Gluten Free

This recipe from our Rochester restaurant brings together the lively flavors of fresh garlic and ginger. It makes for a refreshin’ salad that goes with all sorts of grilled and roasted meats and poultry.

This recipe is so simple it’s downright hard. We’re talking about only three ingredients here—potatoes, oil, and salt. But you’ve got to pay close attention to those ingredients and their handling to come out with crispy, erect french fries. Make sure you read Fry Obsession (see below) before you start.

This is our most popular “vegetable of the day.” It shows up on the menu every Monday. It’s damn simple and packed with flavor. When you can make it with fresh corn in season, it’s even better.

Serve up these deeply flavored Cuban-style beans with a pile of perfectly cooked white rice. Add a salad or some veggies and you’ve got the Dinosaur vegetarian platter.

Rice acts as a base for many a saucy dish, so you should never take it for granted. It’s gotta be every bit as good as the food you serve it with. Rinsing the rice before cooking gets rid of the floury starch that clings to the grains and makes cooked rice sticky and lumpy, and adding some garlic boosts the flavor.

These beans have a deep, broodin’ flavor—sweet and spicy at the same time. We add crumbled hot Italian sausage to make ‘em truly special.

This recipe was inspired by an Italian recipe handed down by my partner Mike’s grandmother. Like all good Italian cooks, she insisted that the raw ingredients in any dish be ripe and flavorful. She never cheaped out and neither do we. When we started the Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, it was one of our original sides, and it has stayed on our menu ever since. It’s best made in the morning, or at least several hours before serving.

Coleslaw is an absolute essential in a barbecue joint. We make ours fresh twice a day so the crispness and integrity of the cabbage always contrasts with the tangy, creamy dressing. What I’m saying is, it don’t get better with age.

We make this salad every Sunday at the restaurant. I like to cook the potatoes til they’re soft so the dressing can penetrate deeply. But the true secret to our potato salad is the Zatarain’s mustard we have shipped up from New Orleans (see Resources, page 175). Sure, you can use another coarse-grain mustard, but once you’ve had a real Creole mustard, nothing else will give you satisfaction.

When spring hits and the asparagus comes into season, I can’t wait to eat this simple potato salad. Because it’s made without mayonnaise, it can be held at room temperature where the flavors can really develop. It’s perfect picnic food. Once the asparagus goes out of season, try making it with a pound of green beans instead.

When the peaches are perfect, ripe and succulent, make this dish. The real fun comes when you set the sauce ablaze. Just watch your eyebrows!

This dish has some serious garlic happenin’. We developed it as one of a whole bunch of recipes for a Dinosaur garlic festival. It marked the birth of the Custom-Que at the restaurant, a special menu that’s broadened our repertoire and given our customers a taste of some unique dishes influenced by the world of wood-fired cookin’.

Pulled pork is one of the wonders of true blue barbecue. It starts with a pork butt, also called a Boston butt, which is the meat surrounding the shoulder blade of the pig. This is a tough, fatty piece that’s magically transformed with spices, smoke, and slow cookin’ into something lean and melt-in-your-mouth tender.

It doesn’t get much easier than this—or tastier. That wonderful Zatarain’s Creole Mustard (see Resources, page 175) is hard at work for you, makin’ an easy sweet and savory sauce that brings out the best in pork.

This quick grill dish makes it easy to come home after work and eat well. The secret is in the simple sauce all seasoned up with the classic flavor partners that lamb loves the most—rosemary and Dijon mustard.

Because our weather in Central New York is less than tropical, we have to figure out ways of keepin’ those warm weather flavors coming even when poundin’ rain or three-foot drifts make it hard to get to your backyard grill. So here’s a way to make ribs in your oven and bring on all the flavors of places with better weather. Our method for makin’ ribs in the oven can also be applied to the recipe for Dinosaur-Style Ribs (page 93). All you’ll be missin’ is the taste of the smoke and the smell of the outdoors, but the ribs will still be fallin’-off-the-bone tender.

This is our reason for being. If you’re a rib joint, you’d better have great ribs. What we strive for every day is a perfect balance of spice, smoke, sauce, and pull-off-the-bone tender pork. Here’s the blueprint and some tips to achieve some beautiful barbecue. All you need are a few hours and a dedicated pit boss spirit. A couple of beers won’t hurt either.

I’m a big fan of anything braised, and these lamb shanks fit the bill. The fall-off-the-bone tenderness of the meat and the richness of the stock really turn me on. Served on a pile of grits, it’s outstanding.

If you like to wow your friends with your backyard cooking prowess, this is one showboatin’ dish you’ll want to try out. I like what happens when you marinate lamb in yogurt. The enzyme action in the yogurt does something special to the meat, tenderizing it and giving it an exotic allure.

We don’t do much poachin’ at the restaurant, but at home it’s another story. This is how I like to fix salmon. It has a light, almost brothy BBQ sauce flavored with a bit of dill.