Atomic Buffalo Turds - ABT's

Atomic Buffalo Turds (ABT's) are always a crowd favorite, easy to make, quick to assemble, and lots of variations available to match the tastes of your crowd! Also included in this recipe is the "secret" to making these tasty treats even easier to assemble!

The basic ingredients include jalapenos, cream cheese, bacon, and hard salami!

Per 1lb of fresh jalapenos:
1lb of jalapenos (usually about 12 peppers per lb)
1 - 8oz pack of cream cheese
1/2 lb of bacon
Small pack of hard salami


Lay the jalapeno on the cutting board and slit the top where the pepper seems to land and rest naturally.


Scoop out all the seeds from the inside. Try and leave the top and sides in tact - try not to break the pepper apart too much. You can see I'm not wearing any gloves in this picture - maybe you should!



Spoon 1 tablespoon of cream cheese into a slice of hard salami. This is the secret! If you try to spoon the cream cheese directly into the ABT it gets a bit messy. The hard salami folds into a taco and then slips right into the pepper!

Don't forget to get creative - add a slice of pineapple or ....?!?! into the pepper with the cream cheese and salami.

Wrap the pepper in a HALF SLICE of bacon - simple cut the entire lb of bacon in half to get the half slices.

NOTE: use quality bacon for this recipe - believe me, I've used all the brands and price points and it is not worth using cheap bacon to save a buck... I use Farmer John Maple Bacon. It is thick sliced, uniform shaped, and very flavorful. It doesn't string or fall apart.

Here's another key - if you use high quality bacon, stretch the bacon as you wrap the pepper. When you let the bacon go, it will contract and stick to itself and the pepper eliminating the need for tooth picks. When you are making a lot of these, the tooth picks stick out and reduce the grill space AND have to be picked out of each pepper - what a pain!

A perfectly bacon wrapped pepper!



Ready for the grill / smoker!

Only 2lbs of peppers left to go!


You can also use Anaheim chili peppers or yellow peppers or.....?!?! Use your imagination - the possibilities are endless. I do use more dry salami and cream cheese to stuff the larger peppers but that's not a bad thing - is it!?

I cook the peppers at 250 F grate temp for at least 1 hour but best results are 2 hours at 250F. The bacon gets a little more crisp and the pepper skin gets easier to bit through but is still crispy. About 15 minutes before you pull the peppers, you can dust them with some brown sugar to offset some of the heat or just to add another twist to the recipe.

Who's hungry?

Spicy Tri-Tip

This recipe for Spicy Tri-Tip is NOT for the faint of heart. There is enough spice in here to make my dog think twice before he inhales a piece!

The average tri-tip is usually about 2 1/2lbs. It will shrink some in the cooking process but trimming is typically not required. Look for a piece that has even marbling throughout the meat and no large pockets of fat. There will be a thin layer of fat on the lower side but not thick enough to trim off. I like to use the rule of thumb - 1/2lb of meat per person so a typical tri-tip after it shrinks a bit will feed 4 people. You can stretch this if there are girls or US Coast Guardsmen (sic?) present but don't get crazy.



Recipe is per average size tri-tip cut:
Mustard (You can use plain yellow but Dijon kicks it up a bit) - 6oz
Black Pepper - 1 tblspn
Onion Powder - 1/2 tblspn
Cayenne Pepper - 1/4 tblspn
Season Salt - 2 tblspn
Cumin - 1 tblspn
Garlic Powder - 2 tblspn
Chili Powder - 2 tblspn



Here's a trick - cut slices into the meat (not the fat side) about 1/4" deep and make about 1" squares. This really lets the spices get sucked into the meat. This is a reasonable option if you don't want to inject the meat. In this case, since we are not injecting with clear or near clear liquids, this is the best option.

Coat the meat with the mustard first - work into all the cracks. The mustard will help the dry rub stick to the meat - particularly when we rest (wrap in foil) the meat.

Work the dry rub into the meat getting as much even coverage as possible. If you made the slices in the top, make sure you get into all the cuts!

Cook the tri-tip at 250F grate temp - I start fat side down to get it soft and then flip it fat side up for the last 1/2 hour. Pull the meat at 140F internal but you can go to 150F internal for a medium cook. I wouldn't recommend exceeding 150F. Normally it should take about 90 minutes to get to 140 so flip the meat fat side up after about an hour. This will also give you the chance to get a probe temp of the meat and see how it's doing.

After the meat has hit the internal temp you are looking for, wrap it in foil and then a beach towel and place on the counter - or better yet - in a dry cooler. You can add a splash of apple juice at this point but if you have a nice piece of meat, you shouldn't have to.

Let the meat rest for at least 1/2 hour. If you have it in a cooler it will maintain temp for a few hours.

Unwrap and slice - try to get your slices about 1/4" thick.

Chow time!

Chicken Satay

This is a really easy recipe that takes about 20 minutes to prep and another 30 - 40 minutes on a grill / smoker. It can be used as an appetizer or a main course. You can also substitute in beef instead of chicken - probably a skirt or flank steak would work well.

The ingredients are simple:

• Boneless Chicken Thighs - each Thigh will fill 1 skewer.
• Thai Peanut Sauce - you can find this at your grocery store with all the other sauces - I like San-J but they are all similar.
• Sweet Onion - 1 whole onion per 3 3kewers.
• Wooden Skewers - I use 10" Long Skewers so I can fit a bunch of stuff on each one!

Cut each onion into 8 sections and pour some olive oil over them.




Wash and prep the thigh meat by boning and removing the skin. You can use breast meat but dark meat is more forgiving and you don't have to pay attention to the time as carefully. Dark meat doesn't have the potential to dry out like breast meat.



Cut the boned thigh meat into strips about 1" wide.

Pour the Thai Peanut Sauce over the meat while it's on the cutting board. This way you can work the sauce into the meat instead of pouring it over the meat after it's already on the skewer - you can get the sauce into all the folds. You can save some of the sauce to pour over the skewers after you have them on.

Thread the strips onto the skewers. Try and keep the folds tight so you can get some sauce captured in the folds as well as fitting the 3 - 4 strips per skewer. I put an onion wedge between each strip and on each end to add some color and flavor. You could also use bell peppers or ...?

I cook these just like any other thigh - about 350F at the grate and it usually takes between 1/2 hour and 45 minutes depending on how much you have the door opening on your grill. You should cook chicken up to 180F internal but try not to get too much above that or it will start to dry the meat out.

I used the remaining onions and Thai Peanut sauce to make a little extra snack.

I flip chicken almost constantly. Probably more than I need to but about every 5 minutes or so. I never have any complaints and what are you doing besides having a cold one anyway?

I made some sweet potato "fries" at the same time to go with the skewers. These came out great!

Fatty Piston - BBQ "Tool"

The "Fatty" or Bacon Explosion is now a common term known in the BBQ world and beyond. This "tool" should make it easier for you to successfully make a fatty.

I found this tool on another blog here but there were no specific instructions or bill of materials on how to build it. I'm making it easier.....

Why else would someone make this tool? Well.... I have issues - whenever I make a burrito / taco I seem to add about twice as much as the tortilla will hold - now what do I do? How am I supposed to eat this monster? Well, I have the same problem when I make a fatty. I know how much stuff I want on the inside. It just seems to be a little overstuffed making the fatty hard to roll up and maintain the integrity of bacon weave. When I saw the fatty piston on the other site a light bulb went on. I can compact the stuffing, getting the required amount of product in the middle!

All of the items were purchased at Lowe's but should be available at any home improvement store.



2" Schedule 40 PVC Pipe - the Cylinder
3/4" Schedule 40 PVC Pipe - the Piston Drive Shaft
1" Slip Fit Cap - the Piston Head
1" Slip Fit x 3/4" Slip Fit Adapter - connects the drive shaft with the piston head
1 1/2" Slip Fit Cap - the handle
1 1/2" Slip Fit x 3/4" Slip Fit Adapter - connects the drive shaft with handle.

I made the handle a bit larger than the piston head so you can tell which side is the piston and the larger surface just felt better in my hand.



You can see that the 1" Cap barely fits inside the 2" pipe. It's not a super tight tolerance with about 1/16" clearance on each side. I was worried at first that this gap would allow product to get around the side and cause problems but it worked great!




Here are the parts laid out so you can visualize how they go together.




I used some goo gone to get rid of the bar code sticker and price tag.




Here is the piston assembled. I glued the handle and slip fit adapter with PVC cement. I did not glue the piston head and adapter because PVC Glue is probably not food grade and I didn't feel like testing the theory even though it probably wouldn't come in contact - since the piston stayed together when I used it - I guess it didn't need to be cemented anyway. I may have to glue it after a few hundred uses but until I need to.....

I cut the 2" Pipe / product cylinder about 12" long. Most of the fatties I make seem to come out about 8 - 9" wide so this left a little room just in case but wasn't so long it became difficult to use / clean / store. I cut the 3/4" pipe 15" Long. Combined with the piston head and handle, it was long enough but still not too long.




I jammed almost 2 1/2 cups of stuffing into the piston for the appropriate length of my fatty. This stuffing was diced baked potatoes, cheese, breakfast sausage and some mango salsa. I wouldn't recommend adding any liquids in the future. It made the log kind of loose and would hold together better without it.





The log fit just right into the fatty. It was compacted so much that if I needed to I probably could have trimmed some off the end without messing up the log.

Add some sauce on the sausage layer....

Roll your fatty up - remember - roll up the sausage layer first and THEN roll up the bacon weave around the sausage roll.

Que'n for Kids 2010 California State BBQ Competition

Let's get this party started!!

Que'n for Kids 2010 California State BBQ Competition - Orange County Fairgrounds, Costa Mesa, CA - June 12, 2010.

Meat, Inc BBQ Team just finished attending the OC BBQ Competition.

Team members for this competition were Aaron, Doug, Ryan and Strawberry. Also joining us were Ann and Dan - KCBS Certified Judges that cooked with us to check the box on their way to becoming MASTER JUDGES! Very impressive!

We also had some help from Mike and Wendy and some extra friends that dropped in!

Aaron singing Holy Diver to his meats so they could cook even better. Ann is in the background trying to remember the chorus (you can see his stripes so you know he's clean).




Mike and Doug prepping meats.




Doug and Mike tossing meats on the smoker.




The Meat, Inc, crew making the world famous ABT's (Atomic Buffalo Turds). We only made 20lbs of jalapenos. All sold out within 1 1/2 hours.




Dan and Doug checking on the Texas crutch. Looking good boys!




Strawberry manning the wet bar. Looking good with a shirt on finally.




Aaron explaining to Monkey (from Rancho Rocke BBQ) why we couldn't trade Strawberry for a 40oz of Mickeys until all the dishes were washed.




Mike - that's 2 tablespoons of CUMIN - sheesh!




Can Aaron be in charge for a minute?!?! Put your shirt on!




Aaron and Ann making turn in boxes. Such great fun. Ann needs to make our turn in boxes every time. Aaron sucks at it.



Aaron and Strawberry being interviewed by the Food Network about our History Of BBQ Display. Do you think this film has ANY chance making it to production? Me thinks not.




Mike and Ryan discussing Cumin.




Turn in Chicken - a VERY disappointing 48 / 57. Same recipe that we pulled a 2nd place at Stage Coach.




Ribs - an average 34 / 57. That pesky 6th bone killed us.




Pork Butt - 18 / 57 - not bad.




Brisket - 19 / 57 - Not bad.

We finished up 30 / 57 in the middle of the pack. If our chicken would have been scored higher, we would have had a top 20. What are you going to do?

Overall contest results found here:
http://www.cbbqa.org/wiki/index.php?title=Kristie%27s_Foundation_-_Orange_County_BBQ_Festival_2010




Vending was outstanding - the proceeds from the vending went to Kristie's Kids Foundation - a great cause - Meat, Inc. sold 1198 samples! We sold over 300lbs of meat in under 2 1/2 hours! The crowd really enjoyed the samples!

Here's a link to the foundation. Please visit - it is a GREAT cause!

http://www.kristies.org/




Wes taking a bite of award winning ribs!




Ryan and Doug pulling more meats for the crowd. Doug asked Ryan if he wanted front or back of the house and Ryan picked the "easy" one - back of the house. Ryan had to cook his a$$ off! I'm pretty sure he didn't get dehydrated though!




The line passes by the History of BBQ display.



Monkey shows his appreciation for Strawberry and the official "Mr. BBQ 2010" - Big Country.

A Meat, Inc. fan voting for crowd favorite. She voted 5 times. It's legal.

Strawberry was actually asked / volunteered by the team to announce the award ceremony. At least he's wearing a shirt!

Overall it was a very well run contest for a great cause. We had a great time but we were a bit disappointed in the overall results - particularly chicken. But what can you do? Get another beverage, cook some more meat, and try again next time!