Abstract:

The heat of summer just isn't a good excuse to hang up your oven mitts. On the contrary; if you take it outside, baking on the grill opens the door to new opportunities that might otherwise be problematic in the confines of the kitchen. Case in point: A recipe I chanced upon for 100% whole wheat sugar cookies already yields a treat that's impossibly chewy with the right amount of sweet; but add the subtle richness and aroma of apple wood smoke, and you've got a baked good that is made for the grill.

Yeah you heard me right; we're smoking cookies!

Purpose:

Every year come spring, I get bit by the grilling bug, and so I start to look for excuses to cook outdoors. Even foods that are just ok on the stove top or oven are somehow magically elevated to new heights when prepared over flame and/or coals. My Big Steel Keg is a convection grill; meaning that much of the cooking happens because of the flow of heated air over the surface of the eats. If you abstract the heat source with a big hunk of ceramic or metal, you have what barbeque folk call "indirect cooking", which is nothing new; as this is the driving principle behind how your oven works in every setting except broil (which I bet you probably don't use anyway). That being said, your oven is an absolutely terrible vehicle to move smoke into food; that is, unless you wish have your whole abode smelling like bacon for the next couple of months (and maybe you do).



If you're in the majority that don't want your house smelling like "pork-pourri", then this is where your barbeque grill comes in. We know that a grill set up for indirect heat = oven; so assuming you can regulate your temperature, why not treat it like one? One thing I was always reluctant to try on my gas grill (because of the fluctuations in heat) were cookies. Cookies need so little time in the oven that a temperature swing can be the difference between the best cookie, and something that may not even be all that passable. With kamado-style cookers like my keg, insulation and plenty of regulated air flow means that 10 minutes of assured temperature ain't no thang. And as long as I'm baking cookies, why settle for run-of-the-mill?



The bag of whole wheat flour I brought back with me from the Stafford County Flour Mills this last spring featured a recipe courtesy of the Kansas Wheat Commission for 100% Whole Wheat Sugar Cookies, and I'd been looking for an excuse to give them a go (what can I say, I have a thing for recipes on the backs of packages). The heartiness of a whole wheat cookie seemed like the perfect excuse to infuse baked goods with the flavor complexity of a fruit wood smoke; so all that was left was to adjust the recipe a bit to accommodate.