Pink Butcher Paper – A Must-have for Grilling, Smoking and BBQing

If you have been using a foil to wrap meat and other foods, it’s time now for you to start using butcher paper. It’s quite impossible that you don’t know about butcher paper; but still if you don’t, butcher paper is a strong kraft-style paper butchers traditionally use to wrap fresh meat.

Although a roll of white paper may come to your mind, butcher paper is also available in pink and is known as pink butcher paper. It’s available in rolls of various sizes and also as convenient, pre-cut sheets.

How is Butcher Paper Superior to Foil?

You might be using an aluminum foil to wrap meat and veggies on your grills, smokers and bbq to make the process easier. Wrapping your foods during the BBQing process can quicken the cooking and help prevent the brisket stall. It can also help keep the them juicy and moist, and avoid the excessive darkening of their exterior.

You may not imagine using a butcher paper for your BBQ or grill since paper can easily catch fire when directly exposed to flames. However, you’ll be surprised to know that butcher paper works really well when it comes to wrapping larger cuts of meat. In fact, several professional pitmasters prefer butcher paper to wrap their foods during the smoking process. The mild smoking temperatures protect the paper from catching fire or smoldering.

While foil has its own benefits, butcher paper is more breathable than foil and hence traps less steam, keeping brisket and veggies moist without making the bark mushy. Fans of crunchy, crispy bark can even leave the brisket unwrapped, but this can dry out the meat.

Butcher paper has one more benefit of not being heat reflective. This means you don’t have to adjust your cooking time to compensate as you would with foil.

Recipes Using Butcher Paper

Brisket

Take two wide sheets of butcher paper that are four times longer than the width of your brisket.

Place one of these on your workstation with the long edge perpendicular to you and the second on top so as to overlap by around half its width. Now lay the brisket laterally across the paper, around one foot from the bottom edge. Give it a last burst of apple cider vinegar and then lightly spray your wrap’s surface for good measure.

Fold your paper’s bottom edge over the brisket’s top and pull it as tight as possible. Smooth out the paper. Now roll the brisket over and pull tightly to secure. Fold the sides again.

Spare Ribs

While some pitmasters prefer cooking spare-ribs 3 hours on, 2 hours wrapped and 1 hour unwrapped, leaving the ribs wrapped the full second half of cooking gives excellent results.

Fold one end of the butcher paper over the ribs, then the other. Both should overlap the middle. Tuck the butcher paper tightly with your fingers around the bottom edge of the rack till the paper conforms to its shape. Fold the paper over the top of the ribs along the diagonal edge on both the corners. Tuck the paper tightly around the top of the ribs just as you did with the bottom. Then tightly fold both sides.

Why to Use Pink Butcher Paper for BBQ?

While using butcher paper during BBQing is not new, more and more pitmasters are being obsessed with pink butcher paper for a good reason. The most prominent reason of its popularity is that the pink butcher paper is a food-grade paper. Furthermore, pink butcher paper has an added ‘sizing’ which is an internal treatment that adds to its strength when it’s soaked in moisture. Adding sizing to an already strong and thick paper enables you to wrap raw meat in it and it won’t become a papery slush as you carry it for a while.

Pink butcher paper can also be used as a part of a “Texas Crutch” which includes wrapping of meat to avoid evaporating cooling so as to avoid the dreaded BBQ stall, as mentioned earlier.

So, have you started looking for pink butcher paper for your next BBQ party?