In January 2018, I visited Disneyland Park in Anaheim and had dinner at the River Belle Terrace restaurant in Frontierland. The spareribs were horrible, but the house salad was delicious. It consisted of arugula, apple, dried cranberries, gorgonzola, candied pecans, and a side of apple vinaigrette.

When I recently decided to try my hand at grilled romaine lettuce, the obvious choice was to dress it like a Caesar salad…at least that’s what most recipes do. Caesar dressing, shaved parmesan cheese, crispy croutons, and you’re done.

Well, I’m sure that would be easy and delicious, but my mind wandered back to that sweet salad I had at Disneyland. How about using it as inspiration for a grilled romaine lettuce salad prepared using the Weber gas grill? Continue reading Grilled Disneyland Romaine Lettuce Salad →

Introducing The Teres Major Steak

Teres major is not a steak you will find at most supermarkets. You’ll have to seek it out at a good butcher shop or from online sources. But it’s worth the effort to find and grill on your Weber gas grill.

Also known as a shoulder petite tender roast, petite tender, shoulder tender, or bistro tender, the teres major steak is lean but juicy, and as the alternate names imply, it’s very tender. It’s shaped like and eats a lot like a tenderloin but with a bit more fat and thus more flavor.

The teres major muscle is tucked away inside the chuck primal and comes from the shoulder blade. It takes more time and effort to fabricate this cut from the shoulder clod, which is why you don’t see it often in the usual retail settings. Continue reading Teres Major Steak →

In August 2018, I had a few issues grilling a flat iron steak and wrote about it in one of my posts. Two years passed and I completely forgot about that experience. I’m standing at the butcher counter in 2020, I see a flat iron steak, and I think I should try grilling one and posting about it here. Not until I started writing this post did I discover I’d cooked and posted about flat iron steak before!

Well, I’m happy to report that I had a better experience with flat iron steak this time.

If you don’t know much about flat iron steak, you can read about the origins of this cut of meat in my previous post.

First, I upped the grilling temperature…preheated for 15 minutes, two burners on MEDIUM-HIGH, one burner on LOW, and one burner OFF to create a hot direct zone and a cooler indirect zone in case I needed it. Turned out I didn’t need it. I seasoned the meat with Susie Q’s Santa Maria Style Seasoning and let it rest at room temp for 1 hour. Continue reading Flat Iron Steak Redo →

What Is Pork Secreto?

I noticed this interesting cut of pork in the fresh meat counter at Belcampo Meat Co. in Palo Alto, CA (before the location closed in March 2019). The butcher said it was equivalent to “pork brisket”, a “butcher’s secret” that they grilled for themselves behind the restaurant.

Good enough for them? Good enough for me!

When I got home, I searched the Interweb and found several definitions for pork secreto: the aforementioned pork brisket; pork skirt steak; a strip of pork hidden under belly fat; a cut that resides behind the shoulder; and a cut between the shoulder, ribs, and fatback.

So maybe “pork secreto” can be any number of things. In the end, I trusted the butcher that fabricated and sold the cut, as well as my own eyes, and decided that it looked like a tiny brisket weighing 1.25 pounds.

The butcher said this was a Duroc-Berkshire crossbreed, so a quality piece of pork.

It consists of two parts, like a beef brisket, but in the opposite configuration. In a beef brisket, the fatty portion comes from the chest and the lean portion is towards the belly. In a pork secreto, the fatty portion comes from the belly and the lean portion comes from the chest as part of the picnic…or so I’ve read. Continue reading Pork Secreto →

Introduction

In July 2019, I post a video review of the Impossible Burger at Burger King. The flavor was OK. The problem was the degree to which it was cooked. Two of the three burgers I tried were extremely dark on the outside, almost to the point of being burned, and they were not moist and juicy.

At the time of that video, raw Impossible Burger was not widely available in supermarkets. In the video, I commented that someday I’d like to get my hands on some and try cooking it on my Weber gas grill.

Well, that day arrived in July 2020.

I was doing my weekly grocery shopping at Safeway and noticed a display of raw Impossible Burger in the meat department, a 12-ounce package selling for $14.99! (At the time of writing this, just one month later, this same package sells for $9.99 at Safeway and $7.94 at Walmart.) I gulped hard, added a package to my cart, and headed to the checkout stand.

Continue reading Impossible Burgers On The Weber Gas Grill →

I was gifted a bottle of Secret Stadium Sauce by my discussion forum friend Jim Lampe when we met up for a Milwaukee Brewers Spring Training game in Arizona in March 2020…right before all hell broke loose with the COVID-19 pandemic.

If you’re a Brewers fan and have attended games at Miller Park or the old Milwaukee County Stadium, you know all about Secret Stadium Sauce. You may even have a bottle of it lurking somewhere in your refrigerator. The story goes that one day back in the early 1970s, the ballpark food vendor was running out of ketchup and mustard, so they took what little they had left and mixed it into barbecue sauce, added a few spices and other ingredients, and Secret Stadium Sauce was born and has been a fan favorite ever since.

I’d never heard of this sauce, but had a chance to try it on a grilled hot dog at the spring training ballpark in Arizona. It tastes like a tomato-based barbecue sauce but with unique spices. Jim uses Secret Stadium Sauce plus beer as a bath for grilled bratwurst and shared his method in a post on The Virtual Weber Bulletin Board. I decided to follow his lead with my bottle of sauce. Continue reading Brats In Secret Stadium Sauce →

Original Joe’s San Jose. Photo Credit: Victor H. via Yelp. Used with permission.

Introducing Original Joe’s

Original Joe’s is a beloved Italian restaurant, an institution located in the heart of downtown San Jose. It’s a holdover from a simpler time, a Bay Area tradition that dates back to 1937 when the first Original Joe’s opened in San Francisco. More locations and perhaps a few copycats opened over the years. They all followed the same successful model: Waiters wore tuxedos, kitchen staff wore “chef’s whites” and “toque blanche” (white hat). They served old-fashioned Italian-American dishes prepared in an open kitchen, the menu consisting of steaks and seafood cooked on a charcoal grill, Italian pasta specialties,  soups, salads, side dishes, and desserts. And they had a piano bar where, back in the day, men wore suits and ladies wore dresses and you’d stop by for a cocktail and listen to someone tickle the ivories or play the organ. Real classy!

Original Joe’s in San Jose opened in 1956. It was a partnership of four men, at least two of which had a family connection to Original Joe’s in San Francisco. Surviving all these years through good times and bad,  even through the exodus of downtown retailers to spacious air-conditioned malls in the 1960s and 1970s, Original Joe’s continues to serve favorite foods with a “traditional San Francisco flair” to locals as well as to visitors from all over the world.

The Famous Hamburger Sandwich

One of the signature dishes at Original Joe’s is the “Hamburger Sandwich”. Today they call it the “Original Joe’s Famous Hamburger”, but to those of us in the know, it’s still the hamburger sandwich.

The hamburger sandwich is simplicity at its best. The menu describes it as, “3/4 pound ground chuck tumbled in chopped yellow onion, Swiss cheese, grilled or broiled and served on our signature French bread.” You can add bacon or fried egg, if you like.

Original Joe’s hamburger sandwich. Photo Credit: John D. @forksandtrails via Yelp. Used with permission.

The chopped yellow onion is pressed into the raw ground chuck and formed into an oblong-shaped patty. I don’t care for the strong onion flavor, so I order mine without onions. You’ve got to have it grilled on the mesquite-fired charbroiler. It takes a long time to cook a burger this thick, but your patience is rewarded when it finally arrives at your seat at the counter. (You are sitting at the counter, aren’t you? Where you can watch the open kitchen in action?)

The hamburger sandwich comes with Swiss cheese; I add bacon. It’s served with steak fries and a little cup of ketchup on the side. I always wish they’d bring more fries and ketchup to begin with, but you can ask for more.

My Attempt To Make A Hamburger Sandwich

I decided to make a version of the Original Joe’s hamburger sandwich using my Weber gas grill. No mesquite charbroiler, to be sure, but quicker and easier.

I formed 1.5 pounds of good quality 80/20 ground chuck into two thick, 3/4 pound oblong-shaped patties, applied kosher salt and pepper, and let sit in the refrigerator for about 30 minutes, giving the salt a chance to penetrate the meat. Continue reading Original Joe’s 3/4 Pound Hamburger Sandwich →

Picanha (pronounced “pee-KAHN-ya), also known as top sirloin cap or coulotte, is a cut of beef that most Americans know little about. Those that do probably associate it with expensive Brazilian steakhouses (churrascarias) where it’s skewered in half-moon shapes, grilled to perfection, and carved to order at the table.

A company named Porter Road Butcher gave me a 4.24 pound package of their dry-aged picanha to try, and it’s the basis of this article. You’ll find picanha at better supermarkets, butcher shops, or online meat retailers.

Picanha Defined

Picanha is a triangular roast with a lean side and a fat side covered with thick, white hard fat.

Picanha has great beefy flavor and good moisture due to abundant intramuscular fat. It should not be confused with tri-tip. Both come from the sirloin primal, but picanha is cut from the top sirloin butt while the tri-tip is cut from the bottom sirloin butt. Continue reading Picanha from Porter Road Butcher →

My first encounter with grilling cheeses was at the 2019 San Francisco Fancy Food Show. You can watch my video to learn more about my experience at that amazing specialty food show.

After trying some of those cheeses at the show, I decided to buy a few and grill them at home on my Weber Summit 450. I bought the following:

• Rougette BonFire Grilling Cheese
• Rougette BonFire Marinated Grilling Cheese
• Kourellas Greek-Style Grilling Cheese

The first two were ones I saw and tried at the Fancy Food Show. The third one was something I picked up at Whole Foods. Continue reading Grilling Cheeses →