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A perfect treat to try at home!

Ingredients:

• Honey Crisp apples 4/5
• 2 packs of thin cut bacon
• 1 3/4 cups Heavy Cream
• 1 cup light corn syrup
• 2 cups light brown sugar
• 1/4 cup butter
• 1/2 teaspoon of Sea Salt
• 1/2 teaspoon of Vanilla

Directions

• Put bacon in the smoker at 250 for 30 minutes or until crispy.
• Place the bacon on a paper towel to get rid of as much of the grease as possible.
• Use a wooden stick to stab apples. Place apples in the fridge to stay cold.
• Mix Cream, Corn Syrup, Brown Sugar, Butter, and Salt in a heavy bottom saucepan over medium heat. Try your best not to stir; that will add bubbles to the caramel. Heat till 235 degrees. Pull off heat and add Vanilla. Let rest 10 minutes.
• Dip apples into the Carmel sauce covering it as much as you can. Roll in bacon bits or other toppings and let rest on a baking mat or Parchment paper.

**Things I learned** Candy thermometers help. Use a silicone mat or parchment paper to rest the apples after dipping. Dip those apples fast – Saddleback Co-Owner, Matt Gillett.

ENJOY

Occasionally you’ll get a cut of meat and it will be much darker than you’re used to. This is referred to as a ‘Dark Cutter’. So what causes meat to become dark?

Long term stress on an animal can cause the meat to become dark. A typical healthy animal stores energy in glycogen. When an animal is harvested it converts the glycogen to acid, meaning the meat will have a lower PH. This is normal. When an animal has undergone long term stress, it uses its stored glycogen, meaning the meat will not experience the same drop in PH when harvested. This will lead to a darker cut of meat and sometimes unpleasant taste.

*This is referring to meat being dark upon butchering. There are of course other factors that can lead to meat being dark, oxidization being just one.*

We learned most of this from this podcast, if you’re interested in learning more, I highly recommend checking it out: https://bit.ly/312cs8F

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High-Quality Food, No Frills, Crazy Prices

Saddleback BBQ – Started the first locally owned ghost restaurant in the Lansing area. To commemorate the ghost restaurant we decided to add them to the permanent menu. Check it out now!

High-Quality Food – We utilize Saddleback’s smoked meats for all of our proteins. These meats are smoked for 10-12 hours using all Michigan Hardwood. While sourcing fresh ingredients to compose the rest of the food. For many large chain restaurants that offer similar products, the meat seems to be an afterthought; for us, it’s the foundation.

No Frills – We share Saddleback’s existing commercial kitchens. TB&B’s is a takeout and delivery restaurant only. These efficiencies allow us to have crazy low prices with premium ingredients.

Crazy Prices – The majority of our meals start for less than $10 and include chips, salsa, and a water.

There are three main reasons meat will be tough:

1. Connective tissue (silver skin) – Connective tissue is a protein based structure, that is found inside the muscle and between the muscle and the skin. When it comes to areas with a high density of connective tissue you’ll notice the ‘silver skin’ on top of the meat. Although trimming this off with help with the tenderness of the meat, it will not solve the issue because most likely this is intramuscular fat and goes throughout the entire piece of meat. The best way to handle a cut like this is to slow cook it. Think of a brisket being smoked for 12 hours, the goal is to render the intramuscular fat to make it become tender. If you cook at a high temperature for a short duration the meat will stay tough.

2. Contracted Muscle – Processing an animal before it has reached rigor mortis will cause the meat to contract and become more tough. This is the idea of cooking an animal immediately after harvesting will lead to a worse end product. After the process of rigor mortis has occurred the meat will not contract when exposed to heat or being cut. Meaning, it will be much more tender.

3. Fat – The main aspect when it comes to fat is the amount of marbling. Marbling is the foremost factor when determining the grading of meat. This is how the USDA makes its grading scale for prime, choice, or select cuts, but that’s a different story for another day.

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Please join our Smoking & Grilling Group for Video Tutorials from Saddleback Matt!

Smoking & Grilling in Mid Michigan Public group · 1,710 members Join Group A group for all the people that grill and smoke meats in the Mid-Michigan Area!

A very popular technique in the BBQ community is to rub your ribs in mustard before applying your rub. It is said to help the rub adhere to the meat. This may be a turn off for some folks, the thought of ribs marinating in mustard may not sound the most pleasant. However, if you ever have the chance to try this method you’ll be surprised to find out it does nothing to the end taste of the ribs.

At Saddleback we do not rub in mustard before putting down our rub. We’ve found the rub sticks just fine to the meat without any mustard.

We’d love to hear from you if you are pro mustard, what are the advantages you’ve found?

Click Here to Learn More About Our Recommended Smokers

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Spritzing is a technique used in BBQ that is said to help keep your meat moist. Typically it’s done using a spray bottle and some sort of liquid. It seems like apple cider vinegar is the most commonly used liquid, but I’ve also seen water, apple juice, and all sorts of crazy concoctions.

Many many many of the top bbq chefs in the world promote the spritzing method. They swear by it. Saying it does wonders to help keep the bark from overcooking, giving you a deeper smoke ring, and keeping the meat more moist.

At Saddleback we go with the less popular route, we choose not to spritz our briskets. After cooking thousands and thousands of briskets, we’ve tried all sorts of different methods. But when it comes to spritzing we have not noticed a difference in the end product that gives us any reason to believe it is better.

Of course, when it comes to these arguments, no opinion is a wrong opinion, this is just the route we’ve chose to go with. Perhaps in the future we’ll stumble on a new technique that calls for spritzing and it will be far superior. Until the day we are team no spritz.

Thoughts?

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To support us, please consider ordering our BBQ Sauce!

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This is an ongoing debate, and I don’t expect this will end it. At Saddleback we always cook our brisket fat side up.

This does a couple things. First from a practical stand point, when you cook a brisket fat side down it has a tendency to stick to the grates of your smoker, making it difficult to move.

Second, because the fat sticks to the grates it will ensure you will lose some of your hardly fought for bark.

BUT – we use an offset smoker, the smoke from our wood needs to travel a long distance before hitting our brisket. This is a very indirect feat source. If you use a cooking method that has a more direct flame on the meat you may want to consider going fat side down. The thick layer of fat will help protect the meat from the heat.

As always with BBQ experimentation is always the best part because at the end of the day you get to eat some really great food.

We’d love to hear which method you prefer and why!

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As is often the case with BBQ, when smoking a pork butt the thermometer should be one tool that you use, but is not the be all and end all.

At Saddleback we like going by “feel” to be our final determining factor. You want the shoulder to feel “loose”. It should have a good amount of jiggle to it when touching it. When inserting your thermometer if it goes in with almost no effort, you know you’re getting close.

We typically smoke our shoulders around 250 degrees for 6-10 hours. We are looking for an internal temperature between 195-205. We know a shoulder is ready to come off when you can easily pull the bone out.

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Ghost restaurants are quickly gaining popularity. Mainly because you can offer the public new menu items and “launch a new restaurant” with very little investment. Ghost restaurants have far less risk than a traditional restaurant, and make your existing brick and mortar location more efficient. We started our new restaurant in less than a week and for under $500.

Toast Now

Ghost Restaurants rely on online ordering and delivery to be successful. When starting “Tacos Burritos and Bowls”, we knew we needed a cost effective method to quickly offer these features. We chose to go with Toast Now. For $50 a month we now have a workable solution. This allows our customers to order for in store pickup, curbside pickup, or delivery.

We have tablets at our restaurant that receive the orders – from there our front of house staff places the orders in Saddleback’s existing Toast terminal. It’s not a seamless system, but it’s effective and relatively inexpensive.

Website

For our website we followed the same ideology as the online ordering system – Something quick and inexpensive. We chose to use Wix to make our website. Wix makes it incredibly easy to make a simple, good looking website. Our philosophy was to essentially make an online brochure. We linked to our Toast Now menu for customers to make their order. All in all the website took less than 48 hours. It’s functional, and we think it looks pretty good.

Social Media

Using our existing social media channels we advertised the launch of our new website. This helped generate excitement for the new menu. We sent out an email blast to our entire email list as well as a text message. All the news we announced was met with incredible reception.

Photos

To ensure we had high quality photos of our new menu we brought in an amazing local photographer. We made every item from the new restaurant and had him take photos of all of them as well as all of the items together. We now have high quality photos of our whole menu: great for online ordering, the website, and social media.

Mushroom Duxelles are delicious, they pair perfectly with the tenderloin in a beef Wellington, and the best part, they’re extremely easy to make!

Ingredients

• 1/2lb of Button Mushrooms
• 1/2lb of Baby Portobello Mushrooms
• 1 Shallot
• 1 Red Onion
• 1 clove of Garlic
• 1tsp. Salt
• 1tsp. of Pepper
• 2 Sticks Thyme

Procedure

1. Add all ingredients in a food processor.
2. Blitz it up!
3. Use the food processor until all ingredients are well broken down – you’re looking for a brown paste like substance.
4. Cook in a hot pan (about 6 minutes) – The reason you cook it is to release all the moisture, this adds to the flavir and keeps your Wellington crisp!
5. Add your favorite Cognac and cook for an additional two minutes.
6. Let it chill.

To see how to use your duxelle in a Wellington click here!

Smoked Beef Wellington? Absolutely, it’s our favorite way to do it! It’s not a difficult as it looks, below we break down every step in detail. Good luck!

Ingredients & equipment

1. Whole beef tenderloin
2. Dijon Mustard – Enough to spread over the entirety of the meat
3. Prosciutto – one standard pack
4. 2 Puff pastries
5. 4 crepes
6. Plastic wrap
7. 3 eggs
8. Olive oil
9. food processor
10. Salt
11. Pepper
12. Garlic

Instructions

1. Season your tenderloin with salt, pepper, and garlic, making sure to cover all sides of the meat.
2. Turn your stove to medium high heat, coat the bottom of the pan with Olive oil, quickly sear all sides.
3. Smoke at 300 degrees until the internal temperature reaches 125 degrees.
4. Brush all sides of the filet with Dijon Mustard.
5. Lay your crepes down, layer the prosciutto over the crepes.
6. Season with black pepper.
7. Generously spread the mushroom duxelle over the prosciutto.
8. Lay plastic wrap under your crepes. Place your tenderloin on the edge of the crepes. Use the plastic warp to roll the crepes around the meat. Make sure it’s as tight as possible.
9. Place in fridge for 30 minutes.
10. Brush your puff pastry with egg yolk.
11. Repeat step 8 with the puff pastry.
12. Place in fridge for 30 minutes.
13. Add a latice over the pastry to enhance the look!
14. Brush with egg yolk and season the outside with salt. This will help the pastry crisp.
15. Place in your smoker at 400 degrees for 20 minutes.
16. Let it rest for 10-15 minutes.
17. Enjoy!