Grillin' with Wolf - Mom! The meat loaf!

The short turn around between games this week doesn’t leave a lot of time to plan a serious tailgate for some people. I wanted to make sure that what we followed up last week’s stew with would be simple enough to pull off in a short amount of time and not send anyone back out to the supermarket. So this week’s recipe focuses on the “go to” dish for most people when they don’t have a lot of time to throw dinner together, a simple Meat loaf. Everyone has a meat loaf recipe that they rarely change up, weather it is because mom made it a certain way or the ingredients always seem to be around the house; however, I am not here to just give you an alternative way to make something, I want to make you try new things. So in appreciation of Percy Howard’s final two minute touchdown in Super Bowl X and a salute to the Governor’s attempt to slow down LT3, we are going to smoke that old standby.

Ingredients
1 lb ground beef (I used 90/10)
1 lb ground pork (I used a spice Italian sausage)
1 large onion chopped
1 large green bell pepper chopped
3-4 cloves of garlic minced
2 eggs
½ cup bread crumbs
2 dashes Worcestershire sauce
salt and pepper
Rub down with spicy mustard before adding rub

Again my basic rub recipe is
Mix 1/3 cup paprika, 1/4 cup brown sugar, 2 tablespoons pepper, 2 tablespoons salt, 2 teaspoons garlic powder, 2 teaspoons onion powder, 2 teaspoons ancho chili pepper and 1 teaspoon cayenne pepper together. Adjust to taste.

Here is my BBQ sauce recipe again, but this time with a slight change
1 and 1/2 cups ketchup
1 cup water or stock
1/2 cup apple cider vinegar
1/3 cup brown sugar
pepper to taste
1/2 tbs onion powder
1/2 tbs garlic powder
1 tbs yellow mustard
1 dash Worcestershire sauce
2 dashes of hot sauce
2 tbs of sriracha
Heat all ingredients to a boil on stove, and then reduce to simmer for about an hour.

Mix meat loaf ingredients in a bowl and form into a loaf as you would at home. Rub the loaf down in mustard and generously apply rub to outside of meatloaf. Create an indirect heat grill as I described here, and place meatloaf on a piece of aluminum foil, with a few holes in it to drain grease. Depending on the size of the loaf you made it should take about 3-4 hours to smoke at 250 degrees. I added some oak chips every hour or so in order to get a little smoke in there.

After 3 and 1/2 hours it should look like this

The last 15 minutes or so I applied a nice coat of BBQ sauce so that it had a chance to caramelize but not burn. After eating smoked meat loaf I assure you that regular old meat loaf will never be the same.

Enjoy!