Thursday, September 6, 2012

What a Croc! Get it?

I've been trying very hard to cook more throughout the week. With the addition of Bonus Baby, time has become a major issue for trying to get meals ready after I'm cut loose from all the kids. As a professional fake chef, I never spent much time with crock pots during my cooking endeavours. Several years ago, a friend decided it would be funny to give Capn' Fakecookin the devil's cooking pot. After I made the leap to being at home with the kids, I realized that they are in fact quite useful. My apologies to people who I may have insulted over the years based on nothing more than their ownership of this appliance.

Melissa and I are picky eaters, so most recipes need a little adjustment and some just won't work. Plus, many of the foods we want to eat most often don't get the best results from hours in a crock pot. Things like...BBQ. I have looked up a great number of recipes over the past year, all promising amazing pulled pork, ribs, BBQ chicken, and basically every cut of everything from nothing more than the Ronco philosophy of set it and forget it. The principles of the recipes have all been the same. A little seasoning, perhaps an onion, and then dump a bottle of BBQ sauce over the meat and leave it on low for however many hours.

Review after review gave top marks to many of these recipes as a way to get all that BBQ flavor without the constant tending needed for smoking or grilling. Personally, I never saw these results from any of the recipes. Some of them were...okay, but I wasn't looking for just okay. I needed something awesome. One day, with great hope, I found a crock pot rib recipe that had one of those pictures designed to make you hungry. It worked. I added ribs to our meal plan the following week.

The recipe was ultimately the same as most crock pot BBQ recipes, but I had a plan! I was going to use my home-made dry rub on the ribs AND I was going to use a glazing sauce I had made up when I did some real smoked ribs earlier this year. I figured that the taste should be pretty amazing, even if the results were a little underwhelming.

Meticulously I followed the directions which promised that "fall off the bone" tenderness that some people really get excited about. Fake chef cooking tip: If you are unable to take a bite of the rib without all of meat falling off - you shouldn't be bragging. Likewise if you can't pick up the rib by the bone without the meat falling off - you am cook it wrongbad.

As usual, the great thing about this was being able to keep up with three kids and know that dinner was working the whole time. The house smelled amazing all day, and I'm happy to take the credit there. After almost ten hours (the recipe recommended twelve) it was close to our slightly sad, early-bird special, dinner time. So I checked the ribs to see how things were progressing. I used a big set of tongs and gently lifted a set of ribs out of the sweet and spicy sauce. It was already far gone - just way too tender. The meat just sort of dissolved as you picked it up, a great idea for pulled pork perhaps, but not ribs. Additionally, the sauce and spices had clearly seeped into the meat, which you would think is great, but there just wasn't the flavor. It was just color. We had to use extra sauce just to get any form of "BBQ" flavor.

I will not give up, though I will put out the call. If you have a great crock pot recipe - particularly one for BBQ - that you really love, please share it!

Also, when I have perfected my crock pot pizza - I will let everyone know.

3 comments:

  1. I have never had luck with BBQ crock pot recipes either myself. My husband and kids all love the 3 envelope crock pot recipe. Google it, it's famous amongst crock pot folk lol!

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    1. haha, "crock pot folk" - This looks good! I see a lot of slider recipes that I think the boys would be into as well. That's goin on the meal plan soon. Thanks Heidi!

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  2. Every crock pot recipe i Have ever tried for BBQ has fallen off the bone. The closest I have ever come is keeping the temperature down low until the last hour and switching it to high. Adding just a small amount of water as your cooking (1/4 cup) it's still hit or miss though sometimes they fall directly off the bone sometimes they don't. It's because of the way they are cooked. It is the reason they fall of the bone.

    Aaron

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