North Texas Green Egg Festival – Yakitori Ya’ll!

This year at the North Texas Green EggFest, Chef Brooke & Chef Mike are sharing some flavorful Japanese Yakitori with a Texas twist! Our Texas Tonkatsu brings a little something extra with smoked Dr Pepper! We teamed up with Millbrook Mushrooms to show off some delicious and beautiful local mushrooms! More info about Millbrook Mushrooms here

Meaning “roasted bird”, Yakitori street stalls first appeared in the middle of the Meiji period (1880s-90s). At the time, being a primarily Buddhist country, many meats were not consumed as readily as today.  Shamo game fowl was quite popular as many game-birds were considered somewhat medicinal and allowed for consumption. However, such meat was expensive, so the stalls took the off-cuts that came from restaurants and skewered and barbecued them, basting them with tare sauce.

In the 1960s, with the increasing spread of the broiler, yakitori started becoming popular with the public at large. Then demands for higher quality meat cuts saw the development of nationally protected chicken breeds, known as jidori, as well as branded chicken.

As the popularity of yakitori spread, regions and townships began to develop their own personal spins and combinations of flavors creating unique and delicious varieties of the original dish.

Chef Mike & Chef Brooke have created some of our favorites: Ponzu Zoe (Mushrooms)  & Ton Negima (Pork Belly) as well as our special Texas Tonkatsu with smoked Dr Pepper!

Did you say Smoked Dr Pepper?!? Yep. Sure did. It’s fairly straightforward too! Many folks have encountered the smoked cocktails and fun devices that allow you to create smoked cocktails at home. Well you can certainly use these, or simply fire up your smoker and smoke your Dr Pepper at a nice low temp.

We used a 1/3 pan, or a small shallow insert used in kitchens, however any shallow vessel will suffice!

Using our Green Egg, we allowed our natural lump charcoal to completely ash over and used some pecan and hickory chips that were soaking for a few hours prior in water. We went a little more aggressive on the wood chips than we would for smoking a meat so that we could impart as much smoke as possible in as short a time as possible. Smoking at around 200*F, we allowed the pan of Dr Pepper to sit in the thick smoke for about 15-20 minutes.

Once finished, we allowed the Dr Pepper to cool and then continued along to our recipe (below)!