Cooking: Memorial Day BBQ for One
May. 29th, 2017 06:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tuftearsHappy Mew-More-Y'all Day!
It being a week before I go on a trip to Italy with![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png)
dracosphynx.livejournal.com, I regretfully decided against going to one of the cons in the area or friends' BBQs - last thing I want is to be battling sickness while on the plane! So I cooked myself some BBQ-ish food.
As I've mentioned before, I've worked out how to make burgers one at a time. The cooking improvement I want to talk about here is "air frying". I didn't actually run off and buy an air fryer, but according to what I've read on the web, it's basically the same as baking the food on a wire rack in the oven...
So that's what I did here. It actually works really well, though I might lightly oil the wire rack next time. I used a wire rack on top of an aluminum baking pan to catch any detritus that might fall off, for easy cleanup. No muss, no having to turn the food over halfway through. Excellent!
This is my usual char siu pork loin but this time I used kale as the side veggie, rather than baby bok choy. I think it worked out pretty well, the only downside is that it comes in 3-serving bags, so I wound up having to freeze a couple extra servings of sauteed/steamed kale.
It may seem like a large amount of rice and kale versus a small amount of char siu pork loin, but honestly the char siu is strongly flavored enough with zing from the crushed red pepper that it works out.
I mentioned in my past entry (two years ago) that the pork came out crumbly -- well, what I've been doing is cooking it at 133F for 5 hours, then cooling the meat still in the bag for a couple hours, then searing it for two minutes on each side on a very hot frying pan or wok. It comes out pretty much the right consistency and taste! I should probably try dropping the temperature some more to 130F and see if that makes it juicier or more tender.
It being a week before I go on a trip to Italy with
dracosphynx.livejournal.com, I regretfully decided against going to one of the cons in the area or friends' BBQs - last thing I want is to be battling sickness while on the plane! So I cooked myself some BBQ-ish food.As I've mentioned before, I've worked out how to make burgers one at a time. The cooking improvement I want to talk about here is "air frying". I didn't actually run off and buy an air fryer, but according to what I've read on the web, it's basically the same as baking the food on a wire rack in the oven...
So that's what I did here. It actually works really well, though I might lightly oil the wire rack next time. I used a wire rack on top of an aluminum baking pan to catch any detritus that might fall off, for easy cleanup. No muss, no having to turn the food over halfway through. Excellent!
This is my usual char siu pork loin but this time I used kale as the side veggie, rather than baby bok choy. I think it worked out pretty well, the only downside is that it comes in 3-serving bags, so I wound up having to freeze a couple extra servings of sauteed/steamed kale.
It may seem like a large amount of rice and kale versus a small amount of char siu pork loin, but honestly the char siu is strongly flavored enough with zing from the crushed red pepper that it works out.
I mentioned in my past entry (two years ago) that the pork came out crumbly -- well, what I've been doing is cooking it at 133F for 5 hours, then cooling the meat still in the bag for a couple hours, then searing it for two minutes on each side on a very hot frying pan or wok. It comes out pretty much the right consistency and taste! I should probably try dropping the temperature some more to 130F and see if that makes it juicier or more tender.
