Smoked Ribeye Meat Hammers

 

Dinos, Tomahawks, Hammers. The humble yet delicious Ribeye is a versatile cut on a BBQ.

As we all know I enjoy the Low’n Slow and one favourite is to tickle the Ribeye into submission using Traeger’s baby pellet smoker “The Ranger”.

  1. If you can, get your ribeye cut into a two inch steak, as for this method it will allow you to get plenty of bark on surface and when finished a tasty medium rare snack. My local butcher was short on rib racks so next best thing was his Meat Hammer (rib on steaks at one inch thick).
  2. Get them out of the vac-pack bag and towel off any residue then salt heavily with a good Sea salt or mountain salt. You do not want an iodised salt or a salt with “anticaking agent”. Back into the fridge for at least an hour, in this case I left in fridge overnight.
  3. Remove from fridge, towel dry and let come to room temperature.
  4. Get your smoker to circa 85C/176F. Once at temp place your meat hammer into the smoke box. In my case with the Ranger I plugged in the Ranger, topped up pellets, set temp, pressed ignite and as soon as the startup white smoke changed to blue then in with the meat hammers.

Note: If you are using any kind of fire to cook then you want to get temperature up so you can burn out the wet smoke. Going down another rabbit hole here but…. Wet smoke or grey smoke is bad juju for cooking, your fire will chuff out a mix of grey and black smoke when you first light this type of BBQ. This type of smoke looks cool however will leave a bitter acrid coating on your dinner. Target blue smoke.  This signifies a clean burning complete combustion fire resulting in aromatic enhancement to the smoking / cooking process.

  1. So, blue smoke present and hammers in.
  2. An hour after going in I checked the meat and probe tested as well, core temperature on both steaks was 45C/113F. Our target internal temperature is 53C/128F.
  3. 30 minutes later we were at desired temp, meat was removed and wrapped in heavy tin foil to rest for 30 minutes,
  4. Then I unwrapped and completed a hot sear in a thyme butter for 60 seconds per side. Job done.
  5. Sliced, plated and if the mood takes you there throw in some salad stuff and you are good to go. I didn’t…. we had just harvested new batch of Kumara so a selected few spent time in another smoker (I have a few), and while the meat hammers were resting we finished the Kumara over open fire.

Alternatively if you want to run without the sear then leave the meat hammer in the smoker until internal temperature reaches 57C/135F then wrap, rest, slice, serve.

Kia nui te kai!