Oven Bake

For beef, pork, lamb, venison, duck, dove, quail, or, yes, even a mixture of the above!

Corn Light Bread, a favorite barbecue side in middle Tennessee, breaks all the Southern cornbread rules. It’s loaded with flour and sugar and it’s baked in a loaf pan. Why sweet cornbread with barbecue? Our guess is that sweet-sauced barbecue calls for a sweeter bread, just like the customary pairing of a sweet wine with a sweet dessert. Anything not sweet enough just tastes sour. Judging how most of the country prefers sweet cornbread, this may be the one that tastes the most like home.

Other than a soft bun or white bread, cornbread is the choice for barbecue. Min has been making it so long she only uses the recipe in her head. After years of working with the test kitchen staff of Martha White, the historic Nashville flour and cornmeal company, and writing the live radio commercials for Martha White’s Friday night segment of the Grand Ole Opry, who needs a recipe? The key, of course, is self-rising cornmeal mix. Southerners prefer white cornmeal (made with white corn) to yellow. So do Rhode Islanders, as R. B. likes to point out, where the native white corn johnnycakes are as ancient as their close cousins, Southern hot water hoecakes. Either way, white and yellow are interchangeable and basically a regional preference, like white and brown eggs. Don’t get hung up on color. For cornbread, it’s all about crust and batter. First, the best crust comes only from a well-seasoned black iron skillet preheated with bacon drippings or oil. When the batter hits the pan, POW! It sizzles. Second, the batter must be creamy and pourable. If your batter is thick and dense, add more liquid, because you want the batter to slide to the edges of the pan with ease. Cornmeal absorbs quite a lot of liquid, and even a shot of water can loosen things up. Get the feel of good cornbread batter, and crumbly, dry cornbread will be a thing of the past. Now, about the balance of outside crust to inside moisture. For Min, the finest cornbread is an inch thick and a mile wide. Most 2-cup recipes baked in an 8- or 10-inch skillet are just too tall, denying the cornbread its rightful ratio of crust. Min uses about 1 1/2 cups of cornmeal mix for a 12-inch skillet and only about a cup for a 10-inch. Sugar is also an issue that divides cornbread camps. The most common cornbread recipes and mixes are often half flour and half cornmeal, with a heavy dose of sweetness. We’re in the other camp, using very little sugar (or none at all) in skillet cornbread. It’s just a matter of taste. If you live in the land of self-rising cornmeal mix, get acquainted with it and use it to replace the plain cornmeal, flour, leavening, and salt. It’s the best way to go. If not, and you don’t have a relative to send you some, give this a try. Always serve cornbread flipped out of the pan with the beautiful browned crust faceup. Whatever you do, invest in a good cast-iron skillet. It will bring your family generations of top-notch cornbread.

Loaded Cornbread is the cornbread for a crowd and essential for a big barbecue. Dense and moist with Cheddar cheese, cream-style corn, and buttermilk, it can be baked in advance and cut into neat squares. Unlike traditional skillet cornbread that’s best eaten hot out of the oven, Loaded Cornbread travels well and tastes fine at room temperature. The jalapeños are up to you. Substitute a chopped fresh mild green chile or even a can of them. The other substitution is yogurt for buttermilk. Again, if the batter seems too thick, add a little water.

Ranch Style® Beans are Min’s number one foolproof side dish for instant satisfaction every time. She says that if Andy Warhol had been a Texan, the Ranch Style® Beans can would hang in museums throughout the world. The chili pintos’ unmistakable label dressed in basic black with bright white Western lettering and yellow and red accents is as common a sight in Southwestern pantries as Campbell’s tomato soup ever was. These well-seasoned beans make an “appetite pleasin’” homey cornbread casserole with any leftover cheater meat.

Good freezer management makes it so much easier to get away with two-timing. When the freezer door won’t close, we know it’s time for a couple bags of sauerkraut for an Alsatian choucroute (pronounced shoo-KROOT) garni. A French peasant dish from the Alsace region, choucroute garni means sauerkraut “garnished” with an abundance of pork products, or occasionally goose or duck. It’s the perfect freezer purge for using up all manner of cheater pork plus any sausages, bacon, or ham bones. Whatever you find in there will pretty much work with this dish. Choucroute (the sauerkraut) is traditionally slow-baked in a heavy casserole with slab bacon or a ham hock, carrots, onion, garlic, apple, and wine or beer. The seasoning mix depends on the cook (or the pantry), but usually includes juniper berries, bay leaves, cloves, black or white pepper, even cumin and coriander seeds. The sausages, ham, and other meats are added near the end of cooking. Get the bagged or jarred sauerkraut for the freshest taste. While the sauerkraut turns French in the oven, thaw the trove of frozen meats. A fruity, dry Alsatian Riesling is traditional for both cooking and drinking. French and German beers are also a good match. To complete the meal, add boiled potatoes and a green salad.

For too long cauliflower has been confined to salad bars, vegetable medleys, and Velveeta sauces. Everything changed for us when R. B. roasted two cut-up heads in a foil packet on the grill. The transformation was amazing—instead of bland, white, and wet the florets were brown, nutty, and rich. Yes, cheese was involved. And some bacon. A nicely browned cheater oven version is just as big a hit and has become a dinner regular. R. B. prefers the cauliflower cooked really soft, not crisp-tender, but fix it the way you like. It’s good to go as is, or dressed up to suit the menu. Give our variations a try. Some are everyday good, others are fancy dinner-party style.

Whenever the two-pound bags of frozen shrimp are on sale (the bigger the shrimp, the better), we throw one in the freezer and the other in a brine before a quick trip under the broiler. If you’re not near live shrimp, choose bagged frozen ones because the fish counter’s fresh is often the same stuff already thawed. You’ll get perkier results thawing them in a salty bath, which puts a little ocean back in. This recipe is ripe for tinkering. Vary the rub and swap the butter for olive oil. If you skip the brine, use a dry rub with salt instead. Smoked sea salts and smoked paprika chic it up, but the bare-bones version is always a home run with kids. Pull a skewer through a warm corn or flour tortilla, and top with shredded cabbage, cilantro, onion, and a quick chili powder mayonnaise, à la fish tacos. Delicious.

Next to firing up the smoker, having a catfish fry in the party pot (our name for the turkey fryer) is our preferred all-day patio workout. Then, after hours of fun over the hot cauldron, we’re done with frying for months. Except maybe for an occasional batch of corn tortilla chips. The thing about catfish is that its soft, almost mushy flesh demands a rigid cornmeal exoskeleton forged in hot peanut oil. An oven and a seasoned panko/cornmeal crust mimic the deep-fried crust with a fraction of the mess and without oil recycling in the morning. R. B. confirms that leftover Catfish Sticks reheat like a dream in a toaster oven. He makes a mean cheater po’boy with reheated catfish sticks piled on a hamburger bun slathered with tartar sauce and topped with iceberg lettuce excavated from the crisper drawer.

Once you start using the lighter, larger, crisper Japanese panko crumbs, the usual bread crumbs will feel like sand. A box of panko in the pantry crunches up all kinds of oven-fried seafood and chicken and substitutes for bread crumbs in any recipe. Their airy texture is akin to the difference between flaky kosher salt and dense iodized salt. Figure on about three large scallops per person.

We’ve always had a thing for the charred lamb kebabs on flat skewers that the kebab/gyro joints do so well. One place even gave R. B. a couple of swordlike skewers after he bombarded them with questions. We make lamb/beef combo meatballs flavored with cumin to roast in the oven, and sometimes even finish on the grill. The meatballs cook on a baking sheet just like a pan of cookies. We’ve come to appreciate the many lives of a good batch of meatballs. A bag of Q’Balls in the freezer is as prized as a bag of brisket. Toss them with pasta, stuff them into pita pockets and sub sandwiches, serve them as a heavy appetizer or a quick heat-up for kid suppers. Customize the Q’Balls by substituting a couple teaspoons of any of the cheater dry rubs for the salt and seasonings.

For oven salmon we use either an enamel-coated roasting pan or a foil-lined baking sheet. As much as we love cast iron for its searing qualities and overall old-school cooking coolness, fishy bacon and cornbread are never a big hit with the breakfast club. Any salmon leftovers are earmarked for Two-Timer Salmon Salad (recipe follows). It helps to cut whole salmon fillets into serving-size pieces before cooking. Pay attention to the thickness of the fish (the very thin ends take almost no time) and cook accordingly.

One ambitious Thanksgiving eve we gathered family, friends, and neighbors over to the house and deep-fried all their turkeys for the next day. That was fun and exhausting. Of course, keeping with R. B.’s former motto “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing,” we finished the turkey fry with a big batch of catfish. At least we got our money’s worth out of the peanut oil. For other ambitious Thanksgivings, R. B. has stayed up all night (by himself) nursing Tom Turkey’s fire with a formula of wet hickory chips and Tennessee whiskey. Those were the memorable years when R. B. dozed through Thanksgiving dinner and got along particularly well with everyone. Now that R. B. is in cheater recovery, a wet-smoked turkey in an oven bag leaves him with the single challenge of keeping things light and deferential at the dinner table. The cheater turkey is always moist, tender, and smoky and shows off a golden brown sheen.

Put some big beefy ribs in a piping-hot cast-iron pot and in as little as an hour, the ribs will emerge with a deep, dark brown crust and a meaty, tender chew. Like slow cooker Texas Beef Ribs, there’s no need to finish Hot Pot Ribs under a broiler unless you’re brushing on a sauce. They also reheat well in a dry slow cooker or in a 350°F oven wrapped in foil. You’ll also get a nice batch of beef broth out of the deal. After it cools, chill the broth in the fridge to congeal the fat so you can discard it easily. Pour the warmed broth over the reheated ribs or freeze it to use in other recipes.

Grilled chicken marinated in Worcestershire and soy sauce was one of the first things R. B.’s Gourmet-subscribing mother, Loie, taught him to cook. It was probably the first marinade he’d ever tasted, and he loved the way it quickly permeated the chicken skin with color and the meat with salty flavor. Later on, he discovered that Loie’s salty black concoction is a common barbecue trick available at the supermarket under several labels. Both the popular store blends and Loie’s homemade pack quite a punch and don’t need much time to work up some flavor on chicken or beef. Here is Loie’s cheater recipe, which you can easily double and store in a sealed container in the fridge. Use it for chicken or a Gunsmoke steak cooked on the grill, in a skillet, or under the broiler.