Grilling

Stuffed quail sizzling on the grill is a common sight at many a West Texas barbecue. A lot of my friends use a shotgun to bag their quail, but I snag mine on the Internet from The Diamond H Ranch in Bandera, Texas (www.texasgourmetquail.com), where they raise the birds and process them, too. They come vacuum-packed and ready for cooking, with the back, breast, and thigh bones removed. All I have to do is stuff them with a spicy chile-cheese mixture, wrap them up with a piece of bacon, and then put ’em on the grill. I finish them off with a jalapeño jelly glaze just before serving. In all, a mighty nice dinner treat to share with friends.

I met chef Kevin Stewart and his partner, Richard Cordray, at my friend Loncito Cartwright’s South Texas ranch. Kevin prepared this dish using Loncito’s grass-fed lamb and I asked for the recipe, named after Kevin and Richard’s former Marfa restaurant, Blue Javalina. Wild packs of javalinas—compact, coarse-haired, piglike animals with short snouts—roam the high plains of West Texas. Javalinas do not come in blue, nor do they make for great eating. Loncito’s lamb is a different story. His grass-fed lamb has a mild taste that appeals to even the most reluctant lamb eater. It is available at select farmers’ markets and specialty foods stores throughout Texas.

Good redneck that he is, John Pennell says he started making sausage out of every critter he hunted. Apparently that wasn’t enough, and he turned to making it out of quail purchased from nearby Diamond H Ranch in Bandera, Texas, a leading quail breeder and processor. Soon John’s sausage became so popular that he chucked a sixteen-year stint in construction to concentrate on a new business: Uncle John’s Quail Sausage. He ships his sausage all over the country and supplies numerous Texas restaurants (mine included) with his delicious quail links. Uncle John’s getting pretty well known in these parts, but I’m just as big a fan of his wife, Lanette, leader of Almost Patsy Cline, one of the area’s top party bands. A vocalist, songwriter, and bassist, she and fellow vocalist and keyboardist Vicki Gillespie started the band in 2002. The duo got so many requests for covers of country legend Patsy Cline’s songs that they named their band after her. As the band’s popularity grew, they brought in artists Larry Nolen (guitars, vocals), Bryan Kibbe (guitars, vocals) and Rick Reynolds (drums, vocals), expanding the group’s repertoire to include the music of numerous male legends. I’d sure like to have Almost Patsy Cline at my next party. On the menu, of course, would be Uncle John’s quail sausage on skewers, making it easy to grab a bite and keep on dancing.

Josh Raymer, the creative young chef behind Fredericksburg’s Navajo Grill, enjoys a little low-key partying at home on his days off. He and his wife, Julie, often invite friends in for a relaxed evening with simple food, a few good wines or a cooler full of beer, and some good conversation. Josh describes Hill Country parties as generally laid-back—dressing up means stepping into your “nicer” boots. But even the most casual affair on his stone patio includes music—Willy Nelson and the Texas Tornados are favorites. Decoration often consists of little more than bunches of herbs clipped from his carefully tended herb garden and plunked in jars. “We don’t do much.” Josh and Julie came to my garden party with their two-year-old son Hank and this equally irresistible salad. Don’t let the semi-boneless instructions frighten you. You can order neatly packaged, semi-boned quail from just about any commercial outlet, including Josh’s Bandera, Texas, supplier, Diamond H Ranch (www.texasgourmetquail.com). Semi-boned quail means the back, breast, and thigh bones have been removed, leaving the bird’s skin and its tiny leg bones intact. This allows the birds to be laid out flat for easy grilling.

Austin chef Jesse Griffiths and his wife, Tamara Mayfield, brought succulent lamb ribs to my Fredericksburg garden party, and everyone devoured them. Jesse cleverly ensures these ribs are partyfriendly for guests and hosts alike—the recipe can mostly be done in advance. The ribs are initially simmered on the stove top and then need just a very short turn on a grill before serving. Jesse and Tamara are co-founders of Austin’s Dai Due Supper Club; their dinners are movable feasts staged at various local farms, vineyards, hotels, and private homes featuring local, sustainably produced ingredients prepared onsite by Jesse. If you can’t find lamb, pork spareribs or beef shortribs will work equally well. If you use beef ribs, they’ll need to simmer for 4 to 5 hours. You can simmer the ribs up to 24 hours in advance, and the glaze will keep for 3 weeks in the refrigerator

The only place to start with something so absurd yet perfect as this dish is in the middle. The bacon is ready to flip in about a minute and a half. The edges get super-crispy (who has ever noticed before that bacon has corners?), while the lean inside stays wet and meaty. And the fat actually firms and ripples, like lardo that’s been working out. Suspense builds when you flip the bacon and crack the eggs on top. It’s awful—like watching a landslide threaten to wipe out your village—as the egg whites run toward the edge of the hot brick, but the salt is so hot they rapidly lose steam (pun intended) and sizzle to a halt, with at most just a few rivulets dribbling over the sides of the block. The whole thing is done in less than 5 minutes. Take a bite and things get weirder still, with the sheen of salt simmering underneath the egg and bacon instead of on top, and a jumble of textures—creamy, crunchy, chewy, juicy, fatty, fleshy, and eggy.

Barbecued ribs are a delicacy born of the ingenuity of the poorest—the slaves and servants who were tossed bones by their masters and transformed gristly, fatty “spare ribs” into a complex delicious, finger-sucking feast—the New World equivalent of the French potage. The trick to cooking ribs is keeping them moist: brining is a must. Even the most delicious housemade bacon would envy the subtle woodsy notes infused from the smoked salt used in this brine. Bacony ribs glazed with a rich and spicy sauce: it’s like Christmas in July.

If the restaurants that produce them are any indication, the superlative steaks of the world cannot be reduced to a simple formula. Consider Le Relais de Venise L’Entrecôte in Paris, where the brisk waiter actually serves you half a steak, then gives the other half to another person, and then, just as you are finishing the last bite of your first half, he brings you another half-steak right off the grill—a miraculous second coming. Consider Raoul’s in New York, where the experience of eating is suffused by an equally savory experience of sitting, drinking, observing, and conversing. The only way to rival these folks is to take matters into your own hands: an excellent steak, the best pepper, the perfect salt, and thou. Tomes have been written on how to cook a steak. Precious little has been said on how to salt one. To cook: start with a lot of heat, finish with a little. Do the opposite with the salt: cook with no salt at all, or very little, if you really must have some. When the steak is served, choose the most beautiful sel gris you can find and let fly.

There is only one ingredient that is used in every burger recipe. It is not the all-beef patty (burgers can be made from pork, ostrich, bison, portobello, soy, lamb, turkey); it’s not the sesame seed bun (there is baguette, millet loaf, no bun at all); it’s not the special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, etcetera, etcetera. All are optional. It’s salt. You cannot make a great burger without it. I’ve never seen a recipe that didn’t call for anywhere from a pinch to a teaspoon. Yet rarely if ever does a recipe name specifically which salt might be the best one for the job. Salt should improve a burger in three ways. It should expand the fullness and complexity of the meat’s own flavor by lending complementary mineral depth. It should produce a layering of flavors, presenting more or less of itself unpredictably with every bite. It should lend a crunch of texture that calls attention to itself by contrasting with the succulence of the meat and signaling the flavor dynamics of the sandwich to your mind and your palate. In other words, it should do its work, do it in a disciplined manner, and communicate the work it has done effectively. Sel gris is chunky, moist, and packed with fresh minerals—perfect for the job.

We embrace the urge to grill as a rogue moment of atavism in modern life. Our primitive faculties at play, we become dissatisfied with our indoor culinary selves. Flattening a split chicken under a brick of 500-million-year-old salt and cooking it quickly over an open fire makes good on all that grilling has to offer: simplicity and dramatic impact. The salt block compresses the poultry, making it cook more quickly and seasoning it at the same time. The result is a novel flash-fired flavor, crackling crisp skin, and firmer textured meat that reinvigorates the experience of eating chicken as an authentic form of self-expression. See page 267 for more on using salt blocks.

The sheep is one of the first animals domesticated by mankind. For about ten thousand years, we’ve been living together and feeding each other. The true testament to the strength of our relationship is that it hasn’t changed much. The passion is still alive. One secret to this longlived tryst is that sheep are uniquely unwilling to give up their sheepy flavor, so that every time we eat them it’s like a first date, or the first time, or an earlier time, or a mythic time. We’ve domesticated the gaminess out of most everything we eat, but every time we toss a leg of lamb on the fire we grow bushy and wild, our countenance waxing fierce amid the ghostly tendrils of burning fat and smoky mountain herbs. And after we toil over the flaming coals, the table is laid, the tapers lit, the dark wine poured. Aromatic and rackling—golden on the outside; savagely, voluptuously rosy on the inside—a leg of lamb is a meal of the ages. Salting a leg of lamb should be approached with anticipation and reverence; this is one of the truly sacred uses of a coarse and lusciously moist salt—in other words, sel gris—in both the cooking and the inishing of the food. Any good, moist sel gris will work here, but I cannot resist calling for my own true love, the rather obscure but sublimely supple salt we have adopted as our house sel gris at The Meadow. The zesty flavors of Parameswaran’s pepper—a whirl of eucalyptus, celery seed, lemon peel, and cedar—is likewise a point of precision that can lend yet more depth to the flavors of the dish.

The plump pink flesh of a salmon needs so little to bring it to life that many people call it quits before they’ve tested its limits. The smoky-sweet flakes of Cyprus hardwood smoked lend an explosive crunch that brings a whole new vocabulary to the language of fish. The salt’s cleanliness penetrates through the richer flavors, adding depth to breadth; its pastrylike crackle gives the palate something firm to hold onto amid the fish’s sometime incessant unctuousness; and its lilt of golden smoke brings an oakiness that incandesces on your palate long after the fish has left the fire.

When I was first married, back in the late sixties and early seventies, going out to eat was reserved for very special occasions. Because of our tight budgets and young children, our social lives consisted of cooking out with our friends on Saturday nights. When the steaks and Vidalia onions were piled on our plates and we took our first bites, I think for a short while we all forgot that we were as poor as church mice, because we were eating like kings. What fond memories these Vidalia onions bring back!