How Grill Master Tom Ellis Uses Fire and a "Little Hell" to Cook a Feast — Smoke Point

there's two kinds of moisture in wood one is that it comes naturally from being green so when you cut a tree down there's tons of moisture in it and then you also have moisture that comes in from rain and humidity like today we have a little bit of a challenge it was a hurricane this week so all of our wood was wet like jesus there's nothing we can do to keep the water out of the wood this is not your choice right so there's moisture obviously from the rain and from humidity hear that it doesn't have that dead sound of like a baseball bat whereas if you hit it with this that's a little more seasoned but like you're looking for like that dead sound that's when you know you got like better wood i can hear it hissing that's like the sound of a horror movie for us that means it's gonna be a hard day if you show right there you'll see the moisture boiling out of that wood that's our challenge the other big part of fire the main other component is oxygen and then once you get coals you're home free now it's really nice it's ripping [Music] so i'm tom ellis i'm the owner operator of the swell party which is a catering events company located in the beautiful hudson valley today we are at the glen falls house in roundtop new york serving a fire roasted dinner on saturday nights and doing a cookout on sundays these pork shoulders we're going to use in the sambap so we're going to do a uh dutch oven cook on those for six hours in a braising liquid before we chuck them in there we're going to get a little sear on the outside we got the plancha right over the hot fire and we're letting that plunger get nice and hot so that when we get that first connection we're going to get a lot of action right from the get-go so we're just trying to get a crust on it because when you pull apart pork and it's got those really like brown bits that come from that initial sear like you get a little bit of that crunch in there i like that in my pulled pork which is basically what this will be i'm gonna do a little dance with them now and try to get a little bit of a sear on the sides as well so now it's we're going to set them up in the dutch ovens so before we get the fire moved in because then it's really hot he's going to line it up so that the legs will go on those bricks and this is straight up american cowboy like dutch oven is straight up american cowboy this would be like on the cattle train you know what you'd end up getting cowboy cooking for the most part you know a lot of it's rooted in argentinian uh traditions which is the gaucho which is cowboy the idea that this stems from is guys on a cattle train so it's always you know there was no kitchen there was only fire so now here's the braising liquid so this is apple juice orange juice chicken and beef stock and roasted tomatillos and coffee garlic this is where it starts like this is step one is dutch oven cooking you know anybody can do this really and these these dutch ovens obviously they really hold the heat really well and they distribute the heat really well as long as you get a nice distribution of heat from the outside the heat is pretty much distributed through the metal once the metal gets hot then it really starts to cook we're primarily using these fire ovens which are called infernillos you can use them for a lot of different techniques as you can see it's built with components and they can be stacked in different ways and you can do top heat bottom heat i've been working with these for like seven years and uh every season we come up with a different thing you can do i mean i love how it's got the outrigger so you can slide out you can access the foods in every dish some component goes through the infranil so this is a black sea bass just like any other striped sea bass you know mild white flesh right now i'm going to take them out of the ice just open their bellies up hit them with a little salt and pepper slice lemon and a garlic scape [Music] these are going to get cooked and hay the haze is just like basically the moist cooking so it's not broiling we're doing like more of a steam it's like all wet moist heat the hay is moist and wet it's been soaking in water all day and that'll keep it from catching fire and burning and this is basically going to be our cooking vessel for the black sea bass so we want we want top heat and bottom heat steam it really good from the top and the bottom so you got the heat coming from both sides you know percolating through the hay get pulling the steam the moisture at the end of the day the fish is steaming from the moisture in the hay so this is cheesecloth that's been soaked in wine so this is just one more flavor component that we're gonna give to this fish we really move to this because you can just like look at the fish touch the fish interact with it see how done like you know and you get a lot of benefits you actually pull some notes you get some nice notes out of the hay you know you'll pull some sweet notes out of there flavor profile is enhanced by the hay [Music] you know i went to uh theater school and i was an actor you know there was always an appreciation for the uh theatrical and for for the experience of the guest what's great about in the way we do this is it's not theater for theater sake sometimes it is but but for the most part it's form equals function we started using a lot of sort of hanging rigs and then we drop down with wire or string and you can roast from this fire so we get more use of the same fire like we try to use the same fire in like a bunch of different ways because there's heat coming off in a bunch of directions we could slow roast them in a less visual way but again this is part of the fun so we'll use the same fires try to use the same heat roast them up bring out their sugars and then we're going to break them down into like a pineapple chutney that's going to go on the samba and it's the components for that dish you know all they're going together you know the pork and the pineapple are going to be naturally paired up i was a caterer in new york for a long time and i was doing what people do in new york city which is hotbox catering at one point asked by a high-end wedding planner to work with a company that was doing fire cooking and i was just blown away by the idea of cooking fresh on site that was the real shock was like we're gonna bring the the raw ingredients and we're going to cook this meal for 250 people banquet style on-site day of event i mean that's that's you know that blew my mind the notion of it i personally i i would never consider myself a chef i have a lot of respect for the word chef what that means in the world of food i leave that for morimoto or for you know dan barber i am a events person and i understand events i understand food and beverage i've been in this business for 30 years i know i've done every job you can do and i try to design and map a world of food that people can execute when people think of us they a lot of times they do think about meat we actually enjoy the vegetables you know is a is a more interesting part of it mostly it's beef pork chicken beef pork chicken beef pork chicken but there's the palate of vegetables it's like it's infinite and it's seasonal it changes through the year which is like so it actually becomes a more interesting thing to work with so we're going to throw the rob on and the rob is going to go in with the roasted onions and we're going to top it with ricotta cheese and make that cream up so it's almost like a take on a creamed spinach and we've trimmed this down you know you take all the woody parts off of it because that ruins the dish if you bite into a woody base of a broccoli rod so with the carrots we like to actually get them to get a char like i get actually to get black gives them a really nice flavor spread them out really good they're not touching they're not going to get color and you really don't want to steam them because then it's hard to get that char see now is where you start to multitask you got two punches going you got to remember those pineapples going you got to remember those pork need fresh wood and you got to keep it all in your head we never stop moving it's a lot like sailing a big boat everybody's got a job and it's constantly changing and everybody's gotta flow and move within you know each other without you know causing problems and you're constantly working against the clock i'm gonna add the green beans to this this is a side for dinner so this is uh the carrots with pole beans then we're going to build apple dumplings right in here all right so apple dumplings with drop dumplings old school so apple dumplings was something my father was like the only thing other than the barbecue that my dad would do and it's just a poor person's dessert you know it's definitely got an emotional punch you know brown sugar a lot of brown sugar a lot of cinnamon and then a little butter and we're gonna let that start to cook so this is a drop dumpling batter and it's kind of a gross dough i mean it's like you almost feel like it's not gonna work every time you do it it's like this is wrong this can't be how these these work so i'm going for a touch here you know when you feel it this is really getting there now yeah and we're just going right in drop dumplings are just like they sound they just drop they're meant for dropping in and you cover it and it's going to steam them up and hopefully fluff them up now you got to put some coals on the top there that'll give you that top heat okay so it's been five and a half hours so this guy should be ready i think anybody who who does this a barbecue or or open fire cooking i think they tell you it's not easy very challenging i'm 52 and i feel every day if i have a 18 hour event day i'm i'm banged up for four or five days afterwards it's fun i like the challenge of keeping the fires going and making sure that the heat is where it needs to be [Music] [Music] fire is primal and it's essential and it's truthful it's what we had for thousands of years it's the history of man is cooking with wood it's in us it's in our dna it speaks to us in a very very honest way [Music] you know i've and i've heard that the smell of fire because of our history with fire and cooking with fire that the smell of fire actually starts the digestive process that actually makes you begin to get ready to eat because you smell fire and you go oh i'm gonna eat so it's there's an allure it's uh you know it's a magical thing you

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Keywords: open fire cooking, open fire grilling, dutch oven cooking, how to cook in a dutch oven, how to use a dutch oven, open fire dutch oven, pork shoulder dutch oven, open fire fish, open fire, grilling, bbq, open fire cooking grill, open fire cooking fish, open fire cooking meat, cowboy cooking, outdoor cooking, dutch oven, open fire cooking for events, grill, food event catering, catering, event, Swell Party, barbecue, eater, eater.com, food, restaurant, dining, dish, foodie, chef, food show

Id: CbKyq4Kp_bo

Length: 11min 2sec (662 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 26 2020