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Doing (Just About) Everything on the Sapling Everything Grill

Jul 9, 2024 | Cooking with Maple, Our Company, Products and Customers

Family Grilling on the Sapling maple syrup evaporator

Cheers! You can do (just about) everything on the Sapling Everything Grill!

We’re always discovering new things that we can do on our Sapling Everything Grill. So far, we grill and smoke food, bake wood-fired bread and pizza, and, when we add our Sapling Evaporator Pan, we make maple and apple-cider syrups and brew beer.

Can you boil lobsters on a Sapling? Can foods? Do a clambake? Have a pig roast? Distil tinctures? We’ve fielded these questions and more. Answer: Maybe! We’ll let you know. But for now, here’s a little bit about how we do just about everything else!

Grilling and Smoking

The Sapling Everything Grill is very effective for preparing large food spreads; we use it to grill meats for parties at our home and to smoke special meals or preserve meats for the family larder. At 30″ by 20″, the surface area is extensive: we’ve fit 14 pounds of pork bellies on it for smoking, 15 pounds of chicken for grilling, a 15-pound turkey, 40 hot dogs . . . you get the picture.

There’s more prep and cleanup time involved in wood-fired grilling and smoking than other alternatives, but it makes for delicious weekend and holiday meals.

You can grill or smoke on the Sapling Everything Grill with wood or with charcoal. If you are using softwood, wood gets hot quicker and is good for searing, and you can be ready to grill in 10 minutes or so. Charcoal is going to take you at least 20 minutes to get to grilling temperature. And to smoke, you need a minimum of 30 minutes to get your charcoal bed set and your chips smoking.

For step-by-step instructions on how to grill and smoke on the Sapling Everything Grill see how to grill and how to smoke here.

Some Favorites:

House Maple BBQ Sauce: Mix equal parts maple syrup, ketchup, and apple cider vinegar. Add Worcestershire sauce and red pepper flakes to taste. Brush sauce on whatever you are grilling on your Sapling Everything Grill, and serve more at the table!

Maple Cured Bacon: Cure 8 lbs. pork belly in the refrigerator for two weeks with 6 tablespoons sea salt, 1/3 cup maple syrup, and 1 1/2 teaspoons curing salt, flipping the meat after a week. Rinse, pat dry, and smoke at 150 degrees or lower on your Sapling Everything Grill for 2 hours. Store in the refrigerator or freezer for at least a day before slicing, cooking, and eating!

Wood-Fired Baking

You don’t need a fancy outdoor kitchen for fancy wood-fired breads. The Sapling Everything Grill is an easy and economical way to make wood-fired pizzas, Montreal bagels, flatbreads, rustic breads, and more. You can turn ANY grill into a bread and pizza oven by adding a pizza stone, but baking with wood makes a HUGE difference in taste.

Just like with grilling and smoking, there’s more prep and cleanup time involved in wood-fired baking than other alternatives, but the taste is worth the time if you have it.

Pizza

We’re still perfecting our method, but, by using the large, rectangular pizza stone (the Sapling Pizza Stone), and firing our Sapling Everything Grill up to 400 degrees or higher, we’ve made some amazing, amazing wood-fired pizza. The wood-fired taste is just outrageously good.

We’ve used the same general method to make excellent wood-fired Montreal bagels and focaccia on the Sapling Everything Grill as well, and are confident that our skills would lend themselves to wood-fired naan and tortilla. You can find step-by-step instructions on baking these flatter breads on the Sapling here.

Breads

Not-so-flat rustic breads took a bit of study, but we put the effort in and our tastebuds were richly rewarded. Especially when in new territory, we choose King Arthur Baking recipes whenever we can because the recipes are reliable and basic. (We use King Arthur Flour whenever possible, as well, for consistently good results.) For our first rustic bread bake, we chose to make half of King Arthur Baking’s No-Knead Crusty White Bread recipe. You can get the play-by-play on how to make rustic breads on the Sapling Everything Grill here.

Perfection: Crusty White Bread made wood-fired on the Sapling Everything Grill.

Wood-Fired Veggie Pizza with Maple and Goat Cheese: Make your favorite pizza dough and roll it thin. Top with crushed tomato, fresh mozzarella, sliced baby bella mushrooms, baby arugula, and toasted walnuts. Sprinkle with goat cheese and drizzle lightly with maple syrup. Remove the baffle from Sapling Smoker and ensure the damper is open. Place the pizza stone on the grates and start a fire. Cook covered at 400 degrees or hotter for 10 minutes or until done.

Brewing Wood-Fired Beer

Wood-fired beer. Is that a thing? It must have been at some point. And, according to these homebrewers it still is. So we put our Sapling Evaporator Pan back on our Sapling Firebox and tried it! We chose an extract kit instead of an all-grain kit for ease, and we began with 7 gallons of water instead of the usual 5 gallons to accommodate the shape of the pan. (Normally, homebrew recipes start with 5 gallons of water, but you usually brew in a tall and narrow pot. The Sapling Evaporator Pan is short and wide—engineered for faster evaporation—and so we added extra water to the recipe to accommodate our pan. The adjustment was spot on.)

Overall, it was surprisingly easy and mess-free to brew beer on the Sapling! And the resulting Sapling Summer Kolsch was enjoyed by all. The nitty-gritty on how to brew beer on the Sapling is all ready for you here.

What should we try on our Sapling Everything Grill next? You tell us! Or, better yet, try it yourself and tell us all about it. We’re always looking for an excuse to brag about our customers!