BEEF
How To Cook Grass-Finished Beef
How To Grill a Perfect Grass-Finished Steak
Beef Shank and other Slow Cooker Joy
CHICKEN
Charlie's 16-Clove Garlic Chicken
Chicken Korma with Bundh Gobi Mutter (Instant Pot recipe)
Garam Masala Chicken - Instant Pot
Schmaltz, or What To Do With The Chicken Fat
Quick Roasted Chicken with Mustard and Garlic
TURKEY
RABBIT
Once you've had roast beef cooked this way, you'll never go back to that sad stuff you've been forced to endure for all of these years. This is simplicity itself, and it makes... the best roast beef ever.
The roasts we sell at Kennedy Ranch are perfect for this preparation, because they're very uniform in size (in addition to being high quality meat, natch.) Of our roasts, the best for this preparation are the Cross Rib Roasts, the Sirloin Tip Roasts, and the Eye Round Roasts. I do my Standing Rib Roasts this way, too, and they're absolutely divine.
If you don't have one, run down to the kitchen gadget store and get one of those meat probe thermometers that let you see the meat temp without opening your oven door. Best money you'll spend, and you'll want one for this recipe.
The day before you plan on cooking your roast:
Defrost roast and pat it dry. Rub it all over with 4 t of kosher salt (or so, whatever it takes to get decent coverage.) Wrap the salted roast in plastic wrap and let it sit in your fridge 18-24 hours.
The next day:
Take it out of the fridge, unwrap it, and let it come to room temperature.
Adjust the racks in your oven so the roast can sit on a middle rack. Preheat the oven to 225 degrees.
Rub the roast all over with 2 t of vegetable oil and sprinkle evenly with pepper. Heat 1 T of oil in a skillet until it just starts to smoke. Brown all sides of the roast. Transfer roast to wire rack set in rimmed baking pan. Roast until meat probe thermometer registers 115-degrees, an hour or two, depending on the size of the roast. Turn off the oven without opening the door, until meat probe thermometer reads 120-degrees, 30-50 minutes longer, again depending on the size of the roast. If it hasn't come to temperature in 50 minutes, turn the oven back on to 225 for five minutes and turn it off again.
Transfer roast to carving board and let it rest for 15 minutes before carving (important!). Serve with horseradish.
Night one - Beer Can Chicken
Remove chicken from refrigerator, rinse and pat dry. Preheat oven to 450-degrees.
Place half full beer can on a rack in a baking dish. Lower chicken onto beer can so that the beer can is supporting the chicken as it sits upright. Note: for Whole30 compliance let somebody else drink the beer and half fill the can with chicken bone broth.
Loosen chicken skin around the neck and sprinkle breast meat with salt, pepper and fresh rosemary.
Put chicken in hot oven and roast for 15 minutes. Reduce heat to 325-degrees and continue roasting until meat thermometer inserted in chicken thigh reads 160-degrees. Remove chicken from oven, cover and let rest 10 minutes.
Serve the legs, wings and crispy skin with a fresh green salad and baked sweet potato jo-jos (baked in the oven along with the chicken).
Be sure and pour the pan drippings into a fat separator, and save the juice and the fat separately in the fridge.
Meal two - Chicken Protein Salad
Slice breasts from chicken carcass and chop breast meat into 1/4" dice. Place in a bowl, along with:
Mix well. Serve over lettuce and greens from the farmer's market. This will keep in the fridge for a week's worth of lunches.
Meal three - Chicken Sweet Potato Pie
Cut up two sweet potatoes into chunks, boil until soft and drain. Set aside.
Preheat oven to 375-degrees.
Chop chicken thigh meat into 1/4" dice, strip remaining meat from chicken carcass and dice, set aside. Save all bones.
Heat fat from baked chicken (first night) in a deep cast-iron skillet. Sautee in fat until soft:
Turn cooker on high, bring to a boil, then cover and reduce heat to low. Let it cook 18-24 hours, the longer the better. Strain.
This will keep just fine in the fridge for 3-4 days, or will freeze up to a year. Drink it like tea or use it as the basis for recipes like risotto, chicken veggie soup, or any other of the million recipes that call for chicken stock.
You want a thick steak for this - 1 1/4" - 1 1/2".
If you're grilling over charcoal, start the grill and let the charcoals get a bright orange with ashy cover. Turn your gas grill on high. You want it HOT.
About 20 minutes before grilling, remove the steaks from the refrigerator and let sit, covered, at room temperature.
Brush the steaks on both sides with canola oil and season liberally with salt and pepper.
Place the steaks on the grill and cook until golden brown and slightly charred, 2.5 minutes for rare, 3-5 minutes for medium-rare. Don't leave, watch for flare-ups.
Turn the steaks over and continue to grill 2.5 minutes for rare (an internal temperature of 125 degrees F), 3 -4 minutes for medium-rare (an internal temperature of 135 degrees F). Don't cook a grass-finished steak past medium rare or it will be tough!
Transfer the steaks to a cutting board or platter, tent loosely with foil and let rest 5 minutes before slicing.
Here's a fun steak project from one of our favorite TV chefs, Alton Brown: Dry Aged Chimney Porterhouse
Two words - don't overcook! Grass finished beef doesn't have the fat content to stand up to the higher internal temperatures that come with cooking to medium and above. What's more, it cooks 30% to 50% faster than what you're used to. Watch it closely! Rare and medium rare - that's what you want.
If you don't have a rapid-read meat thermometer, get one and use it regularly. Pull the meat off the grill or out of the oven when the internal temperature reaches 120-degrees, and let it rest, covered with a foil tent, for 10-20 minutes. It'll finish cooking while it rests. Generally speaking, if I'm working on the grill I'll touch the beef to see how firm it is. If it feels like my cheek it's rare... if it feels like the web between my thumb and forefinger it's medium rare.
We also suggest that you stick with thicker cuts. The steaks we sell at the farmer's market and through our CSA are cut no less than 1 1/4" thick, and we suggest that our custom-beef clients get them cut the same way. If you have a thinner steak than that, throw it on the grill still partially frozen. That'll help you keep the internal temperature down while the surfaces are getting a nice char going.
Another thing - because the beef has such a low fat content, you'll want to use oil on the grill every time you throw something on the barbecue. It'll stick otherwise. Some folks use tinfoil under their hamburgers. We like the char taste that comes with direct grilling, but experiment and see what works best for you. Ken likes grilling one side of his burgers on foil, for example, to make sure they stick together when he flips them. I have great luck without it. You make the call.
When you form your hamburgers - again, form them about 1" thick. I'll roll the burger into balls, flatten them to about 1" thickness, and then make a divot in the middle with my thumbs. When it cooks, the meat seems to rise up in the middle... if you put a divot there it'll rise up to be flat when it's done cooking. Whatever you do, don't make thin patties out of this burger. You'll be disappointed if you do.
If you like your beef cooked past medium-rare, we strongly recommend that you just give our meat a try cooked the way we recommend. You'll see. We are confident that we'll make a believer out of you.
We think the perfect burger is juicy, pink on the inside, a bit charred on the outside, shaped evenly enough that it fits in the bun and cooks evenly. It's not hard to do with a little practice! Figure 6 oz. of burger per person, and for the juiciest burgers, use 80/20 ground beef.
Fire up the grill! The grill should be hot... if you're using charcoal, wait until the charcoals are glowing orange and ashed over. If you're using a gas grill, turn it to high and give it plenty of time to warm up.
Handle the meat as little as possible. You don't want to compact it any more than is absolutely necessary. The easiest way to shape patties without overhandling is to use a hamburger ring, available at any kitchen store.
Once the patties are shaped, use your thumb to put a deep thumbprint in the middle of each patty. The burgers will want to plump up as you cook, the thumbprint will "fool" the burger into cooking up flat.
Season both sides of the burger with kosher salt and freshly ground pepper.
Brush the burgers with canola oil. Grill the first side until golden brown and lightly charred, at least three minutes. Flip only once, and cook the other side 3-4 minutes until rare/med. rare.
Enjoy in your favorite burger recipe!
This is a tried-and-true method that I’ve used for years. It’s easy and its fail-safe. It’s a combination of two recipes I really like, from Food Network’s Alton Brown and NPR’s Lynne Rosseto Kasper, along with some adds from how my dad used to do it. Alton’s recipe is crazy simple, Lynne’s is complex, Dad’s was, well, Dad’s. This IMHO combines the best of them all without making it too fussy.
If you're cooking up a big Kennedy Ranch turkey, it'll need some time to defrost. Take it out of the freezer no later than five days before you want to serve it, and put it into the refrigerator to thaw slowly. It can continue defrosting as it brines.
Two or three days before you want to eat... combine in stockpot:
Simmer this over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until it is hot through and the solids have dissolved. Let cool and refrigerate.
In another stockpot:
Heat some chicken fat or olive oil. Brown the turkey’s neck and giblets. Remove meats, add two chopped onions to pot and sauté until onions are clear. Don’t let it burn. Stir in one chopped carrot and one chopped rib of celery, stirring up browned bits from bottom of pot. Add neck and giblets, along with a few sage leaves, two sprigs rosemary, kosher salt and fresh ground pepper. If you have a chicken carcass you’ve been saving to make stock, throw it in. Add water, a couple of quarts, cover and let simmer for 2 hours or more. Remove from heat, strain, let cool and refrigerate. Once they’re cool, chop the giblets fine and shred the meat from the turkey neck saving them for use in the gravy.
Wash, rinse and sanitize a cooler, letting it air dry completely. 2 capsful of bleach in a gallon of water is an effective sanitizer. Don’t rinse it or hand dry, otherwise it won’t be sanitized.
One or two days before you want to eat:
Put your turkey in the cooler and pour the cider mixture over it. Add enough heavily iced water to cover, put the cooler’s lid on and put it in a cool place. Turn it over at least once during the day. Make sure your ice doesn’t all melt, you want your bird to stay good and cold. Estimate one hour per lb. for brining.
The day you want to eat:
First thing in the morning, remove the turkey from the brine and rinse it well, inside and out. Run your hands between the breast meat and skin to loosen skin from breast. Pat dry and put it in the fridge uncovered for several hours to dry.
Put a large cast iron griddle, a pizza stone, or a couple of large cast-iron pans on the floor of your oven. Something that will collect and radiate heat. My griddle fits nicely on a couple of molded rails on the bottom of the oven, allowing for an inch or so of space between the bottom of the oven and the griddle. If you are using an electric oven with the heating element at the bottom, READ THE NOTE AT THE END OF THE RECIPE!
Put the oven rack as low as possible, making sure there's some space between your heat radiating device and the rack. Preheat oven to 500 degrees for an hour, long enough for that griddle to get to temperature. While it's preheating, in a roasting pan, set out about three halved carrots, three halved stalks of celery, three onions cut into rounds. This will be your turkey “rack”. Scatter a rough chopped Granny Smith apple and several leaves of fresh sage over veggies.
In a microwave safe bowl, combine another chopped Granny Smith apple, half a sliced onion, four sprigs of rosemary, six leaves of sage, a cinnamon stick and a cup of water. Microwave for five minutes, drain and put solids into the turkey cavity. Put turkey onto your vegetable “rack”. Rub turkey with softened butter, sprinkle with fresh ground pepper and put it in the oven. Before you close oven door, pour enough dry white wine into your roasting pan to cover bottom to about 1/2”, about four cups. Close the door and roast for about 1/2 hour.
After 30 minutes, reduce heat to 350-degrees.
Stick a meat thermometer into the breast at this point, making sure you keep it in the meat and don’t hit a bone.
Roast until thermometer reads 160-degrees, basting occasionally with juice from the pan. It will take 2.5-3 hours for a 20 lb bird. Check the dark meat, it should be at least 155-160 degrees. Don't pull it out early, there's enough moisture in a Kennedy Ranch turkey to let the breast get a little warmer while the thighs cook completely. When it’s done, remove from the oven, put it on serving platter or cutting board and cover with foil or an inverted bowl. Let rest a MINIMUM of 15 minutes, more is better. Besides, the gravy will take a while. Start carving when the gravy is done.
To make the gravy, heat up all but one cup of the giblet stock you made previously. Remove veggies from the pan, put them in a food processor and chop roughly. Pour off juice from the turkey pan into a fat separator to remove excess fat. Pour defatted turkey juice back into roasting pan along with 1/2 c apple cider and 1/2 c of the dry white wine, and heat it over low heat on two burners. Stir up brown bits from bottom of the pan. Heat until liquid reduces by half. Add heated stock and stir until it’s bubbly.
In the meantime, combine the 1c cold reserved stock with 1/4 c flour and whisk until smooth. Whisk cold flour slurry into bubbling roasting pan juices, stirring constantly, until it thickens. Stir in veggies from food processor, tear and add four leaves of sage, and add warmed minced giblets/neck meat. Heat through, add kosher salt and pepper to taste.
It’s a lot of typing but it really is easy. And worth it. Key to success- a good meat thermometer. Don’t try this without!
NOTE: If you don't have something to absorb/reflect heat from the floor of the oven, or if you are using an electric range with the heating element on the floor of the oven, your best bet for cooking one of these big birds is to start it cooking breast-side-down, and flip it halfway through cooking. That will ensure that the thighs get done before the breast gets overdone. It's definitely a bit of a hassle but the results are very much worth it. You'll need help, and preferably some silicone hot pads. We did it this way every year before we figured out the griddle/pizza stone trick.
