sauce, and so on.  Everything is meant to be eaten together. 

Here’s what my plate looked like after the meal.

The best part?  The burger was $9!  This would cost $30 or more at a restaurant on the Strip, and it wouldn’t be as good. 

I have much to learn in the culinary arts…..

Go try this place.

What am I working on?  I recently made pulled pork for 80 people.  My smoker ran all day for that one, but that’s not what I’m here to write about.

I’m writing about pizza, and to be more precise, pizza cooked on the grill.

I know what you’re thinking.  “WF – you’ve finally and predictably gone off the edge.  You can’t cook pizza on a grill.  You need an oven, and preferable one with a pizza stone.”

Oh ye of little faith.  The grill is the perfect place to make pizza, and I’ll tell you how to do it.    

First, you need some dough.  You could cheat and buy some dough from the store and roll it out, but that would be, well, cheating.  However, if you’re in a pinch, so be it.  I suggest making it fresh or doing what I did.  Marry a baker who will make the dough for you.  Spread the dough as thinly as possible. 

Second, you need to figure out a sauce.  I whipped up a quick one with san marzano tomatoes, olive oil, garlic, fresh basil, a little salt, and a bit of dried oregano.  Another option, and one I love, is to thickly slice large tomatoes, put some salt and pepper and olive oil on them, and grill them a few minutes on each side.  Place those on a plate until the sauce it needed and they act as your sauce.  Just mush them a bit on the dough and voila!  Awesome pizza sauce.

Brush the top side of the dough with olive oil and gently place that side down onto a clean, hot grill.  Not “crazy I’m cooking steaks here” hot.  Just hot.  Say 350-400 degrees.  Brush the top side of the dough with olive oil and wait about 2-3 minutes, or until the underside shows grill marks and is starting to brown.

Flip it over.  It should look something like this.  Quickly put your sauce, cheese and all topping on, and close the lid of the grill.  Cook another 3-5 minutes, or until the underside is browned and the topping are, well, cooked. 

Check out the final product.  

Slice and enjoy outside with your favorite cold beer.  You’ve just made pizza without heating up the house.  Perfect on a summer evening. 

For extra credit, cook on a charcoal grill with real wood chunks to get that smoky flavor into the pizza.  Just be careful of the heat.

Happy cooking.

WF

The Ballad of Billy the Kid

This week’s topics include the WF as short order cook, a reflection on how spoiled the Things are, Billy the kid (work with me), and I drink 27 year old wine!

What am I working on?  Since returning from vacation, I have been on a cooking tear, even by WF standards.  I’ve made smoked whole chickens, smoked spare ribs, carnitas tacos, homemade salsas, enchiladas (using the smoked chickens and carnitas), black mussels steamed in white wine, butter, garlic and shallots, and pasta made with the leftover mussels and their liquor. 

However, I’m not here to write about all of that fancy food.  I’m here to write about the simple poached egg.

I love poached eggs and I’ve never tried to make them.  Yes.  I know that’s odd.  Recently I decided to correct that and the Things were my test subjects. 

I pulled out a shallow, straight sided pan (a sautoir for you Francophiles).  I know that some purists insist on deep pots that you drop the egg into.  Whatever.   The shallow pot is easier and gives you less opportunity to fail.  I added a little salt and vinegar to the water after it started to boil, and turned down the heat to just under a boil.

The result?  Perfect medium poached eggs.  Check ‘em out.  The Things loved them.  I wonder how many kids have a dad who will get up and make them fresh poached eggs before school.   I suspect not many. 

However, I don’t mind.  I love cooking fancy food, but nothing gives me greater pleasure than playing short order cook for breakfast.  There’s something very fulfilling about making people exactly what they want.  “Over medium.”  Cool.  “Sunny side up.”  Got that.  “Poached runny.”  Nice.  I can do that.  “Scrambled.” Done.  And so on…..

Plus, if you can’t cook eggs really well, can you call yourself a good cook?  Methinks not.

Yo… Billy!  Recently my friend D invited me over to assist him on a culinary ‘project’.  You may recall D from such blogs as.. this blog!  D’s the one who had the pig roast last summer that I wrote about.

D decided that he wanted to upgrade his roasting hardware, so he bought a fancy motorized spit.  Hand cranking a pig in the heat of the day gets old quickly, so he bought a new toy.  He wanted to try it out before the big pig roast.

He researched a whole lamb, but they were ridiculously expensive, so he decided upon… wait for it… a small goat.  Naturally, I jumped at the chance to come help!

We’ll call this small goat Billy and this is the tale of his last days.  Actually, his last day was well before D picked him up, so this is actually the tale of what became of Billy….

We rubbed the cavity of the carcass with lemon juice, olive oil, salt, fresh rosemary and chopped garlic.  We stitched him up and tied him to the spit.  We then inserted bolts to keep Billy from moving while on the spit.  Finally, we cut slits on the outside of the body and shoved them full of garlic and rosemary.  More salt, lemon juice, and olive oil, and we were off to the pit.

Here’s Billy ready to be cooked.  Looks Frankenstein-esque, doesn’t he?

Here’s Billy during the cooking process. 

And here’s Billy after cooking.  Note the goofy looking dude carving Billy up in his sandals. 

The review?  The goat was very well cooked.  Rich flavor from the herb and lemons.  However, I have to admit that goat straight off the spit is not my favorite meat.  It is VERY gamey.  The Red was not a big fan, nor was Thing 1.  I ate a fair amount and enjoyed it.  Thing 2, however, is our resident carnivore.  He had multiple helpings, including going to work on a goat spare rib.  I was so proud!

What’s really exciting, though, is what we can do with the leftover goat.  If you slowly cook it down, it loses its gamey flavor.  D’s wife made a Filipino stew which was absolutely awesome.  She told me what it was, but I can’t remember the name.  Either way, it was awesome!

I took the heart of the carcass (ribs, back, etc.) and some legs and plan to make a traditional goat birria stew.  More on that in a future blog. 

Thank you, Billy!

If I had tons of money, I could drink wine like this every day.  This just in… I have a weakness for great wine.  Actually, great booze of any sort.  I’ve come to embrace this alleged weakness and one of my methods is joining the wine clubs of a few, select wineries.

My favorite wine club is Stags Leap Wine Cellars (not Stags Leap Winery, which is fine, but not the French-beating, world class winery we’re talking about).  As you may recall, a SLWC cabernet was one of the American wines that beat the French in a blind taste testing in the ‘70s.

Why this wine club?  First and foremost, you never have a SLWC bottle which isn’t great.  A lot of wineries charge a lot of money for adequate wine at best.  Not this winery.  All of their wines are great.  Second, once or twice a year, they’ll send an email to their wine club members offering some of their old library wines for sale. 

Recently, they offered a flight of 3 old merlots ('83-'85) for about $140 before shipping and tax.  My response to being offered 27-29 year old wine which has been cellared perfectly for that price?  Hell yes!

The Red and I recently opened the ’85.  I admit that I am not a big Merlot fan, but I also admit that Merlots have gotten a bad rap in the last decade or so.  The fact is that the French have been using Merlot grapes for centuries, including in a lot of their high-end Bordeaux wines. 

How is 27 year old Merlot?  It took a long time open up.  I tasted it straight out of the bottle and it was flat.  Very little flavor.  In my experience, this is normal for old wines.  They have to breathe a lot before their true flavors open up.  However, the aroma was nothing short of intoxicating and it only got better as it opened up.

After it opened up for 1-2 hours, this wine had a depth and complexity I’ve never tasted before in a Merlot.  Awesome wine  Money well spent. 

Happy cooking

WF