By Richard Thomas Summer isn’t over yet, and even if it were, plenty of barbecue sauce-based recipes don’t actually need you to fire up the grill. Bourbon barbecue meatballs are made in your kitchen oven, and can be used as an appetizer or filling snack item for just about any afternoon gathering. The first thing you need to do to ...

By Richard Thomas One of the things about car camping is that one doesn’t need to rely upon lightweight backpacker food. Yet at the same time making ice runs for a cooler to store perishables, like meat, is a serious nuisance that most prefer to avoid. That is where dried meat, like jerky, comes in. When used to make a ...

By Richard Thomas Rating: A+ While Bourbon Barrel Foods didn’t start with its soy sauce, that product is easily its most famous. According to company founder Matt Jamie, he “paid for my soy sauce production with bourbon-smoked paprika,” but it was his micro-brewed Bluegrass Soy Sauce that captured headlines and got itself on the Louisville episode of Bizarre Foods America. ...

By Richard Thomas Rating: B Once upon a time, dried meat was such a major means of preserving meat that whether the jerky had a truly pleasing flavor or not was immaterial. Nowadays, what makes jerky popular with backpackers and astronauts is that it’s preserved protein that tastes good and relatively unprocessed. Snackers don’t even care about the preserved part, ...

By Richard Thomas Rating: B As a guy who loves whiskey and has a sideline in cooking with whiskey, I always have two fundamental questions when it comes to whiskey and food: can you taste the whiskey, and does the whiskey enhance or improve the flavor? In too many food products, the amount of actual whiskey used is so minimal ...