Summer Grilling

Fire Works

By Ivan J. Sheehan
Photographs by Michael McDermott and Sarah R. Sphar

Though scientists still debate the first appearance of flame as a controlled element, evidence found in caves from the Middle Paleolithic era – about 100,000 years ago – seems to indicate that Neanderthal man used flame to cook. Born of necessity, cooking over hot coals still remains an inherently primitive art, though it has had centuries to develop into a cultural phenomenon.

The word barbecue first entered the American lexicon in the early 1700s, where it likely evolved from the Spanish word barbacoa, referring to a framework for supporting meat over fire. In turn, barbacoa may be traced to the Taino Indians, who inhabited the Greater Antilles. When Spanish explorers invaded the region in the 15th century, it’s possible they so admired the Taino cooking technique that they incorporated the word into their language. American barbecue took root among early settlements across the southeastern seaboard, giving rise to the often-imitated Carolina barbecue. Its popularity quickly spread west, stopping in Memphis, Kansas City and Texas, with each location contributing varied tastes and methods, a topic that engenders debate as heated as any flame.

Before grilling could become the center of summer celebrations, two companies struck a deal that would put the power of fire in the average person’s hands. In 1881, the Barber Match Company of Akron merged with Swift & Courtney & Beecher of Delaware to form the Diamond Match Company; in 1910, the company developed a chemical formula that effectively created the modern match. A year later, Diamond donated the patent to the public at the urging of President William Howard Taft, who had witnessed the disastrous effects of matches made with yellow and white phosphorous.

Around the same time, Henry Ford had expressed interest in a parcel of land in Michigan’s northern peninsula, which was rich with iron and timber. He contacted his cousin’s husband, Edward G. Kingsford, a real estate agent and owner of a local Ford dealership. Kingsford helped Ford purchase more than 300,000 acres, and in 1924, a chemical plant was opened to make use of waste wood to manufacture charcoal briquettes, an invention patented in 1897 by Ellsworth B.A. Zwoyer and mass produced by Ford. The product was originally called Ford Charcoal Briquettes, but was renamed Kingsford Charcoal Briquettes in 1951, when Henry Ford’s grandson sold the company to the newly formed Kingsford Chemical Company.

Through the 1940s, grilling took place mostly at campgrounds and picnic sites. It was not until after World War II, when families moved out of the city and into the suburbs, that grilling moved to the backyard with special help from one man with a flair for flame.

In the Mount Prospect suburb of Chicago, George Stephen Sr. was not happy with his open-flame brazier. Stephen’s employer,Weber Brothers Metal Works, happened to manufacture harbor buoys; one day, he cut a buoy in half, placed a grate in the bottom half, fashioned a curved top lid, added vents for temperature control and built a stand to keep it upright. The Weber Grill went into production in 1952, selling well despite its $50 price tag. Thus, with distinct barbecue styles, reliable flame, a powerful heat conductor and a sturdy grilling apparatus, the modern cookout was born.

In any barbecue endeavor, the most important ingredient is the protein, and northeast Ohio has many fine food purveyors with unique expertise in the ways of the grill. Among them are Sanford Herskovitz of Mister Brisket in Cleveland Heights, Kris Kreiger of Chef ’s Choice Meats in Berea, and Kate and Tom McIntyre and Eric Muhoray of Kate’s Fish at the West Side Market in Cleveland.

With a moniker like Mister Brisket, Sanford Herskovitz better know his steer – and he does. For three decades, he’s been the proprietor of his namesake deli and butcher shop on South Taylor Road in Cleveland Heights. The modest storefront echoes Herskovitz’ commitment to simplicity, where the focus is on flesh rather than flash. A brisk deli business lures customers with generous, deliriously rich corned beef sandwiches, but the real beef of this business is choice cut meats.

“I used to be a psychologist,” says Herskovitz of his early career aspirations. “I finished graduate school and there was no work, so here I am. This is my dad’s business.” The lifelong Clevelander expanded his parents’ meat and poultry store, in the process educating countless customers on the finer points of beef.

“There are three things you look for: flavor, texture and appearance,” he says. You’ve got to be able to separate flavor and texture, and people always mix it up. They’ll have a very tender piece of meat – ‘oh, this is the most delicious steak I’ve ever eaten’ – but it will be tasteless.”

There are eight grades of beef in the United States, from prime, choice and select to utility, cutter and canned. When the USDA grades cattle, the packing house pays the government a fee per each pound of beef assessed, so it can cost millions for certification.“ Choice, prime – everybody thinks it’s a status symbol,” says Herskovitz.“ It’s not. What they talk about is fat. USDA prime is very, very heavily marbled, and that’s what I want. A lot of people come to me and just shriek and say: ‘My God, there’s so much fat in here!’ Well, I got news for you, that’s what makes it good.

“The reason the prime is so expensive is because they feed [the steer] a lot, so they’re alive longer, and because it’s fattier, it requires more trimming. So the price goes up and up.”

There is often debate among purists about the benefits of dry- or wet-aged beef versus no aging. “Twice, we’ve had blind tastings and nobody could tell the difference,” says Herskovitz. “Everybody was mixing them up. It makes absolutely no difference. Aging is baloney. What they’re looking for is tenderness, and the tenderness will come from the marbling.”

Among Herskovitz’ favorite cuts is the skirt steak, which comes from the outside diaphragm of the steer. It is sometimes called Romanian tenderloin. There is an outside skirt and an inside skirt, which, according to Herskovitz, is chewy and tough. For the liberally marbled outside skirt, he does not recommend marinating the cuts, noting that USDA prime cuts of outside skirt will require little more than salt and pepper. Among the best preparations for grilling is a pinwheel (see recipe at right).

Another recently popular cut is hanger steak, which is often confused with the skirt because it tastes similar, though denser. The hanger should be avoided if you prefer steak well done, as it will be too tough. Herskovitz also enjoys rib steaks, namely the rib eye. He prefers his prepared Pittsburgh rare – a 2 1/2- to 3-inch thick steak, covered in oil to severely burn and char the outside while keeping the inside extremely rare. Look for consistent, generous marbling in a rib eye, and don’t get it less than 1 1/2 inches thick. “Anybody who says they want half an inch or three-quarter, I say ‘nein.’ You might as well have a piece of ham.”

Does Herskovitz ever get tired of beef? “Absolutely not. It’s the best thing in the world. I love it.”

In Berea, chef Kris Kreiger shares a similar passion for steer, though he has a particularly strong appreciation for one of the most popular meats sold in the United States: pork. “If it weren’t for the sausage that I make, I’ve often contemplated not selling red meat,” says Kreiger.

A chef by trade, having worked in professional kitchens including the Cleveland Athletic and Clifton clubs, Kreiger sold food service for 13 years, but eventually tired of it.“I was starry-eyed and stupid enough to start my own thing,” says Kreiger of opening Chef ’s Choice Meats three years ago. “One of my motivations for doing this was I couldn’t find any good meat anyplace. If I just wanted nice, thick pork chops, I couldn’t find them!”

Kreiger’s facility is divided among two main buildings: a former market, a Berea fixture since 1907, where Kreiger offers a diverse array of prepared food, including ethnic specialties and freshly butchered and house-cured meats; and a former beverage store, which now houses his galley kitchen, cold room, meat locker, brine cooler and smokehouse.

In the market, you’ll find potato pancakes made from his grandmother’s recipe alongside dishes he learned to cook while living and working in kitchens in Germany for three years. “People don’t cook. It’s maybe a hobby, except on the weekend,” says Kreiger. “The days of cooking at least six days a week are long gone.”

Pork is traditionally divided among jowl, Boston butt, picnic, hock, belly, ham, foot and loin cuts. Kreiger, who sources his pork from Daisyfield Farms in Sandusky, purchases whole pork loins, which he breaks down onsite. Much like Herskovitz and his beef, Kreiger is adamant about acquiring well-marbled meat. “I can tell if it’s going to have some nice marbling when I pick it up,” says Kreiger.

Among Kreiger’s favorite cuts to work with is the whole pork butt, the cut of legend in Carolina-style barbecue.“ I leave the bone in, because I call it the pop-up timer: When the bone cleaves out, you know it’s ready to shred. If it doesn’t pull out, keep letting it cook.” Kreiger breaks the butt down into a cottage ham, which has a little more muscle attached.“ For a full pork butt, you want to do indirect heat. It’s going to take four or five hours on the grill, at least. It takes me that long in the oven.”

No discussion of pork and barbecue would be complete without mention of ribs, of which there are 13 bones on a slab. When it comes to cooking ribs properly, plan ahead. “Never boil ribs – that just leaches all the flavor out of it,” says Kreiger. “I know a lot of people par-boil ribs, and I just don’t understand it.”

Never submerge the ribs when cooking. Ideally, you should only add enough liquid to create steam to keep them moist while braising, to impart flavor. As with the butt, the bones become a reliable thermometer. When the bones cleave out an inch from the meat, the ribs are done. “If you want to cook them on the grill, you sear them off first, and then it’s low and slow,” says Kreiger. “It takes 4 to 5 hours.You still run the risk of toughening them up, because there’s not enough moist heat.”

Kreiger notes that pork chops are great prepared on a grill (see recipe at right). “I love a great pork chop, so long as it has some nice fat in it,” he says. “If it’s lean, it gets tough.You don’t have to kill pork anymore – it’s already dead. You don’t have to cook it to shoe leather like my mom used to. Just cook it to a nice medium, medium-rare. ”He recommends brushing chops with sesame oil, which imparts a nutty flavor, and using a flavorful rub or simply salt, pepper and a little garlic.

He warns against marinating pork in an acidulant for more than 45 minutes unless you are making sauerbraten, as it will start to cook the meat, making it dry and tough when you cook it over flame. “I like to sear them off over a medium-high heat and move them to the side [over indirect heat], especially with pork, because it’s so lean these days that there’s just not enough marbling in there to keep them moist,” he says.“You really need to let that meat rest for 5 to10 minutesbefore you start chowing, because you’ve shocked all those juices to the center, and it gives them a chance to expand back in to the meat.”

For boneless chops, Kreiger recommends butterflying the meat, and grilling it quickly for approximately two minutes per side. As with beef, there is technically a pork porterhouse, which contains part of the tenderloin and the sirloin, and makes for a hearty, excellent cut for the grill. Pork tenderloin is another favorite of Kreiger’s, and he finds it works well on the grill. “I wrap medallions in honey maple bacon, sprinkle them with [Kreiger’s] rub, sear them off, cook to medium and brush them with maple syrup,” says Kreiger. “Man, they are so spanking good!”

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need any special set-up to grill perfectly delicious seafood – a fact that inspired Kate McIntyre to open Kate’s Fish at stands F12 and F13 at the West Side Market.

With a background in food service corporate management, McIntyre began working at Nautilus Seafood in 1998, and in 2000, took over the business when the original owners wanted to close. “I decided that I really, really liked the business, and when they were pulling out, I decided I wanted to make it my own,” says McIntyre. “I think mostly, it’s the fact I like to sell a quality product and a lot of people don’t know how to cook fish … We get to talk to them, good customer relations, give them recipes. I just found that a lot of it was educating people on what to do with seafood, and that just really appealed to me.”

Helping McIntyre manage the business is her son, Tom, who she works with three days a week. “Working with my son is – how shall I put it – it’s heaven or hell,” jokes McIntyre. “He has learned an awful lot about the fish business, and he is very smart and very capable of running the business in my absence, and he has a lot of good qualities … He’s as passionate about the business as I am – maybe even more passionate about it, because I’ve been there longer, and he’s newer to it.”

Tom and his right-hand man Eric Muhoray, both twenty-somethings, possess an energy and enthusiasm that is immediately evident as they carom around the stalls’ ship-like quarters, fielding questions and offering advice to customers. As with Kreiger, Kate’s Fish deals almost exclusively with whole product. “One of the big things that we try to do is cut down as much fish from the whole fish to filets as possible, as opposed to buying it already filleted, which everyone else will do,” says Tom. “That way, we see the product whole, we know how fresh it is, and we get to control when we cut it, how we cut it, how we store it on ice.

“If we buy salmon filets, who knows how long they’ve been filleted for? We buy whole salmon, we filet them here, to order, that day, and you can’t get fresher salmon.”

When it comes to grilling fresh fish, many people assume it needs to be on foil, that it will disintegrate over the grates or that it will dry out. “First of all, I think a common misconception with grilling seafood is there are specific kinds of seafood that are just for grilling,” says Muhoray. “You can grill any type of seafood, all of it. There are several types of seafood that may be easier to grill … a high-fat content fish, such as salmon or Chilean sea bass, won’t dry out on you on the grill, so it’s really tough to overcook it.”

Muhoray and Tom also point to denser fish, such as swordfish, marlin, mahi-mahi and tuna, as ideal for the grill. Much like a steak, the solid structure of the fish will easily stand up to grilling. The pair recommends using olive oil to brush both the grill grates and the fish to prevent sticking and to add flavor. Denser fish may be marinated, as the marinade will impart flavor to the outside without compromising the integrity or solidity of the fish, but they warn against marinating for more than 20 minutes.

Salmon is among the fishmonger’s biggest sellers, with farm-raised Alaskan salmon the most popular seller. “There’s a stigma about Atlantic farm-raised salmon, and peoples’ doctors will say, ‘eat the wild salmon’,” says Tom. “Wild salmon is better, but it’s also twice as expensive. I like Atlantic salmon, and I eat it all the time.”

“Honestly, the farms we get it from are really clean, northern Alaskan waters; it’s a really clean fish,” says Muhoray. “Oftentimes, depending on where the wild fish is coming from, the farm-raised can almost be cleaner than the wild because it’s raised in a very controlled environment. ”The high fat content also means it’s great on the grill. Keep an eye out for Coho salmon, Yukon River salmon and wild sockeye, though the latter is thinner than other salmons, with a lower fat content, so it cooks very fast.

Mother and son both share a strong love of Copper River king salmon. It has a very high fat content and is very thick, so it’s well suited for grilling. “The Copper River king salmon is the best salmon ever; it’s unbelievable,” says Tom. “I can’t afford it – I’ll get like one piece per season!”

“I think that it has the best flavor, and the best balance of fat to meat – the flavor is superb,” adds McIntyre.

Everyone from Kate’s Fish stresses the ease and depth of flavor gained from grilling whole fish. Because the skin tends to keep whole fish moist, again, it’s tough to overcook it. They recommend stuffing the belly, and rubbing the inside with salt and pepper, which keeps it open to allow the heat to get inside and keep it moist from within. Also, making slits in the flesh on the outside all the way down the fish allows heat to more easily penetrate the skin and cook the fish evenly. It’s also convenient because you can spread the slits open to check for doneness.The fish is cooked when the meat is opaque; if it’s translucent, it needs more time.

Among whole fish, snapper and branzini (see recipe at right), a Mediterranean sea bass with a high fat content, are highly recommended. “Branzini is mild in flavor, and they’re usually one pound to a pound and a quarter, which is a perfect size for one person,” says Kate, who actually prefers to grill whole snapper stuffed with orange and fennel.

For some of the more delicate Lake Erie fish, such as yellow perch and walleye, as well as sole, catfish and halibut, Muhoray offers one final foolproof option: “If you use a grill basket, oil it, and put that on the grill, then you don’t have to fuss with [fish] on the grates,” says Muhoray. “Cook it through, don’t even flip it, and just take the basket off when you’re done. That’s an easy way to do any type of fish.”

Whether you prefer beer or wine, Ohio’s wineries and breweries have you covered. Here are six beer and wine selections to accompany this month’s Recipe File menus.

Pork Rib Chops with Corn and Pineapple Salsa, and Lager Beans:

During the warm summer months, riesling is always a crowd favorite. The 2006 Ferrante Winery Golden Bunches dry riesling produced in Harpersfield Township is classic riesling: light golden color with shades of green and a nicely pronounced nose with distinct green apple, ripe melon and floral aromas. The light body is punctuated by clean green apple, peach, tropical fruit and honey flavors, with a refreshing minerality. The high acidity and bright fruit flavors (particularly the pineapple) are a natural match with the salsa, and stand up to Kreiger’s spice blend. The apple and pineapple on the palate and light body nicely complement the pork.

While many IPAs could easily overpower pork dishes with their abundance of hops, the Buckeye Brewing Company Hippie IPA serves as an ideal complement to the pork chops, salsa and beans. The generously – yet not overwhelmingly – hopped Hippie IPA is well suited to accompany Kreiger’s pungent dry rub, the spices in the salsa, and the smoke and sweet flavors found in the beans. The IPA soaks up the summer sun, with nice floral notes from the hops and a crisp finish, and the right amount of body to capably accentuate the sweet pork.

Grilled Skirt Steak Pinwheels with Bacon and Blue Cheese Potato Salad:

Varietal cabernet franc arguably finds its finest expression in France’s Loire Valley in Chinon. However, in Ripley, located in the Ohio River Valley appellation, Ron Barrett and Nancy Bentley are crafting a fine cabernet franc bottled under their Kinkead Ridge label. Their 2005 cabernet franc has a bright intensity in the glass, with eggplant purple hues. It has a bold nose marked by fresh soil, blackberry, cherry, leather and smoky aromas, a byproduct of aging in French and American oak. The medium-bodied wine possesses a pleasing balance of spice on the palate, with strong pepper and smoked overtones yielding to ripe black cherry and chocolate flavors. The medium-plus tannins and acidity help cut the fattiness of the skirt steaks and nicely embrace the intense piquancy of the blue cheese. The wine’s earthy, smoke and spice flavors are well suited to accentuate the big grill flavors of the beef, and the smokiness of the bacon and bite of cayenne in the salad.

Imperial beers typically feature big flavors and big alcohol, and Akron’s Hoppin’ Frog Brewery Bodacious Black and Tan is no different. At 7.6 percent ABV, this creative brew unites the producer’s B.O.R.I.S. the Crusher oatmeal imperial stout and Hoppin’ to Heaven IPA. Although it’s 67 percent IPA and 33 percent stout, the roasted coffee and dark chocolate flavors of the stout initially jump out, but the IPA adds an interestingly assertive hoppy finish that when blended with stout is reminiscent of chocolate-covered Turkish delight. The combination is light enough as to be enjoyed in the summer sun, but it’s far from reserved. Such intense flavoring and high alcohol are best enjoyed with hearty meat dishes, such as the pinwheels of skirt steak and the rich potato salad, whose richness complements the beer.

Grilled Whole Branzini with Caponata and Grilled Pugliese:

While temperamental pinot noir grapes may be the bane of many a winemaker, the resulting wines are best friends with a diverse array of foods. The 2006 St. Joseph Vineyard pinot noir from Ohio’s Grand River Valley is unusually Old World in its subtlety. It possesses beautiful light purple hues that darken to violet in the cheeks of the glass. A reserved nose offers wisps of cedar and clove with some vegetal traces. On the palate, the medium-light-bodied (12 percent ABV) pinot provides black pepper, strawberry and cinnamon, with cherry and licorice rounding out a short, to-the-point finish. The subdued flavor profile, body, gentle tannins and acidity make for a wine that doesn’t overwhelm the fish. Rather, it complements the naturally flavorful whole fish, with enough backbone to embrace the abundance of fresh herbs and smoky grill flavor. It also provides added dimension to the olive oil–heavy, vegetable- and basil-laden caponata.

Traditional Belgian wit ale (as well as its German cousin, hefeweizen) is good any time of year, but the ale’s citrus aromas and bite are especially refreshing under the bright summer sun. The Great Lakes Brewing Company Holy Moses is one such wit ale. The cloudy brew is loaded with botanicals, including orange peel, chamomile and coriander that feature prominently in the ale’s aromas and taste. Much like the fish, the ale is crisp, refreshing and light, and the liberal use of botanicals in the brewing process marry perfectly with the orange and herbs used to flavor and perfume the fish, as well as the aromatic caponata.

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