jalapeño - Smokey Jones

Smoked Jalapeño Poppers

September 18, 2021

A few weeks ago my wife and I were invited over to our friends’ place for dinner. We were asked to bring a side so we thought a bit and that’s when my wife suggested smoking some jalapeno poppers. It didn’t take me half a second to agree! But I didn’t want to get premade poppers and smoke them, I wanted the challenge of making them on my own so I set out one Saturday afternoon on a mission!

Upon suggestions from my wife (who is an amazing cook herself!) I decided that I would cook up some pork sausage and mix it with the cream cheese. Not content with just doing that, I added some seasonings to the cream cheese consisting of my pork shoulder rub, onion powder, and garlic powder and mixed it all up.

You can’t have a jalapeño popper without bacon! My wife suggested that I pre-cook the bacon a bit until it was flimsy, which I did, with the thought that it would help the bacon get crispy when being smoked. That turned out to be a great idea, but more on that in a bit.

I then cleaned up some fresh jalapeno peppers, cleaned out the seeds, and gave them a good rinse in cold water. I was worried that it would take a considerable amount of time for this process but using a spoon to clean out the insides of the peppers made life a lot easier!

What did take a quite a bit of time, however, was assembling the peppers, bacon, and cream cheese! I decided to leave the peppers cut in half and add a spoonful of cream cheese mix and then wrap them in bacon. Looking back, I should have cooked more bacon because well, you can never have enough bacon! I placed the poppers in a disposable pan which would go on the smoker.

Normally, I wouldn’t hesitate using the smoker but I was concerned that I wouldn’t be able to get the bacon to the desired crispness that I was wanting so I decided to use my grill for the process. I turned the grill up to high until until it was up to 600 degrees. While I waited, I made a pocket out of aluminum foil and placed a couple of handfuls of cherrywood pellets in it. I then put the pocket of pellets directly on one of the burners and turned the other 3 off. I placed the pan of poppers in the grill for 15 minutes. The pocket of pellets was producing the perfect amount of smoke, but when I checked on the poppers I could tell the bacon wasn’t going to get crisp. I decided to turn on the other 3 burners again at a medium flame and let them cook for another 10 minutes. Finally, I turned all 4 burners to high for the final 5 minutes which resulted in the bacon getting crisp without the cream cheese melting and running out of the jalapenos.

We arrived at our friends’ place for dinner and they were an immediate hit! I, personally, think they’re the best poppers I have ever had, and my wife agreed! Our friends were impressed and asked “is that sausage in the cream cheese? That’s unexpected but awesome! This is a keeper! You’re going to have to bring these over all the time!” When people love my cooking and ask for the recipe I know that I did it right, and that is why I love cooking!

Beef

Beer Can Bacon Burgers

May 6, 2020

Beer can. Bacon. Burgers. Let those words sink in a second and what thoughts come to mind? The most obvious thoughts, bacon and burgers, but where does the beer can fit in to this equation? That’s exactly what I thought when my wife mentioned it to me after coming home from work another great grilling idea. I asked her to contact the gentleman that made them and told her about them for instructions. He was happy to oblige, but over text messaging I had a hard time grasping the concept. I decided to give it a try!

Creating these isn’t difficult at all. First, take your ground beef (I suggest 80/20 to retain the moisture) and season it as if you were going to make cheeseburgers on the grill. Make a meatball between ½ and ¾ pounds. Next, take the beer can (use an opened beer for sturdiness) and begin to form the burger around the bottom of the can. I found it easier to turn the can over and form it.

Turn the can back over where the mean is now on your counter and press the can down while holding on to the meat. Press all the way until the can feels like it is hitting the counter and continue to work the burger up the side of the can. I kept the walls of the burger about ¼ of an inch thick, maybe slightly less.

Next, I took two strips of bacon and wrapped them around the burger. The first strip on the bottom flush with the counter, the second above the first. Once the bacon is secured (don’t worry, it adheres to the burger really well) I used a paper towel to grip the can and carefully slid it out of the burger. The result was a pocket beautifully wrapped with bacon. This thing wasn’t even filled with anything yet but the idea was making my mouth water!

Here is where the creativity comes in! You can fill the pocket with just about anything you want!! Think of whatever toppings you like on a burger and put them in the pocket! This is a stroke of genius!! For me and my wife’s burgers I added a couple of chunks of Velveeta cheese to the bottom of the pocket, then a couple of sliced jalapenos, a handful of caramelized onions and mushrooms, and topped it with a few pieces of colby-jack jalapeno cheese. For my son’s burger, I added a couple of piece of bacon to the bottom of the pocket, followed by chunks of Velveeta, topped with bacon bits, and topped with colby-jack jalapeno cheese.

I set up my Weber E410 gas grill for indirect cooking, and placed the burgers on for an hour and 15 minutes. I cooked them a little too much at that temp for that long as they turned out a little dry, so the next batch will only get an hour and slightly lower temps. The results, even for being a tad bit dry, where AMAZING!!!!

I let them rest for about 5 minutes and then we dove in!! After the first bite I had to ask myself “where has this thing been all my life!!??” They were that good!! With all of the possibilities that can be added to the pocket, I will definitely make these again and again!! They are a great addition to the household menu!

Chicken

Smoked Chicken Wings

September 4, 2016

It’s getting to be that time of year again, the time when football is all everyone talks about in Tennessee and there’s not one person in our house that complains about it! And it doesn’t matter if it’s Hendersonville High School, college, or pro football, one of the best foods to go along with it is Buffalo Wings! My wife and I love eating wings and having some cold beers to wash it down on Sunday afternoons while we watch whatever game happens to be on the TV, so it was only natural to try out some wings on the smoker!

For my first batch of wings on the smoker I decided to use 3 different rubs. The first rub is my stand-by for smoking chicken breasts, the second rub is what I use on just about everything else, and the third rub was one i made out of a cookbook. I split about 10lbs of full wings into three groups and seasoned each group accordingly.

After getting the WSM up to a consistent 250 degrees I placed them on the smoker and placed a couple of chunks of apple wood on the charcoal for flavor. 90 minutes later, this is what they looked like.

I took the jalapeño sausages and bacon wrapped pork tips off the grate and took them inside for an appetizer. Seriously, that sausage can be a meal all by itself!! Then I took the chicken wings and grate out of the middle section of the Weber Smokey Mountain Cooker, took the middle section out, and placed the grate and wings on top of the bottom portion with the coals to crisp up the skin on the wings. My tastebuds won out, however, I took the wings off after only 5 minutes and they didn’t crisp up to our liking. But they sure were delicious!

My wife and I couldn’t tell much difference between my stand-by rub and the rub I made up from the cookbook (2nd and 3rd rubs mentioned above) other than one was slightly spicier than the other. We did, however, notice a big difference between those two and the first rub mentioned above. Obviously it wasn’t spicy but had a real good smokey chicken flavor. Combined with my homemade BBQ sauce it was our pick as our favorite!

So today I decided to try another batch using just the chicken rub, and I decided to let them smoke 30 minutes longer, and this is what they looked like! I then used the same method as the first attempt to crisp them up by placing the wings and grate directly above the coals. I smothered all but the five wings on the left with my BBQ sauce and let them sit for 7 or 8 minutes. I then flipped them over and let them sit another 7 or 8 minutes and then placed them on a baking pan and took them inside.

The BBQ sauce burned up a little bit (ok, maybe more than a little) but the flavor was amazing!! We have decided that this is a method that we’ll use again but I will only apply the BBQ sauce about 5 minutes before they come off so that they don’t get burned up as bad. And with football getting into full swing next weekend I’m already excited to smoke more chicken wings!

Latest Notes

Smoked Jalapeño Sausage

April 24, 2016

My wife asked if I had ever had hot links before and if I could smoke them. Well, no, I never had them before (gasp!) but after she explained to me that they’re a type of sausage with a little bit of spice and then smoked I figured “how hard could this be?” and figured I’d give it a shot. I love spicy food, and combined with smoke, how could it not be good?

So off I went to Sam’s Club and Walmart to look for some sausage. The challenge in finding the right kind of sausage to use is that my wife suffers from Celiac disease so I have to be very careful when picking out packaged meats. Most prepackaged meats have fillers which contain gluten (a protein found in wheat, rye and barley) and she won’t be able to eat it! Not good, not good!! Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find anything that I felt comfortable enough to serve her. She knows how to read the labels way better than I do, and the last thing that I want to do is cause her to have a problem with something I cooked!

Frustrated, I went to a local butcher shop to see what was available, thinking surely they have to have fresh cuts of meat, and maybe they have something I can use that’s gluten free. There’s a place in town that’s been here for over a year now, and I have always heard great things about the place, and have even sampled some items that some friends have brought over to throw on the grill that was incredible, but I had never experienced the place on my own. Let me just say I wish I had went in sooner!!!

If you’re lucky enough to have a local butcher then you know what it’s like! G’s Meats ‘N More reminds me of the old style butcher shops from way back when, and the customer service is top-notch! I walked in, on a Friday afternoon, looking for something to make hot links out of. When I talked to the owner George and explained to him what I was trying to accomplish, he mentioned that he had some fresh ground jalapeño sausage in the back that he would be happy to put in the casing for me. I asked for two pounds and away I went!

I was already in the process of smoking two pork shoulders and decided to throw on the sausage as an appetizer. The only preparation I did to the sausage was sprinkling a little bit of chili powder on it. After that, on to the grate it went!

2 hours later, we sliced it up, and the reaction that my wife had made all of the searching I had done the day before worth it!! It was so good that she made me take a piece back to George, and I didn’t even hesitate because he had to know how good that stuff was! Thank you G’s Meats for making me look like a rock star!! You will definitely be getting more of my business, especially when we want some more smoked jalapeño sausage!