Bring New Life to Barbecue Leftovers

About author / Amy Powell

World traveler; gourmet 30 minute meals; lover of exotic ingredients; winner on FoodTV's Chefs vs City; graduate French Culinary Institute. Her recipes will tantalize your taste buds.

I don’t know what it is about a summer barbecue, but it just gets me excited. Maybe a little too excited. It usually starts at the grocery store where I am lured in by the latest deal. Ten pounds of spareribs for $1.99 a pound! I may only have four people coming to dinner but surely each of us is capable of ingesting four pounds of pork.

After buying more meat than I could ever need, I get really into the prep. Maybe it’s the feel of the ground beef in my hands as I’m forming patties or getting my hands dirty as I smear a yogurt marinade over chicken, but I don’t want the process to end. Finally, like many a male can attest to, there is most definitely a pleasure derived from manning the barbecue--tending the coals, getting the perfect grill marks, watching and waiting patiently for just the right doneness. The joy is almost more in the journey than the eating.

Needless to say, after all this barbecue enthusiasm, I am almost always left with extras. This is not always a bad thing as certain items like grilled chicken and fish take well to transformations into other dishes. But what about those barbecue classics like hamburgers, hot dogs, and ribs that lose their initial lustiness upon a reheat? Over time I have found that yes, there are ways to make use of leftover grilled hot dogs and indeed even an extra ten pounds of spareribs can find new life as a leftover.

Ribs might be the most difficult barbecued item to try and reinvent. If you just straight reheat them you run the risk of drying them out. If you are lucky, you have high quality ribs with a lot of meat on the bone. In that case, I cut the meat off the bone, being careful to discard any cartilage and cutting away as much fat as possible.

Just like with the over-grilling, I have a tendency to make more barbecue sauce than I can ever use in one go. Most of the time I just freeze the extra barbecue sauce for the next cookout. But for using up leftover rib meat I’ll take that extra barbecue sauce and mix it with some water and the chopped up meat to reheat on the stove. Nice white hamburger buns (also perhaps leftover from a BBQ) get smeared with mustard and layered with thinly sliced dill pickle. The reheated meat gets mounded on the bun for an end result that is a bit like a sloppy joe Cuban sandwich.

In my opinion hamburgers are at their best when they are cooked to a perfect medium pink on the inside so the juices kind of burst out when you take the first bite right off the grill. Trying to straight reheat that burger means that no matter what you do, that formerly juicy patty is going to dry out and that perfect pink middle will turn an uninspiring gray. The best thing to do in this scenario is to treat that burger like any old ground beef. Break it up into small chunks, give it a little liquid and some taco seasoning and suddenly you have the basis for many a Mexican treat. Toss it with lettuce, corn, black beans, and salsa for a quick taco salad. Fry up tortillas and fill them with the meat for an easy homemade taco.

The hardest of all leftover reinventions is trying to do something with those slightly charred, uneaten hot dogs. Most of the time those things find their way to the trash. But in an effort not to waste, I’d like to think that even the lowly hot dog can find new life in a new dish. After a recent chili dog experiment I was left with several containers of chili for hot dogs (not really the sort of thing you want to eat with a spoon right out of a bowl) and a few sad, uneaten hot dogs.

At a girls night dinner a few days later my friend was cooking up pizzas with all sorts of interesting toppings, from pesto and tomato to gorgonzola and pear. I brought the hot dogs and chili along hoping someone would want a side of chili dog with their pizza. Instead, in a moment of inspiration with one extra crust lying around, the chili pizza was created. The pizza crust was spread with a layer of the chili dog chili, topped with a sprinkling of cheese, and yes, hot dog coins. We all agreed that all the pizzas that night were delicious but the one everyone wanted seconds on was none other than the newly invented chili dog pizza.

Summer barbecues are great, so great that we all go a little overboard from time to time, whether in the purchasing, the preparing, or the cooking. Leftovers from the barbecue do not have to be a thing to be feared, ultimately to find their way to the trash. A chili dog pizza, a hamburger with a new life as a taco, or even a Cuban sandwich with rib meat are all fun, exciting, and surprisingly tasty ways to bring new life to barbecue leftovers.

Serves/Makes: 4

• 2 cups chopped cooked pork, such as rib meat
• 2/3 cup barbecue sauce (see below)
• 1/4 cup water
• 1/4 cup brown mustard
• 1 full pickle
• 4 hamburger buns

***Barbecue Sauce***

• 1/4 cup butter
• 1 clove garlic
• 1 cup ketchup
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup cider vinegar
• 1/2 cup brown mustard
• 2 tablespoons chili powder
• 2 tablespoons hot sauce
• 1 splash Worcestershire sauce
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon black pepper