In case you’ve been hiding under a rock to stay cool this sweltering summer, it’s time to enter your spicy and BBQ-related products in the 2012 Scovie Awards contest. Why not take advantage of the Early Bird Special: enter by July 31 and save $10 off the entry fee for each product you submit! Scovie Awards is THE largest, most …
Ask Chef Mike: What’s the Story on Horseradish?
Q: What’s a good use for horseradish besides cocktail sauce or as a side with roast beef? And what makes it so hot? A: Horseradish is a root, similar to wasabi, and a member of the mustard family. Prepared horseradish is grated horseradish root combined with distilled vinegar. It has almost no taste until grated when the cells are crushed …
Hickory Smoked Peanuts? You Bet!
Vegetarians and vegans rejoice! Now you, too can enjoy the delicious goodness of a great hunk of smoked meat…without the guilt. The geniuses over at Hampton Farms have married the flavor of hickory smoke with dry-roasted peanuts for a truly addictive new snack. In fact, I’m eating them in between sentences at my computer. Now, I’m not generally an in-the-shell-peanut-eating …
The 2011 Disc-It Round Up
As three-year-olds go, the Disc-It Round Up is pretty developed and well-behaved. It’s an event the folks at Disc-It started in 2009 as their way of giving back to UNM Children’s Hospital for all the care that Disc-It front man Nevin Montano’s daughter and nephew received in the past. Round Up year one saw 350 attendees; that number ballooned to …
Ask Chef Mike: Why Heatless Jalapeños?
Q: I heard about some guy who has developed a jalapeño pepper with no heat. Why would anybody do that? A: Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Some manufacturers of hot products prefer to use heatless chile varieties and add heat later during processing through the addition of concentrated capsaicin oleoresin. This provides a measurable, more …
It May Be the World’s Largest, But Where’s the Green Chile?
A new Guinness World Record for the World’s Largest Commercially Available Hamburger was set on Saturday, July 2 at the County Fair in Alameda, California. Weighing in at 777 glorious pounds, the mutant “Juicy’s Outlaw Burger” was created by Juicy’s LLC. After a total of 13 hours’ cooking time and the obligatory weigh-in, the burger was split up and shared …
For Carnivores Only: The Meating Place of Smoke & Spice
By Dave DeWitt and Nancy Gerlach The first outdoor cook to use chile peppers during a barbecue was Jaguar Claw, a somewhat hen-pecked paleo-Native American who lived in the Amazon Basin about 20,000 years ago. He had dispatched his prey with his spear, had butchered the world’s largest rodent with his new flint carving knife into chunks, and was contemplating …
