Charcoal Meat Lipstick

There was an awful lot of excitement in the CountryWoodSmoke Facebook Group when Jess Pryles’ new BBQ rub Hardcore Carnivore Black arrived on these shores. For anyone not aware of her, Jess has shot to BBQ fame an Aussie living the BBQ life in Texas, and founder of the Australasian BBQ Alliance. This is one of her new rubs, the other being Hardcore Carnivore Red. The first of these rubs, the black version arrived at Great Outdoors BBQ Co. in Northern Ireland and they kindly sent me a tub to review.

As I like to do with dry rubs, I tried a little straight from the tub, the dark black colour from the charcoal makes for a very striking colour to the rub. Upon tasting, the first and biggest hit was garlic, then a taste I couldn’t quite pin down, perhaps from the charcoal, or the subtle spices. I decided to try on some venison steaks to see how it performed on a strong tasting red meat. I sprinkled the rub over the steaks and cooked quickly on a high heat direct over hot charcoal. The rub responded really nicely to the heat, probably a mix of the charcoal and sugar forming a lovely bark very quickly. The bark worked really well and the flavour of the garlic was lessened upon cooking, it was very delicious and worked really nicely. I’m looking forward to trying this rub on some more dark meats such as short rib and hanger steak, which I think it will work particularly well on. I look forward to further experiments.

Contact Roger Allen at Great Outdoors BBQ Co. for more details and availability.

I was sent the rub to try for free, but was free to give my opinion in this review.

Hellfire Pizza and Grill Set – Bringing the Outdoors In

As much as I am a huge outdoor cooking nut, I enjoy cozy evenings in front of the indoor BBQ – AKA the Lounge WoodStove, in the depths of winter, sometimes it’s just too tempting to snuggle down in front of the woodstove. I always look at the fire, and think, well if it’s going I may as well cook on it, usually something simple like some marshmallows or chestnuts with the kids, or a nice grown up steak in a cast iron skillet on the embers. But I recently heard about a bit of kit that may well just change how I do cook in the woodstove.

The wonderful indoor Hellfire Pizza and Grill Set from Natural Heating in Norfolk is an inspired idea, you have the fire going so why not cook on it… I love these people…

The set is a cast iron bridge with a grate on top, that comes with a cast iron plate, a pizza stone, a cute little peel and some welders gloves.

I placed the pizza stone on the bridge and placed in my raging hot wood stove. I allowed it to come up to temperature and raked some hot coals underneath which was easy to do.

The temperature of the stone easily reached 350 deg C which I checked with a laser thermometer, and the pizza stone was ready to cook on. I made up some pizza dough, and popped a little 7″ pizza onto the stone. It cooked very quickly in about 2 minutes and had a lovely crisp base. I was amazed how well it worked. The pizzas were lovely.

I’m looking forward to cooking plenty of other things such as steaks and seafood on this lovely bit of kit. There’s two sizes a 7″ at £43.99 and a 9″ for larger stoves at £63.99.

Visit the Natural Heating Website for more info.