Maryland · Main
Baltimore Pit Beef
- Intermediate
- 2 h
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with wood-smoke running underneath, char used as punctuation, opening aromatic and staying there.
Ingredients
- 2kg top round roast
- 2 tbsp salt
- 1 tbsp black pepper
- 1 tbsp garlic powder
- 1 tbsp paprika
- 1 tsp cayenne
- Kaiser rolls
- For the tiger sauce: 200g mayonnaise, 4 tbsp prepared horseradish, 1 tsp lemon juice
- Sliced raw onion
Equipment
Thermometer · Grill
The skills inside
Grilling over live coalsResting meat & slicing against the grain
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · egg
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Rub the roast hard with the salt, pepper, garlic powder, paprika, and cayenne and rest it an hour.
- Grill directly over hot charcoal, turning often, so the outside chars while the inside stays rare; 40-50 min to an internal 50C. 50 min
- Rest 15 min, then slice against the grain as thin as you can manage. 15 min
- Mix the horseradish into the mayonnaise for tiger sauce.
- Pile the beef on a kaiser roll with raw onion and tiger sauce. The roll is a handle, not a sandwich.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Resting meat & slicing against the grain 56 recipes
- It came off the heat BEFORE the target temperature, measured with a probe rather than by time, because carryover keeps driving the inside up after it is out.
- The probe went into the coldest likely part rather than the easiest one to reach: the reading that matters is the lowest one, not the first one.
- Rested for a time matched to its size, somewhere warm, and not cut into partway through to see how it is doing.
- The board is nearly dry when it is finally cut. A spreading pool means it was cut too early, and that liquid should have stayed inside.
- The grain was found and the knife went ACROSS it, so the fibres are cut short, and the blade was sharp enough that the slices hold together rather than tearing.
Where it goes wrong It was cut straight off the heat, usually because everything else was ready. The muscle is still contracted and the juice still driven to the centre, so it runs out onto the board; the meat is drier than it ever needed to be, and the flavour that left it is sitting in a puddle under the knife.
Grilling over live coals 77 recipes
- The fire was ready before the food was: coals evenly covered in grey ash with no flames licking through and no raw smoke coming off, and a hot zone and a cooler one both available.
- The grate was hot and clean when the food landed, and the food released cleanly from it when the time came to turn rather than tearing away.
- Marks are browned, not burnt: deep colour where the metal touched, with no carbon flaking off and no soot transferred onto the food.
- The interior reaches its target with a thin gradient, not charred outside and cold within, and not driven through by a flare-up.
- What comes off the fire smells of fire and food only: no raw wood smoke, no fuel, nothing acrid at the back of the nose.
Where it goes wrong It went on over live flames instead of settled coals, so the outside charred bitter in the flare-ups while the middle stayed cold, and everything on the plate tastes of soot.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Zinfandel (old-vine)
- Also Right
- Shiraz or Malbec
- From the Taps
- Smoked porter
- Zero-Proof
- Cherry cola, honestly
Barbecue’s sweet-smoke wants jammy fruit that shakes hands with the sauce; dry austere reds argue with sugar and lose.
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