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Easy Smoking with Smoker Bags

Hello everyone! A little while back, I received an email from Jennifer Honeycutt of Realm Enterprises, Nashville, Tennessee asking me to take a look at her smoker bags.

Now, I’ve never heard of a smoker bag, I’ve never seen a smoker bag so I was quite intrigued by the concept. I readily agreed to do a product review and promptly received a packet of smoker bags together with some very interesting reviews and a large pile of recipes that are to die for. I looked at these with great surprise!

A smoker bag is a heavy duty foil packet. It measures 11×19 inches so it’s quite large and it is 3-ply. Between the 1^st and 2^nd plies are hardwood chips, hardwood syrup and natural sugars. These are sealed between the 1^st and 2^nd layer. The 2^nd and 3^rd layer would be the pouch where you’d seal your food in. Now, these can be used in the oven, on your barbecue or grill. They can also be used in a campfire – what I mean by campfire is the coals of the campfire, just put them right on the coals.

These bags are imported from Finland and have several reviews in various magazines such as Cooking Pleasures, Cooks Illustrated, Mercury News – Food & Wine Sections, The Nibble’s Great Food Finds, and others. I have absolutely no idea how I missed this.

The smoker bags come in two flavors – (1) Alder, which is great with fish and (2) Hickory, which is great with pork or lamb. You could use both of them for chicken, turkey or vegetables. Each bag holds approximately 2 1/2 pounds (1 kg) of food.

The smoker bag itself is designed for you to smoke your food in a very convenient manner. The concept is super simple – put your food in the bag, place it in your grill, oven or coals and in the cooking process the woodchips start smoking up into the food, creating an intense smoked food flavor. For those of you that love smoked foods, this is a great way to go without having to smoke for 6-8 hours to get that flavoring. It’s very fast and very convenient.

The bag itself is recyclable. You just put your food in there, you take it, you roll up the aluminum foil and you recycle it. That’s it for clean up, it’s that simple.

Every smoker bag comes with how-to instructions. Very simply, you fill your bag with your food, put it on a pre-heated oven or grill, smoke it for the recommended time for fish, pork chops, chickens, ribs, brisket, roast, potatoes, vegetables, etc. The recommended cooking time is included in the how-to instructions. Once cooked, you open up the bag and you serve it when it’s done. It’s extremely simple.

The concept I like most about it is you can do the “meal in the bag”. Basically, you can take pork chops with zucchini, onion, broccoli bell peppers, cut up some potatoes, put all of them in the bag, cook for 40-45 minutes, and your meal is done! It’s an all in one bag and cleaning up is simple – just wad up the foil and put it away.

The packet is filled with recipes. For Hickory, they have included smoked barbecued pork ribs, hickory smoked chicken, smoked garlic stuffed lamb with rosemary, and Scandinavian honey salmon. For Alder, they have included Scandinavian honey salmon, easy smoked chicken, delicious pork loin or pork chops and healthy smoked vegetables. There are even more recipes on their website – www.savu.fi.

Just to tempt you more, here are some other ideas, smoked paprika chicken with blackberry relish, chipotle red pork with peach salsa, lemon pepper pork chops, Texas beef brisket, Creole grouper, smoked corn pudding, tomato basil bisque, maple-glazed pork tenderloin for just a starter.

For part 2 of our review, I will be sharing with you my cooking experiences with the smoker bag where I use both the barbecue and coals so stay tuned and we’ll be bringing that to you shortly.

“Get out of the kitchen! Light the fire! Start cooking outdoors”

Crisco.com a website review.

WEBSITE REVIEW – CRISCO.COM

Hello everyone! Today I have decided to do a website review of one of my Dutch oven aids – Crisco. I use Crisco to season my Dutch ovens and found that their website is a great source of cooking tips, recipes and articles.

I really like how they designed their homepage (first page you see when you go to www.Crisco.com) as you can preview mostly all site components in one glance. Your screen welcomes you with tempting food pictures from Crisco’s recipe box – just one click and it’ll take you to the recipe directly. The table at the top neatly categorizes the different sections of their website. Down below, a quick preview of Cooking tips, Fresh Ideas from Crisco and Current Promotions are presented. This would really be a time saver for web surfers on-the-go.

Crisco.com offers “My Crisco” where you can have your own database of recipes and groceries. Signing up is easy, though not a requirement to view other site sections. Just click on “email sign up” and fill out the necessary information. Once you have signed up, you would have your own recipe box, grocery list and access to the message board.

The recipe box allows you to add your favorite recipes and organize them by categories. You can either add recipes by browsing their recipe database or add your own by manually entering it. The site provides a very simple form to fill out if you want to add your own recipe. Adding items to your grocery list follows the same process as adding recipes; you could take from the database or add your own. What’s good about this is you can have all the recipes you want to prepare, say, for Thanksgiving dinner, and then you can just go to your grocery list, print it out and run to the market. This helps you make sure you won’t forget anything so no more 2^nd or 3^rd trips to the grocery store (and save up on gas, too).

Like most websites, Crisco.com also has a message board where you can ask questions and share best practices with other Crisco users. The message board is very simple and houses a list of topics members have posted and replied to. What I don’t like about it, though, is that it’s not categorized by topic. If you have posted a topic 2 weeks ago, it will get buried by the newer topics other members have posted. A quick way to find articles/posts would be to use the “search: feature at the top and selecting “articles”.

A very useful section found in the website is the Articles & Tips. You don’t need to sign up to access this and it is highly informational housing Cooking Basics, Crisco Central, Seasonal Ideas and Cooking Tips.

Cooking Basics provides kitchen general information. The picture to the left displays the topics found under this section which is especially useful when you are starting to build your own kitchen.

One of my favorite parts is Seasonal Ideas as it lists themed/holiday menus for just about every occasion. All recipes under each category have ingredients that are available for the season it is listed under, which I find really great.

Clicking on About Crisco is also a treat, taking you through Crisco’s development from 1836 to today. They have great pictures of old Crisco products, advertisements, recipe books and day to day factory activities coupled with an informational write up which makes a good read.

Since this website is designed with the everyday consumer in mind, it does not have that many resources for outdoor cooking. I tried doing a search for Dutch ovens and Firepits and it didn’t return any useful results. On the up side, they have good resources for grilling and barbecues.

For my own recipe box, I have already added some recipes for the grill and am heading out to fire up my barbecue! Hope you enjoyed my review!

“Get out of the kitchen! Light the fire! Start cooking outdoors”

Santa was good to me.

Hi everyone! I hope you had a great Christmas and rolling into the new years, I wanted to share with you some of my stocking stuffers. Just recently I managed to burn, beyond salvation, one of my cast iron skillet handle protectors.

Well, Santa was good to me and I received some new ones. I’ve never seen this type before, they are from Duncan Manufacturing, they’re cookware lid-handle grips and they’re totally cool!

These things are to grab hot lids with and with a Dutch oven, you know the last thing you want to grab is the lid, that’s why we have lid lifters. These are actually grips and they’re tested to 500 degrees, are water repellant and stain resistant. They are the same material that you would use to remove a stuck jar lid with and they are very very nice.

I also received some neoprene handle holders, you know, when you grab your cast-iron pan and you don’t have something to protect the handles with you tend to have the handle imprinted on your hand – that is a very serious burn.

I also received a Lodge perch pan. That is a cast-iron pan where you pour your corn bread mix into and it comes out the shape of perches. Pre-seasoned of course!

The next biggest surprise that I received was from my mother-in-law. We went over their house for Christmas breakfast and it could’ve been around 10 minutes and she whispered to me “Come on outside”. We went into her garage which has been, as a tradition, stuffed to the rafters with stuff (and that’s a polite term). She showed me a box-full of cast-iron goodies that I just about had a heart attack over.

What I found as I dug through these is a chicken fryer size 10, there’s no name on this but it is probably 30 or 40 years old if not older.

I received a much rusted, very dirty, 12 and 7/16” skillet. It’s a #10 made in USA with no name on it.

I also received a kitchen oven, Dutch oven if you will. This one does not have the legs for traditional outside and this is a 10 ¼” #8 Dutch oven with no name on it.

Included in this little goodie box is an aebleskiver pan, it holds 6 little aebleskivers which is a Scandinavian dish, I believe. This is a #1 pan.

Also a corn bread pan shaped into little corns, this, unfortunately is not made in USA, it’s an off-brand and it’s made in Taiwan so I might not even go into the trouble of saving that.

There was also a biscuit cast-iron pan with no identification marks on it whatsoever and looking at the solidity of this and how it was made, I’m thinking it’s not a USA-made item either. But, some very cool finds, it’s going to take a tremendous amount of effort to get this cleaned up and I’ll be sharing that with you.

I hope Santa hid something really cool under your Christmas tree and I hope your new year is as blessed as mine is going to be and I’ll be sharing with you my enormous task of cleaning these up and cooking with them as the future rolls out! Thanks again for visiting cooking outdoors!