Saturday, July 10, 2010

Pork Kebab on Big Green Egg

Big Green Egg is not a kebab kind oven, but if you like meat on skewers why not. Pork is very easy to deal with in this case.

Big Green Egg is not a kebab kind oven, but if you like meat on skewers why not. Pork is very easy to deal with in this case.

Cooking is straight forward. For this time I've got 4 pounds of boneless pork rib ends:

Wash it and cut into 2 inch cubes:

Peel a couple of onions and slice them:

Put cut meat into a pot or a bowl layer by layer interleaving with onion rings. Pour a marinade of your choice into the pot. Sometimes I use 1% vinegar solution, some other times nothing but seasoning. I heard that some people like to use a table wine or even a beer - one day I'll try that. For this time I've chosen a "garlic and herb" marinade from a shop. Stir up the meat gently to let marinade spread over the whole volume. Put the pot in a cold place for at least 30 minutes. Soak smoke chips.

Clean BGE, put fresh charcoal, start the fire. Kebab needs high temperature and fire under whole cooking area:

While BGE temperature is climbing up, thread cubes of meat interleaved by onion rings on skewers. From my experience meat pieces should be pressed tight one to another on a skewer, in this case it will be cooked well and stay juicy.

When temperature has reached 600F

drop smoke chips on the periphery of the burning charcoal, then place some skewers on the cooking grid or if skewers are long enough on the edges of the oven.

close the BGE cap and cook for 2 minutes or so, just to let one side of the meat catch the color, then rotate the skewers and repeat until all sides look good:

In my case I wanted it cooked to "well done" grade, so it needed some extra cooking time. In order to avoid over-frying I lifted skewers upper, away from burning fire,

and finished the cooking.

Served!

I have to say that this particular cooking was a little bit spontaneous and I used random skewers which I could quickly find around. The skewers had too narrow blades and that made difficult to rotate skewers along with meat. Meat simply did not follow rotation of the skewer keeping its center of gravity down. To avoid that some people use double skewers. I still prefer one blade variant and to make it working proper skewers should have blade width of about half an inch and an in-pressed groove or metal bending along the blade to increase rigidity of the skewer. I'm planning to get skewers like that for the future.

PS. Finally I've got appropriate skewers - check out "Pork Kebab 2 With Proper Skewers"


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