Grilled Veal Chops

Hi I'm Josh Ozersky, and I'm here at eHow.com and I'm grilling veal rib chops. This here is a rib veal chop. It is one of the most expensive but supremely delicate, tender, succulent and beautiful pieces of meat known to man. Basically, I'm just going to have four ingredients. I'm going to put a little bit of oil on each of these. I'm going to put a little bit of lemon and a little bit of pepper and a little bit of salt. I want oil everywhere including on the edges. Now I'm going to squeeze on some lemon and of course, goes without saying, the universal magic element, the transforming start and finish of every meat dish, coarse Kosher salt. Now it's all ready to go and I've got hot coals here. I have a two zone fire. Half of it has got super hot fire, half of it has got no fire at all. The idea as always, get it nice and crusty then move it off. Here's the weird thing about veal though. You can see how delicate this is, I mean it's so floppy it's practically falling apart so you would think that something that was that supple and soft would cook very fast, well guess what, it doesn't. A veal chop takes much much longer to cook than like a rib eye steak would. Why? Because a rib eye steak has got all that fat in it and he fat cooks fast. The other thing that the fat does of course is it provides you with a lot of flareup action too which you're not going to get out of the veal. So I don't want that little checkerboard pattern. I want it to be evenly mahogany if at all possible. I certainly don't want to blacken and carbonize the surface of this beautiful veal. So as soon as this begins to happen I have brown lines here you'll see, not black ones. It's not the worst idea either to squeeze a little lemon on as it cooks. You really don't want that surface to dry out. I personally like flareups myself. I like it when meat flares up. This is my friend. The reason this is my friend is this will help me get a brown crusty surface very fast so then I can move it over and cook it and then when I cook it with slow smoke that makes it taste good. So what I'm going to do now, I'm going to squeeze on a little more lemon. Alright so these are all now on the cold side. Now I'm going to do something very important. I'm going to close this off except for a small one third opening because when you cook with wood, there's two things that you can get out of that wood. One is smoke and the other one is fire. If you're getting fire, you're not getting much smoke and vice versa. There is in fact an inverse proportion between the two elements. The more fire you have, the more air you have, the less smoke you have. When you close it, temperature goes down, the smoke comes up. So now what I'm going to basically do and it's already happening, is as I'm limiting oxygen supply, it's choking off combustion and I'm getting smoke coming out and most of the smoke isn't coming out of these little holes, most of the smoke is staying in here inside this Weber grill so I'm going to let those veal chops absorb it, cook slowly, essentially barbecue and I'm going to take about, I'm guessing it's not going to be less, even as crusty as they are and as hot as I've cooked them on both sides, it's not going to be less than ten minutes of cooking in straight smoke like this until they really get to the right temperature. Alright so it's about 12 minutes later, I think I'm going to check in on these boys and see what they're up to. Oh look at that. You can see how nice this looks. You can see how a little pool of juice has begun to form at the surface. It just looks right like if you look closely, this just looks done and when I touch it, it's firm. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this off and take this one off, this one looks about done. This one might go a little bit longer. The veal chop like any other piece of meat you cook, especially a piece that's got a bone attached, is going to cook longer after it comes off the fire. The bone gets hot, so the bone becomes its own like little oven attached to the meat. On the other hand, I do want it to settle. There's not a ton of juice inside the veal chop, so when I cut it open I don't want all that juice to hemorrhage out and lose all that delicious veal delicate mouth feel flavor that you've really been waiting for. I'll tell you what I'm going to do, for pedagogical purposes I'm going to cut one of these veal chops up now. Now this I've made, cooked all the way through because I know that most of you out there get a little freaked out when you see pink in veal, much as you do with pork but believe you me, it wouldn't be any worse if it had a little bit of pink to it. Nonetheless, this is what your veal should look like. Look at how white and juicy and delicate it is. Oh my Gosh, maybe I'll have a little bit of lemon on it. Whether for a backyard banquet or tailgate, the grilled veal rib chop, king of barbecued meats. I'm Josh Ozersky, and this is eHow.com.