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 It’s time for another off-the-wall fun breakfast! This time it’s my version of a sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit. I know… what’s so special about a sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit? Just make some biscuits, slap some sausage, eggs, and cheese in it then jam that baby together right? Nope!
What’s different about this concoction is that the meats and cheese are baked INSIDE the biscuit. Here’s how it’s done: First, get your favorite cheese. In this house it’s shredded cheddar straight from the brick. My better half doesn’t care for the sliced stuff so I’ve learned to live with it plus, she got us one of those handy-dandy grater/slicer thingies that makes shredding and slicing easy enough that I can do it without screwing things up. Next I brown a small tube of Jimmy Dean sausage in a pan. Once the sausage is ready I beat a half-dozen eggs into a consistent bowl of yellow goo and pour into the pan with the sausage. Stir that until it’s cooked to your desire and take off the heat to sit and think about what got it into this predicament.
Hopefully by this time you’ve gotten your biscuit dough ready to start stuffing. For me it’s easiest to get two cans of Pillsbury Grands (I haven’t delved into the art of making fresh biscuits just yet) and basically use one for the top and bottom. First grab one raw biscuit, stretch it out some so it will hold more of the stuff in the pan and a little of the cheese you’ve chosen, then stretch out another to go across the top and fold the edges over the bottom so you’ll get a good, solid biscuit completely containing the meat and cheese. You’ll have eight LARGE biscuits when you’re done, lay those onto a buttered baking pan and toss it in the oven per whatever baking instructions you have on the side of your biscuit can. The Pillsbury Grands call for a 350 degree preheated oven for 12-15 minutes. Since these are almost twice as large as Pillsbury intended them to be, it’s usually an 18-20 minute soak in the oven. The final touch is a tad of butter on top of each biscuit and a little pinch of cheddar cheese. Shove it into the oven and wait patiently if you can.
There’s always some of the meat mixture left over that didn’t fit in the biscuits which I usually snarf up as an appetizer while I’m waiting on the oven to do its job. We’ll all eat one each then have the remainder of the batch for munching throughout the rest of the day.
I’ve only made these with sausage so far, mostly because I didn’t have any bacon available. There’s a restaurant nearby called The Biscuit King, where I got the idea to try these, which will cook practically anything you want to order into the biscuit. The next thing I’m going to try might be called “The Garbage Biscuit.” Something that will leave you reeling – full of eggs, sausage, bacon, jalapenos, cheese, hash browns, tomatoes, and, well… you get the idea. A biscuit with all those ingredients will be the size of a hubcap. Maybe I could get that guy from Man vs. Food to eat it as a challenge!
 With the Mobile BBQ Cookoff and Hog Wild Festival being what seems like 50 miles from my house, I decided to skip the Swine and Dine Affair, a dinner held the Thursday night before the competition, just to keep from having to drive there and back to hang out with the rest of the teams when I had to be at work the next morning early. At some point during that evening while I was going over my list of things to make sure were packed for the event, I got a call from my Double-M cooking partner Mark Crownover, saying he was sitting a couple of seats away from Johnny Trigg of the Smoking Triggers BBQ team. I started wishing at that time that I had went ahead and made the drive!
The Mobile BBQ Cookoff is a charity event which benefits the United Cerebral Palsy Foundation and alongside the tidbits of food samples given to the judges, each team has to give away at least 40lbs of meat during the event. Most served up hundred of pound of mostly pork butt. Thousands of people showed up to support the event so you might imagine the teams were running hard from beginning to end. This didn’t leave a lot of time for us to get out and see the other teams and thier rigs or talk to other cooks.
I had ambitions of meeting up with Trigg and shooting the bull with him but the opportunity never presented itself. Mark and I managed to meet up with him on his way back to his RV from the awards ceremony where we were able to greet and shake hands. Amanda Yeager on the other hand, a co-worker and BBQ buddy, made the pilgrimage from the Back Yard division peanut gallery over to the pro area and harrassed the poor man into getting her photo taken with him! YES… I’m jealous! I’ve only been a smoking enthusiast for a few years and 2010 is my first year of competing against other teams. Johnny Trigg is who I want to be when I grow up!
Admittedly, I had never heard the name Johnny Trigg, Myron Mixon, Tuffy Stone, or Lee Ann Whippen (just to name a few) until TLC aired the “BBQ Pitmasters” series several months ago. Amanda’s impression of Johnny Trigg after talking to him for a while and as polite and outgoing as he was to Mark and myself proved that he was just as laid back and genuinely friendly as the show portrayed him to be. It was a pleasure meeting Johnny Trigg and I look forward to meeting up with him again on the circuit later this year, hopefully at Riverfest in Decatur, AL or the Big Pig Jig in Vienna, GA. It may be a while still before Double-M will be competing in the pro class but I really look forward to it!
 Our team approached the 2010 Mobile BBQ Championship/Hog Wild Festival as a challenge – not a challenge to see if we could win; a challenge to ourselves to see if we could actually pull it off – and we did! Double-M Smokin’ Q took 8th place overall in our division with a 6th place in chicken and 16th place in ribs. The backyard division competed only in chicken and ribs but we went full-bore with our division’s two meats as well as pork butt and beef brisket for the practice. I know what you’re thinking – 8th place? Not really anything to get excited about… well… we got excited about that silly 8th place rank. While our recipes aren’t perfected on the two meats with which we competed, we proved the mechanics of the contest and our team to be right and have no doubt the next time we light the smoker for a contest, a higher rank will be inevitable!
For those of you not at least a little bit familiar with how a competition like this works, it’s pretty simple. You select a meat, take note of what time the judges want it turned in then back into your cook time based on that deadline.
Most BBQ competitions primarily judge the “Big 4” which is brisket, pulled pork, chicken, and ribs. Some events also have teams competing in sauce, deserts, and seafood.
Chicken, with its relatively short cook time, is by far the easiest of the “Big 4” to prepare. Teams competing in chicken only can show up to the contest with a grill 2 hours prior to deadline and get their product to the judging tent on time. Ribs are a little more complicated since most ribs experts will “low and slow” their slabs for no less than 3 hours. Pork butt and brisket are the most difficult due to their long-haul smoke of 10 to 12 hours in most cases.
The next thing you have to worry about is getting your rig up to and keeping it at temperature for the duration of your long or short-haul smokes for the different types of meat. Every back yarder, semi-pro, or pro has their own favorite cooking rig and every one of them is better than what the other guy is using. The secret to good BBQ is cooking your product at a consistent low temperature – very slowly. If that means a $100 gas-fired vertical from Wal-Mart, a $3,000 Stump’s rig, a $50,000 custom built rig, or anything in between, all that matters is that you know how to operate your own smoker and control that temperature. Once you learn that little trick, it’s all about the sauce.
Who knows if Double-M will compete again until next year’s Mobile BBQ Championship. I have my eye on one in Decatur, AL in September that looks very interesting —–
 No, I haven’t gone native and forsaken the gas or electric rigs but I’ve firmly rested on what most call a “labor of love” – smoking with a pure wood-fired rig. Since the run in Tennessee last Thanksgiving I realized that your gas and electric rigs are glorified outdoor ovens where smoke is optional. NOT THAT THERE’S ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT… I still intend on doing most of my long-haul smokes with the gas rig just for the simplicity of use. If you’ve been hanging around loweralabama.org long enough you’ve seen that I’ve made fun of stick burning purists before for that very fact. For a big bird, brisket, or butt a low-maintenance gas or electric rig is difficult to beat. You’ll spend the first 2-3 hours feeding it wood chips to get a good smoke ring then you can go to bed and not have to worry about stoking the thing all night long. For ribs or chicken or any other short-haul job, it’s all about the smoke and the stick-fired rig can’t be beat!
 For those who have tried my smoked turkey recipe from the previous post, I have an upgrade for you. If you’re willing to invest an all-nighter into smoking your bird, I challenge you to add a couple more days to your project by dropping the bird into a brine solution prior to smoking it.
Amanda Yeager, a friend and coworker, supplied me with the brine mix for the first turkey this year. The mix consisted of mostly salt and brown sugar with a few herbs and spices which you can tune to taste however the most important parts are the salt and sugar. Brining will help lock in the turkey’s juices which are normally cooked out causing the meat to be dry. Brining in conjunction with smoking produces a really moist bird that will have people gnawing the last tidbits of the meat off its bones. That’s IF you’re willing to put the time into turning this boring bird into something spectacular. As the saying goes, a moist turkey will disappear fast and a dry one will feed 500 people.
Here are a few guidelines on brining:
- As always, practice food preparation safety. Turkey is no less dangerous than chicken when it comes to safe handling.
- You’ll need a container large enough to contain your bird with it completely submerged in water.
- You’ll need to keep the temperature at or below 40 degrees Fahrenheit.
- Kosher salt isn’t a must however it will dissolve in water completely where standard salt will not.
- If you get a frozen bird with one of those handy-dandy temperature pop-ups, do not remove it. It will leave a nice little hole for the tasty juices to escape through. Note – these gizmos don’t seem to work in a smoker so your meat thermometer is still key in monitoring the bird’s inner temperature.
- for every 3 gallons of water, use a baseline of 1/2 cup salt and 1/2 cup sugar however the best way to get your mix correct is the taste test. Add your 1/2 cup of each to the water and taste to get your perfect sweet and salty taste but DO NOT taste the water after you’re dropped in the turkey – follow all rules for the safe handling of raw poultry.
- leave your bird in the brine for at least 12 hours if it is thawed at the time you put it in there. I’ve read everything from 12 hours to several days, I think anything more than 2 days is bordering dangerous however if you drop the bird into your mix completely frozen and let it thaw in the brine, 2 days is perfect.
- if you’re using a cooler or some container that won’t fit in your fridge, make sure you keep the turkey and solution iced down. On all three of my 2-day brines, I’ve had to pour hot water on the turkey to melt the ice out of the chest cavity in order to free the neck and that little bag of YUCK. The whole concept of giblet gravy is negated with this turkey because the moisture is built in – no external influences needed to this bird edible!
Other ingredients such as your herbs and spices, chopped vegetables, etc,… for the solution are totally up to you. And speaking of vegetables, a new addition to this year’s birds was stuffing the chest cavity full of chopped onions and potatoes. I also used onions in potatoes in the smoker’s reservoir. That again, is up to you for your favorite veggies or stuffing. This is only to lend more moisture to the inner parts of the bird.
I also stripped back the rub to just salt, pepper, and brown sugar for the last turkey which was clearly the best one of the season. With Thanksgiving over, I have at least 2 more birds left to smoke for friends before the 2009 turkey season is closed out.
Good news though – next year I’ll be joining a tradition of smoking those birds earlier and more often. I plan to use this as an excuse to acquire a much larger, possibly even mobile smoking rig and run a little back yard business of smoking the big birds. And pork butt. And Ribs. And Brisket. And…..
 I just finished carving the 3rd 2009 Thanksgiving turkey and I’m getting better at this every time! Two of the three were smoked in my Wal-Mart economy vertical gas rig and the last in a New Braunfels wood-fired vertical with a side firebox – nevermind the brick, we’ll get to that later. I’ll gladly admit using the stick burner was a lot more fun albeit more work since I was up every so often feeding it logs to keep the temperature where I wanted it.
The gas rig is by far the easiest way to go. I’ve never used an electric rig but I can’t imagine it being very much different than a gas smoker except you wouldn’t have to deal with keeping a gas bottle charged up for use. One trick I’ve learned over the last few smokes with my gas burner is to use chunks instead of chips in the tinderbox of these non-wood-fired boxes. I’ve found Chunks to be the better way to go mainly because they will produce a better head of smoke than chips and won’t burn out nearly as fast in a gas or assumably electric environment. I’ve heard that your temperature is also somewhat easier to control with an electric rig – there’s very little variance between not hot enough and too hot with the gas box! Gas and electric rigs also are really nothing more than outdoor ovens with optional smoke. With wood-fired rigs you don’t have much of a choice about your product being bathed in smoke for its entire stay in your cooker.
One thing is for sure, neither of these two verticals will hold more than one turkey at a time or at most 6 slabs of ribs so I’m on a mission before the next holiday season – UPGRADE! I’m thinking for my next smoker, something with wheels and a trailer hitch. What I want can’t be bought in a store, I’ll have to build it myself. Everyone has seen those home-made rigs that are built out of an old gas container with a firebox on the end – I want to take it a step further and have a choice of either gas or wood and, a mounted burner for crawfish boils, fish frying and such. Basically a rolling outdoor kitchen. I have this crazy idea of taking a little 5×8 trailer I already own and building a wooden deck, complete with rails! I know – it sounds crazy but it would be unique!
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