One Hundred

Wow! What do you think about the glaze on this salmon? This is Red Chili-Honey Glazed Salmon with Black Bean Sauce. The recipe can be found on page 116 of Bobby Flay's Mesa Grill Cookbook. The preparation of a smoked salmon always starts for me at Tag'z Five Star Meats. Mike and Trisha Taglio run the best butcher shop anywhere and their products have been the star of the show here on Bobby Flay Everyday since day one! Please check out their new website at http://www.tagz5starmeats.com/

When I got home with the salmon, I started by soaking a cedar plank and making the Black Bean sauce. It is sort of like refried beans - but so much more. You put it together in a processor. The ingredients are black beans, onion, garlic, adobo sauce, ground cumin, olive oil and Kosher salt. The processor whips the mix into a paste, which I set aside, but later I baked with Monterey Jack cheese melting over the top. The salmon glaze came next. It was honey, ancho chili powder, Dijon mustard, Kosher salt and fresh ground pepper. I whipped all that together in a small pan and took it out to the grill. When we were ready to light the fire, I scored the top of the salmon in a diagonal pattern so that the glaze could get right down in every groove. I brought the cedar plank out of the water and put it right on the grill. The key here is to let the plank heat up to the point that it is smoking and popping, then flip it over. Put the salmon, skin side down, on the smoking plank and let the grill and the smoke go to work. I closed the grill hood so that the smoke could build up inside. I opened the hood only to brush on more glaze and to get a temperature reading. I like the salmon to reach an internal temperature of 130. This gives you a medium level of doneness - well done is just too done for salmon. It will dry out and even change from that classic orange color to gray if you over cook it - so don't get too far from the grill when the salmon is on the plank. The salmon will reach 130 in about 10 to 15 minutes. When the salmon is right, take a grill spatula and just slide the fish off the plank. The skin will stay on the plank, leaving you with the perfectly grilled salmon filet ready for the plate. We added the Black Bean sauce and some brown rice and we were ready for a feast. You must try this cedar plank method of smoking a salmon. The cost of wild salmon has shot through the roof, but don't let that stop you from trying this. You can save money buying farm raised salmon. Wild salmon is much better than farm raised, but even if you use farm raised salmon, this recipe and plank technique is well worth it!

Well this completes 100 consecutive days of Bobby Flay Everyday and its going to be the last. I kept the grill fires burning through the dead of winter into what most people consider grill season. My coldest grill night was 9 degrees and as you can see from some of the videos that snow and thunderstorms did not stop me. Along the way we learned a whole lot of new grill techniques, new flavors and new spices. We paired up some great wines, listened to an eclectic mix of music and watched the college bowls, the Saints become champions, Duke win the Final Four and we threw out the first pitch of spring training - all from over the grill. Now its your turn. Take these recipes, tips and wisdoms of the grill and put them to your own test. I will keep grilling too. I plan to go back and grill again some of my favorites from the past 100 days on the grill. Plus there are dozens of great Bobby Flay grill recipes that we never even got to - you can find them all in Bobby's great books. Hopefully this summer, Dorothy and I will make a trip to New York and if we do you can bet I'm going to eat at Bobby Flay's Mesa Grill - the home of so many great grill memories. So as Bobby says at the end of his show - "Just Grill It!" 

Thanks, Paul