Bison Steaks

This is the first time I have ever done Bison steaks. I've had Bison burgers but only prepared for me at a restaurant. I'd heard good things about it and wanted to give it a try. And I have to say I was not at all disappointed. The steaks were very similar to beef but they had a heartier consistency than beef. And despite having very little fat they were just as good if not better than beef in terms of flavor. For the rest of the pictures and the write up click below...



I want to start with a little about Bison before I go any farther. First off, Bison is not cheap. I bought two Rib Eye steaks at $18.99/pound. Second, the steak is very lean. There was very little marbling if any in these steaks. The NY Strips had a little marbling but were and extra $1/pound. They say that the lack of marbling is due to the Bison being grass fed over corn fed like most of the beef we buy, but I don't know if that's true. I want to apologize for not getting some pics of the meat before I threw it in a marinade. I was distracted when I got home and was prepping them for the following evening and totally forgot to get some pre shots.

Here are the steaks after I pulled them out of the marinade. Decent size but if you have been here before you know these pale in comparison to some of the other monsters I have done on this site:


The marinade was as simple as can be. Garlic, fresh ground black pepper, and this marinade:


I gotta say I like this stuff. It's milder than Andria's so I didn't feel the need to cut it like I do Andria's with coke or oil. It has much less sodium than Andria's as well. I'm gonna add this to the repertoire as a regular. Expect to see more of this stuff on this site.

One thing I was disappointed in was the wine:


The Gallo Reserve stuff is really good normally. And this got a 90 point rating and was only about $11. I was very excited. Love to find good 90+ pointers for $10. But I gotta wonder if they got the labels mixed up with a batch of merlot. Zin is supposed to be meaty, spicy, hearty. This was very smooth and velvety, which is all well and good if one is drinking a merlot. I wanted something to stand up against the Bison. This was not it. I wonder if somewhere there are people drinking a Gallo Reserve Merlot and wondering why it is so spicy?

People ask me all the time how I know when the coals are ready to dump. Well when doing steaks the cook time is only a few minutes of searing and a couple of minutes of baking, if necessary. So you don't need to save the charcoal for a long grill session. You want hot and fast not slow and low so no need to save the charcoal. So when the charcoal chimney looks like this you are ready to go:


After dumping the coals you can see that they are ready to go for a high heat sear. This is a HOT fire:


Same as always, coals on one side for the searing. No coals on the other side for the baking.

My wife likes her steak a little more done than I like so hers went on first:


Seared for about 60 seconds, rotated about 60 degrees and seared some more and then flipped:


Here is a close up of a great sear:


Put hers off to the side to bake. After a few minutes of baking here comes mine for the sear:


Different flash setting along with the edge of my wife's steak which is off the heat but I have it close to the coals as it was a cold and windy night. If I had it all the way over, as far from the heat as possible, it would completely stop cooking while I flame seared mine as there would be no heat anywhere near it for about 4 minutes:


I only baked mine for maybe 2 minutes. The steaks were thinner than I normally make and Bison is supposed to be cooked for a little less than beef. If it were a hot summer night with no wind, I probably would've just seared and pulled mine off. But here we have both on the cutting board ready to rest - hers on the right, mine on the left. Hers has a little better sear than mine as the fire was hotter when I did hers. While hers baked the fire died a bit:


After taking this shot I threw some foil over the top to let them rest and retain some of the heat:


And here we have the money shot of mine. My wife does not care for me delaying dinner with the taking of pictures of said dinner so I didn't risk upsetting her by making her wait while I got pics of her steak. But here is the money shot of mine. Grey around the edges. Pink to red in the middle. Almost perfect where I am concerned:



Now, I want to talk about the differences between Bison and Beef. Bison is meatier, leaner, more expensive and maybe a little tastier. Although that could be the new marinade I used. I need to marinade a steak all night in it to see if that is the difference. Remember I only marinaded the Filet I did a few days ago for a couple hours. But the question that begs to be asked - does a meatier, leaner, more expensive and a little tastier Bison steak warrant the extra cost over a beef steak? Do the Bison benefits merit paying $8/more per pound? Probably not. I liked it a lot, but I also have a little boy that my would like to one day send to private school. I will do it again. I want my dad to try it. But I can't see myself doing Bison very often. But if you have the means and want a healthier steak then this is the way to go.

Click here for the rest of the process

Filet Mignion that almost wasn't - Many videos of the process

Grilling is not a science. Some may call it an art. But one thing is for sure, sometimes things don't go as planned and improvisation is required. This was one of those times. The conditions outside were not ideal for grilling. 40 degrees and the wind was blowing strong. Keeping a grill at the proper temp can be tough in a situation like that. Normally with a Filet Mignon like this I would sear on each side for 2 minutes and bake for another 3-4 minutes on the side with no coals. The conditions this night changed that time frame and the method pretty dramatically. Click below to get the details.


But first let's start from the beginning. For this session I cooked a very nice size Filet Mignon. Stopped by John's Butcher Shoppee off 270 and St. Charles Rock Road and was delighted to find that they had Filets on sale for $8/pound. This bad boy on cost me $8.31:

Yeah, that is a new cell phone for reference. The old Razr is no where to be found.

While at John's I picked up some of their Marinade:

I am a bit partial to Andria's (something John's carries) but I decided to give their "marinade & flavorizer" a go... Here are the ingredients for their marinade:

The main reason I decided to give this a shot is when I saw the Sodium in this and the Sodium in Andrias. Andrias has almost 3 times the sodium John's does. And I have to say I'm happy I bought the marinade. It was really good. Can't wait to have it on something that is marinaded overnight such as the Bison Steaks I'm doing on Friday.

I threw the Filet into a ziplock with some garlic, black pepper, olive oil and the marinade and put it in the fridge for about 90 minutes:

The reason I used oil instead of my usual cola is because I don't want to ternderize the steak anymore than it already is. For tender cuts you want to go more towards oil based marinades rather than acid based marinades.

After 90 minutes or so I pulled it from the fridge and let it come to room temperature on the counter. You can see how the red steak has browned a bit by pulling in the marinade from the bag into the steak:

Time to find the proper wine pairing with my steak. Rosemount Shiraz should do the trick nicely:

This was the bottle that started it all. Different Vintage, but it was about 10 years ago that I was at a house warmin party and someone walked in with a 1998 Rosemount Shiraz. The guy said, "I realize it is Australian but go ahead and try it. It's great." Now at the time I thought of Australians and wine about the way I felt about the French and cars. Despite that I tried that wine and it was incredible. Turned out that 1998 was the best year Australia has ever had in recent history and they were churning out fantastic wines. I was buying it and giving bottles away to people. And thus began the shift in my family from a bunch of beer drinkers to wine drinkers.

Now out to the grill. With more than a few people mentioning how dark some of my outside shots are I attempted to rectify that with a 500 wat Halogen light. Seems to have worked better than the mag light I held under my arm for the last video I shot!?!?!

And here we have a grill set up for two zone grilling. Coals flaming hot on the left, nothing on the right. Oh, and as I always do just before I grill, I give the grate a good cleaning.

Now to those videos I promises in the title. This is me searing the Filet on one side. For some reason in this video it looks like the flames are hitting me in the face. Trust me, that didn't happen:

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And here we have me searing the other side of the steak:



How do I tell if a steak is done? By feel. I push on the steak. The harder it is the more done it is. As you can see in this video, after a full 5 minutes the Filet was just not cooking. The wind was whicking the heat away too fast so I put the steak closer to the coals:



I pushed it closer to the coals and cooked it 2 minutes on each side and it was still way too spongy so I had to transfer it to right over the coals if I wanted the thing to be more than raw. So much for those beautiful grill marks. Time to form a nice tasty crust:



One little trick here. I needed to get air to the coals to keep them hot but keep the heat in and around the steak. To do so I just cracked the lid a bit as seen here. Some would say that with a weber I just would need to open the bottom vents, except I hadn't dumped the ash in a while and those vents were under a couple inches of ash and not much use:



And here we have the steak on the plate and ready to rest for a little while. As you can see in this video that the steak is much firmer than it was when I was testing the doneness after 5 minutes of baking on the side of the grill:



I let this guy rest for about 4 minutes under foil while I got the movie ready for the evening:


With Pitchers and Catchers arriving in Jupiter tomorrow I felt a baseball movie was in order. Sure half the movie is a chick flick but it's still a great baseball movie:

Same ritual every year. In the weeks leading up to opening day I run the gamut of my baseball flicks including Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, the Natural, and For the Love of the Game. And no, I am not some Kevin Costner nut. The only other move I own that he is in is Silverado, but he makes great baseball movies. Back to the steak


Here we have the Money Shot:


And a bonus money shot of an awesome, tender, and juicy bite:



Click here for the rest of the process

How the GrillinFool celebrated the Super Bowl - Part I - Bacon Explosion

Oh, what a joyous day. I love the Super Bowl. I love the culmination of the NFL season. I love the commercials. I love that it is practically a holiday that everyone gets together for. And most of all I love the food. And this year we may have gone a little overboard. If you are a health nut, this is not the place to be.

Here is the main event. This thing is all the rage right now so we decided to give it a try. What's not to love? Bacon wrapped sausage wrapped bacon? It's a cardiologist's dream. And what a perfect time to try one of these monsters - Super Bowl Sunday?


We started with two pounds of Italian Sausage, a pound of thick cut bacon (formed into a weave), a half pound of cooked bacon, a half shallot, some garlic, black pepper, some KC sweet and smoky rub (courtesy of Mr. Raichlen), BBQ sauce, some cheddar and provel cheese.


Mix up the sausage, garlic, shallots, black pepper in a bowl:

Then spread the meat out flat on a piece of wax paper. Here we have the rub applied to the sausage:

Then layer the bacon:


Add some roped provel:

Add some sharp cheddar:


Drizzle on some BBQ sauce of your preference:


You will notice that I did not apply the stuffing ingredients all the way to the edges. This is so the stuffing can be sealed within the fatty.

Since this has cheese in it it really needed to be smacked around pretty hard to make sure there are no cracks and crevices. My dad was having a hard time grasping the concept behind why we need to smack the crap out of the sausage so my mom stepped in to help out.

Once the sausage was thoroughly assaulted time to wrap it in the bacon weave that my dad prepared earlier:

There is no easy way to do this. I just picked up the far side of the bacon weave and pulled it over the top of the fatty and voila, we have a bacon wrapped sausage wrapped bacon. Looks great from this side:

From this side we need a little work:


A few toothpicks later and that bad dog was wrapped well:

Off to the grill. Going for indirect here and some good smoke action. My dad does not have a dedicated smoker but he does have a couple of grills that will suffice. For this job we went with the 20 year old Char-Broil. So how do we turn this grill into a smoker:



Coals on each side, a make shift drip pan made of tin foil and a chunk of cherry on each side. Instant smoker:


And then we have the Bacon Explosion on the grill:


About an hour in we have this:


Two hours in:


It is starting to look and smell really good right now. So much so we started attracting a crowd:


Hmmmm....Future entry on GrillinFool.com? I've got a rotisserie just waiting for one of those guys. That will have to wait for another time. Back to the grilling. Here we have the GrillinFool tending to the Fatty and some ABT's:

Three hours in:

Another 30-40 minutes later:

And here we have the Fatty on the board to rest:


Remove the toothpicks, add some foil:

15 minutes later, time to slice:


How about a closeup of that smoke ring with a different flash setting:



I gotta be honest here, this thing was good, but wasn't all that. The bacon on the outside was amazing but the rest of it was sorta, well, meh. With all the hype I just expected to be blown away. I wasn't. Not by a long shot. Here's what I would've done differently:

1. The Italian sausage was a little overpowering. Probably should've gone with some generic bulk sausage rather than the Italian.
2. It needed more cheese.

Will I try this again? Yes. With a different kind of sausage and more cheese I expect it to be better, but I still don't think it will live up to the hype. I do plan on doing the bacon weave around a pork tenderloin in the near future. This thing is a lot of work for something that just wasn't all that great.

Click here for the rest of the process