franken weber pizza kettle and making lunchmeat

since my retirement from the navy i have become a stay at home dad, giving me plenty of time to actually work on the honey do list and put more time into bbq. winning all around!

i had been getting all the parts for Moose's pizza kettle (thread here) for a while now, and finally got it finished this week. a few minor differences in mine, i used an 18.5" OTS so cut the hole in the bottom a little smaller (8" total diameter), a 16" pizza stone and i'm using a different model burner. neither change seemed to make a difference, the stone got to 650-725 degrees easily and the pizza cooked in 6 minutes or so.

finished and in action



wednesday i got some store made dough and made 2 pizzas, a half pepperoni/half pepperoni & bratwurst for the 2 boys to split, and a chicken, spinach & mushroom white pizza for me and The Woman





turned out pretty good, used corn flour on the peel which worked ok to slide the pie off and didn't mess with the flavor of the crust. next time i will let the dough come to room temp before stretching out.

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i have been making lunch for the kids for a little bit now, usually making the bread and buying lunchmeat. i bought a food slicer last week and figured i could just smoke hunks of meat and slice it for their sammiches. the only thing that would be difficult would be chicken lunchmeat. after some searching i found instructions for "torihamu". it is several chicken breasts cured in honey and salt, overlapped, tied into a log, cooked and sliced. seemed like it was worth a try.

also wanted to try a scotch egg fatty, so i rolled out the sausage sprinkled with rub & arranged hardboiled eggs on it. rolled it up, dusted with more rub and in the fridge for a couple of hours.



a butterball turkey breast roast with s & p, the scotch egg fatty and a pork loin roast fresh from the freezer



everything on the WSM, cruising along at 270. the long thing in the middle is the torihamu. the turkey and pork are on the lower grate. had to throw on some brats for dinner as well.



i pulled everything at 150 deg IT, the chicken and fatty took an hour and a half, and the pork and turkey took a little less than 3 hours. i foiled everything and cooled on the counter for 2 hours and then into the fridge overnight.

this morning i pulled everything out and got ready to slice it all.

before slicing,



after slicing.



everything turned out excellent. the torihamu fell apart when i got the slices too thin, but mostly held together pretty good. loved using the slicer, would not have been able to get anywhere near that many slices by hand. i portioned everything into 1 lb vacuum bags and put them in the freezer. i'm hoping it'll last for a month of lunches.

thanks for looking!

now i'm off to brew some beer!

a scotch egg is a hardboiled egg wrapped in sausage, breaded and deep fried. they're pretty darn tasty.

thanks to everyone for the comments. i've always thought making stuff yourself is better, both in quality and in price, than you can buy. besides, i got tons of time now!

squeekykleen said:

Wow, looks like you are pretty handy to have around! What style of beer are you brewing?

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the white house honey ale, from an extract kit. it's my first time brewing, soi'm keeping my fingers crossed

LMAJ said:

Nice way to take care of the family! Tell us more about the chicken... details please...

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it's fairly simple, use 1 tbsp honey and 1 1/2 tsp salt for each 8 oz chicken breast put them in a bag (i used a vacuseal bag) for 2 days, i also sprinkled in some of my house rub. pull them out, rinse and soak in water for an hour or so. the hardest part was making the log. i overlapped two breasts point to point, and then overlapped the rest with the points going tin the same direction. tying it was a PITA because they kept wanting to slip apart, but it is tied like you would tie a roast. after it was smoked i let it sit overnight in the fridge to make slicing easier. when i sliced it some of the individual breast pieces came apart, but overall it held together pretty well. i think for the net one i'll get full breasts from a butcher so the log will be bigger, and i'll use less breasts in each log to help with tying them.

here's where i found the recipe that i used torihamu article