Adventures in BBQ

It’s been a while and the original plan to do a long slow cook of Beef Ribs didn’t happen due to having a really busy end of the week and not getting the order in. Plus the idea of getting super early on Sunday to get them going lost appeal. When time is poor, but need for meat is high, time to turn to the speedy standby of Tri Tip by Reverse Sear. See how it came out by reading on.

Tri-tip on the direct heat of the Weber Kettle for its final searing

• Setup: Weber Kettle, no Smokenator and setup for indirect 2-zone cooking. No large water pan, but I added a small pan of cold water on the top grate early on to help bring the temperature down.
• Meat: USDA Prime Tri-tip from Vons. The tri-tip is a boomerang-shaped muscle from the bottom sirloin and this one weighed about 2.4 lb (before trimming). This one was quite long and thin so it will be a bit of challenge to fit in a regular Weber foil pan when uncooked. It will also be tricky to avoid drying out the thin part before the thickest bit cooks.
• Fuel: Regular Kinsgford briquettes with red oak chunks.
• Cooking temperature: Two zone cooking with 225-250F in the indirect part away form the coals. This will be followed by direct heat for final searing until we reach about 135F internal temperature, corresponding to medium-rare.
• Prep:

Tri-tip, fat side up, before trimming

Tri-tip before trimming

1. There was just a bit of trimming to do for the preparation. I trimmed off the thinnest part of the narrow end, and the stray bits of the edges.
2. Next, I trimmed most of the hard fat parts off the underside:
   

   Tri-tip after trimming and before dry brining.

3. Put the tri-tip into a Weber foil pan and sprinkled all over with kosher salt. The pan then went into the fridge for an hour to allow the meat to dry brine a little.
4. Just before putting it on the cooker, sprinkled both side with ground black pepper, garlic powder and ancho chile powder in roughly equal proportions. These were patted in before flipping to the other side and sprinkling that side.

Tri-tip after dry brining, sprinkling with the black pepper, garlic powder and chile powder. Next stop: onto the cooker

Cooking Diary

• 4:30pm: Prep meat by trimming off surface fat and sprinkling with kosher salt. Into the fridge for some dry brining for an hour or so.
• 5:30pm: Started about 15 briquettes in the Weber chimney with 2 of the light cubes. After 15 minutes, these were transferred onto the pile of fresh and lightly pre-burnt briquettes.
  

  The tri-tip after reaching 115F internal temperature and being moved onto direct heat for the final searing.

• 6:05pm: Put the meat on the BBQ. Added about 4 red oak wood chunks, and inserted the Maverick meat temperature probe.
• 6:30pm: Flipped the meat over after about 20 minutes, re-inserted temperature probe into the newly exposed upside.
• 6:45pm: Reached 115F internal temperature, shifted over to direct searing (see the picture on the right hand side).
• 7:05pm: After 3 flips every 5 minutes, we reached about 135F in the thickest part of the meat; time to pull it off ! The temperature was checked with a handheld Thermapen Mk4 to see if it had reached the required temperature.
• 7:10pm: Slicing and eating time…

Results for the tri-tip reverse sear

I initially planned this as a test of a made-from-scratch rub as I initially had thought that previously I had used a commercial Santa Maria-style rub which had sugar in. The idea was that the sugars were what was causing flaring and blackening under the direct heat. Having checked back on the previous time I did this, it turns out I hadn’t used the commercial rub that time either. Hey ho, getting forgetful in my old age…

Tri-tip after slicing, plating and drizzling with the board sauce.

When done correctly, tri-tip produces a heck of a lot of juice when it is sliced up for serving. I cut the tri-tip roughly in half down the middle and then starting cutting slices across the grain from one end (the first end cut tends to be a bit dry and tough). After cutting the slices up, I made a herb “board sauce” to help mop up a bit of the juices. I sprinkled rosemary, sage, thyme and parsley onto the board and then used the slicing knife to combine the herbs with the juices. This worked very nicely and added a nice counterpoint to the meat. One change I would make would be to use fresh rosemary next time rather than dried; had I thought about this more than 2 minutes before eating, I would have nipped out to the garden and got some.