Pitmasters Episode 4: Recipes We Cooked

Boy oh boy did Susie (Hey Grill Hey) and I have an advantage on Episode 4 of Food Network’s new competition series Pitmasters.

Spoiler Alert: We won first place in episode 3. And with that win came a huge advantage.

Here’s what Susie and I cooked for the judges, and the best part is we’re sharing the recipes so you can make them at home.

The Advantage: Team Assignments

Immediately, after winning the Surf and Turf challenge, Andrew Zimmern announced that in the next challenge, each team would go head-to-head using the same type of animal: pig, lamb and goat.

As the winners of Big Burn 3, we got to choose who faced off against who and which animal the different pairs would cook. We only had about 30 seconds to decide, and we knew we wanted to be strategic.

Our strategy was to pair two of the top teams against each other in hopes that one would go home. Esaul and Grecia had already won two Big Burn challenges and Connie and John and Hector and Ruben had won Flash Burn challenges.

We also knew that we wanted to cook the pig because it was the protein we were most familiar with.

One thing they haven’t shown much on the show is the bond that we formed with Denzel and Reggie. Their cook station was across from ours, and we named our end of the block the cul-de-sac. We even joked that we were in an HOA.

We weren’t ready for them to go home, so we wanted to give them a protein that they felt comfortable with (without competing against us). We knew they’d crush it with the goat.

With those pieces locked in, we decided to pair Esaul and Grecia with Connie and John with the lamb and then Reggie and Denzel against Hector and Ruben with the goat.

The Big Burn: Rooter to Tooter

Battles were set. Now, the assignment. Create two nose to tail main courses and two sides, and each dish has to include a part of the animal. You win your head-to-head, you’re safe. You lose. You’re at risk of going home.

We ran to the fridge , grabbed our pig and carried it to our station. This wasn’t a whole animal challenge. We had to break it down. Susie and I felt really confident about the butchery aspect. We pieced out the shoulders, hams, belly, ribs, loin, tenderloin and head.

But then I hit a wall. I was physically and emotionally exhausted. We had been going non-stop, battling the elements, facing highs and lows and it just hit me like a ton of bricks. After the pig was butchered, my mind was blank as to what we should cook.

This is where being on a team is so valuable. Susie immediately had inspiration to cook up a live fire German feast. We both have German roots. Plus, my husband lived in Germany as a kid, and I’ve traveled there several times. So I’m familiar with a lot of the dishes.

For the first main, Susie wanted to cook sauerbraten with the shoulder. For the second main, I was thinking of cooking spiessbraten, but the loin was so tiny I was afraid it would dry out.

In my mind, I kept thinking I needed to cook the protein on the grill or smoker, and nothing was registering. Susie and I just kept talking about our German experiences, and it finally dawned on me to just cook schnitzel. It’s my favorite German dish, I just don’t usually associate it with live fire, so I had blanked it out.

Once that mental hurdle was over, we were rocking and rolling. For the sides, we were making Käsespätzle with pork cheek and chicharron and Rotkohl with pork belly.

The Flash Burn: Sausage

And just when we started getting in the groove, it was Flash Burn time. Moe said we had to create a cased sausage link using the animal trimmings we weren’t using in the big burn. I got a jolt of energy back. I make sausage all the time, and I knew as long as we had a grinder, we could knock this out easily.

In keeping with our German feast, we decided to make bratwurst.

We wanted our sausage to have a juicy bite, so we weighed out the meat. Susie trimmed up 5 pounds of ham while I found a little over 1 1/2 pounds of pork fat.

A really important component of sausage making is that you have to keep the meat as cold as possible so the fat doesn’t render before you actually cook it. Our station was in direct sunlight, so that was tricky. After each phase of sausage making, we threw the meat in the cooler to try to slow the melting.

We ran to the pantry to gather traditional bratwurst spices like white pepper and mace. Then, after seasoning the meat, we cooked up a piece to make sure the seasonings were right before casing the sausage.

We threw the bratwurst on a grill grate over the fire. Then, we finished them in a skillet with beer, onions and cabbage. Meanwhile, Susie whipped up a batch of Iron Chef Michael Symon’s pickled mustard seeds.

We originally planned to serve the brat on a pretzel bun, but made a decision on the fly to ditch it. We found the meat-to-bread ratio was off. It’s really important in competitions like this to taste your final dish. Conceptually, the pretzel bun made sense, but the eating experience didn’t match the vision we had.

After Andrew called Chef Symon to tell him we used his mustard seed recipe, we received the judges’ feedback. Big Moe said he wished it had even more fat but added that it had really good flavor.

Ernest Servantes’ feedback was fun. The recipe was so on point with German flavors that he said it made him want to do the chicken dance – a traditional German dance – and so we danced.

We missed out on a Flash Burn win again and the money, but no biggie. We knew we had to keep going to win our head-to-head.

The Judging

The cook was going great. For the schnitzel, there are several varieties, but I wanted to go with jagerschnitzel, which means it’s topped with mushroom gravy. To make the gravy, I grabbed the pork ribs and started to make a stock. We literally used every part of the pig from the rooter to the tooter.

Susie opened her Dutch oven and the aroma was so beautiful. We pulled the pig cheeks, crisped the pork skin, and Susie made homemade spätzle.

It was time to fry up my schnitzel. I placed the skillet of oil over the coals and was aiming for 375F degrees. For some reason, heating water and oil over live fire became my biggest struggle in this whole competition. I had issues with it with my lumpia and with my gnocchi. And now again with the schnitzel. But, eventually I got it there, and the schnitzel were nice and crispy.

We plated up our platter and added a cucumber salad and lemons for a pop of acid to cut all the rich flavors. I was super impressed with our overall presentation and what we had pulled off – especially since I was completely running on empty.

It was time to go head-to-head against Matt and Max. They presented first and went with the traditional American BBQ route. Overall, the judges gave them really good feedback.

Upon tasting our dishes, Jess immediately said, “All I need is a frosty stein full of beer at this point.” So just like our brat inspired Ernest to do a German dance, we hit the marks on German flavors with Jess.

“The schnitzels were delicious,” Jess added. “You looked at the hog like a big jigsaw puzzle, broke it down and rebuilt it into this.” Getting that feedback from a meat scientist meant so much.

Then, Andrew jumped in and reminded us that he’s a German kid. My heart skipped a beat because I was hoping we evoked great childhood memories and didn’t miss a mark.

“This is the food of my people,” he said. “The food itself was really beautifully handled. You understood the assignment here in terms of giving us so many varieties of elements. You’re making this extremely hard for us. Thank you for a lovely experience.”

See What We Cook Up Next

Catch new episodes of Pitmasters live Mondays at 9/8c on Food Network, or streaming the next day on HBO Max. Make sure to stop by next week to see how we did in episode 5.

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