So, yeah,
today I've got a new little toy to play with outside.
I went ahead and bought this attachment for the kettle, which
allows you to put long skewers on it, and it actually is a little bit
of a raised fitting on there, which I'll show you outside something else
neat that I found to do with it, which is a second use for it.
But in order to really use this
new skewer attachment, we've got to make some skewers.
And the first thing we're going to do
is get some marinades ready because we're going to be doing chicken, beef,
and I've got some veggies and mushrooms that I already cut up off camera.
I will be doing some skewers of those,
but let's get our chicken marinade ready first, and we're starting
with two tablespoons of what's called Peri Peri sauce.
This is something I got at Trader Joe's.
If you can't get this, you really want to get sort of a hot sauce that you like.
This is pretty hot.
Now I like some spice.
Some people like a lot of spice.
For me, this is pretty hot.
So we're going to go ahead and we're going to mellow this out
a little bit with a quarter cup of maple syrup.
Last ingredient for this is
half a teaspoon of a ground dried sage.
And I'm just going to mix us up with a fork
here.
Want to get everything incorporated, get that sage mixed in there.
I'm going to take a tiny little taste here.
Oh, it's got sweetness, but it's got that kick.
Now let's move on to our beef marinade.
This one, we're going to start with half a cup of soy sauce. To this I'm
going to add a quarter teaspoon of chili powder. Half a teaspoon of dried ginger.
And because this is pretty salty, we're going to add a tablespoon
of Turbinado sugar.
Now, if you can't get Turbinado sugar, brown sugar is fine.
Same thing, we're going to go ahead and mix this up here.
Really want to get that ginger dissolved here.
If you've got a couple pieces of ginger that don't want to dissolve,
that's not going to hurt anything. A little taste.
Kind of a classic beef marinade.
All right,
let's go and get our beef out here and our chicken out here.
Get those cut up into skewer sized pieces.
So for beef, I have old reliable, my favorite cut, the tri tip.
I got about a three pound USDA choice tri tip here, and I'm going to cut it into
skewer sized pieces.
And then I'm just going to put it
in a little Ziploc bag here and we'll pour the marinade in
and then we'll let it kind of marinate for about an hour
before we get it on skewers and out to the grill.
So I'm just going to go ahead and start
cutting into pieces about this size.
This is what I'm looking for an inch and a half, two inches, something like that.
Get our pieces in our bag.
We'll dump our marinade right in.
Mix this up a bit.
All right,
that's going in the refrigerator and we're going to move on to our chicken.
So for my chicken today, I'm using chicken thighs.
I just really love the dark meat on the chicken.
So I'm going to cut these into,
you know, small enough pieces too, they're going to be smaller
a lot of the times then the beef pieces are not going to be as thick.
And that's going to be fine because I'm going to put,
you know, chicken on one skewer, beef on another.
If the chicken finishes first, it can come off.
The other thing I like about chicken thighs is they can really tolerate,
I don't wanna say, overcooking,
but they have a wider range before drying out. Chicken breast,
you know, you start going past 160,
165, you're in that zone where it might dry out.
Chicken thighs to me, have a little bit more
of a forgiving range because of the fat in them.
So I've got the chicken pieces in a Ziploc bag here,
and we're just going to pour this Peri Peri sauce marinade in here.
So these are going to go in the refrigerator
for about an hour with the beef,
and then we're going to go ahead and get those skewers made.
But first, let's go outside, look at this new toy
I have, this new attachment, so you can see what it is.
So this is the new toy that I was mentioning inside,
this is the Only Fire skewer ring kabob ring, whatever you want to call it.
It adds about three to four inches of height
to the Weber kettle and you have five long skewers that go with it.
Now it just lifts off very easily, sits back down.
It's pretty lightweight construction, but it doesn't really need to be heavy
for anything like this. And it has slots in here
so these skewers stay upright like this, or
you can lay them on their side.
But my guess is if you get them on the side, they're
they're going to be quite a bit of flex if you have a lot of meat on there.
Now I bought this on Amazon, and I'll put the link in the video description.
It may be available other places, but when I buy something, I'm really hoping
that there is another use to it beyond just the intended use.
And I did find one use in this, and that's the reason I purchased this.
And so let me show you. I'm going to remove the skewers real quick.
If you've ever done, say, beer can chicken
or something like that on the Weber kettle where you're standing it up,
you notice there's not a lot of headroom, you know, when this is off here
and you have the dome on,
that can get
pretty close to the top. And doing, say, a large turkey or something like that.
You may not have any room at all.
So when I saw this, I thought, OK,
you have these holes in the side, but if you just take some foil
and crimp it around there.
You can seal off those openings and give yourself an extra three,
maybe four inches of height in the Weber kettle with the lid on.
Now, obviously, its primary use for skewers is what I'm
probably going to use it for mostly, but it is nice to have that
secondary use.
Then I can just remove the foil.
And back to skewer set up.
So let's fire this up,
see how it does and cook up some skewers.
All right, I'm going to put my veggie skewers to the outside,
the meat in the center.
And I know people are going to ask, why didn't you use lump?
Well, I had a lot of smothered briquettes left over decided to use those, plus lump
burns hotter, and I don't want a super super hot
fire here on this one because I want to see how this works.
I'm going to go ahead, throw my lid on and let these really start cooking.
So we've been going about four or five minutes here.
Let's move our lid off and give everybody a flip.
These grooves make flipping kind of easy,
you just flip it over and set it back down into the groove.
Oops, I just lost a bell pepper,
piece of a red bell.
Chicken's looking good.
So our veggies are getting close.
I don't like my veggies burned when you're skewering them,
so, and the mushrooms, I can look at those
and see that those are getting really close.
So I'm gonna go ahead and get my mushroom skewer off here,
and I don't want to overcook these, you can see
they're all really wrinkled right now.
And with the lid on the ambient temperature
in, there is 550 degrees, so cooking pretty quick with the lid on.
I'm going to go ahead and lay this skewer on the side.
It is possible to do that on here, but there is more flex
and it can slip into these little grooves easily.
If there's one thing I wish this had was these skewers being just thicker
because I think there'd be more ability to withstand flex
and they would lay better. Even if they were a little wider
on these gaps without falling into that notch.
But overall, so far, these are doing good. So far with only losing one pepper.
Ooops, just lost a second pepper.
I'm pushing it.
Yeah, these are coming off.
They're getting really soft.
And they're doing good.
Give our beef another little flip here.
Chickens getting some nice color on it.
Let's see how that will rest on its edge there.
It works.
But again, I think if those skewers were a little thicker and a little wider,
it would work better.
Throw my lid on, give these another few minutes and I think we'll be done.
All right.
We've been going a few minutes and I'll take the lid off in a second
and we'll check these,
but I did a quick test.
I didn't film it, but I did a little B-roll
and I'll show you. If you have more skewers,
you can actually just lay them across in between the notches.
I just threw the peppers and the mushrooms back on as a test real quick,
and you can see you could fit a lot more skewers on here than just the five
if you have more. Let's look and see how we're doing.
Those are looking good.
Now, my tri tip, I like about 130 degrees,
so I'm going to pull one of these off and do a quick temp check.
That's a 140 in the center,
so. So went just a little too far on the tri tip, that's fine.
I'm also going to do a quick temp check on the chicken here.
If I sit over here, might be able to show you.
That's 156.
Yeah, 156.
Got a couple more minutes on the chicken.
So I'm gonna let the chicken finish up.
I'll pull some off with
some tri tip, and we'll have a taste.
All right, all our skewers are off, and I've got a plate with some pieces
of everything that we cooked, and I'm going to start with some peppers.
Maybe some peppers and onions.
Grilling veggies over charcoal,
lump, briquettes, wood, anything you want give such a great result.
And now mushroom?
I love the meatiness of those Criminy mushrooms with the char on them.
It's really good.
And now for some chicken with a little bit of char on it to.
It's nice. The heat from that Peri Peri sauce was mellowed, it's still there,
but the the Maple syrup really does mellow that. Now,
tri tip, my favorite cut to cook.
Let's see.
I usually don't marinate tri tip, I usually give it a dry rub.
But this is a really good application to use a marinade when you're doing skewers.
Man, top notch, came out great.
So all in all, I'm pleased with the Only Fire skewer attachment.
It works.
Couple of those suggestions, I wish they would change,
but I think there's going to be really useful for doing those larger skewers
and for that height that I might want
when I'm doing beer, can chicken or something.
So really multiple uses on this, I'm happy.