Meat Plans

Last August I wanted to try smoking some meat, so over the course of a couple of weeks I made some kick-ass homemade barbecued pork and beef. I finished the summer vowing to get a smoker.

Here it is, April, and I still haven't got one. But I'm going to get one, and am trying to plan a few opportunities to put it to the test. I'll definitely re-do the recipes I did last year, but like I mentioned I'm going to use a cut of meat with more connective tissue - shoulder or butt. I'm salivating just thinking about it. This summer, this place will change from Cthulhu's Family Restaurant to Cthulhu's Smokehouse.

Oh...and there's no sense in doing it again if you don't intend to improve things or explore new things. So this year, I'm going to add homemade bacon to my list of smoking feats. I found that post when I was looking for a pulled pork recipe. Over the winter I found a local meat store that sells good-sized, good quality (non-industrial/corn/petrol-based) pork bellies. They cost a bit, but they look like they'll make great bacon.

I just need to figure out when...I'll probably need to throw a good-sized cookout at least once this summer. This will also be the second year we spend a week on the South Coast (Westport MA) at the beach, and I think smoking up the bacon for that trip (breakfast and BLT's) will be the thing to do.

Shit...it's 11pm and I need barbecue.

It's Time To Get A Smoker

Okay, I'm done trying to defeat the challenge of smoking on a gas grill. Cooked another piece of meat today, this time a 5+ lb beef brisket. I Did pretty much the same thing, with the exception of using apple wood sawdust instead of hickory chips for smoking.

It didn't matter a whole lot - I just couldn't get the grill to sustain the smoke level I want. Even when finding an odd steel grate (for some reason inadvertently delivered by our last moving company) allowed me to lower the plate of sawdust directly over the flames, it still took forever to get smoke. It still tasted awesome, BTW.

The rub was good.




Both the mop and sauce used beer for the majority or part of the liquid. I put more thought into what beer to use than I thought I would. I settled on a Belhaven Scottish Ale that my dad had left with me some weeks ago. It's fairly heavy and malty, and I figured in a recipe looking for smokey, somewhat sweet and caramelly flavors, I figured it was "the go". I had just enough in a 15.9 oz draft can to make the mop, the sauce, and give the cook a mouth full before tossing the can in the recycle bin. It's not as good as a McEwan's, but what is? The sauce was very vinegary (sp?), too much so for my taste. Two tablespoons of light brown sugar made it a much better sauce.

Summer's almost over and I, as a true consumer, will probably find a good smoker on clearance at Home Depot or someplace.

Birthday Weekend Food Adventure, Part Three - The Best Barbecue Evar!

With the kids finally in bed Saturday night, it was time to start prepping to make pulled pork on Sunday. I had been dying to make the stuff for like, a whole week. Srsly.

I'd spent some time online at home and at work looking for recipes, and finally settled on this one. Actually, there was no settling. I read the post, read the recipe, looked at the results and said "Yeah, I'm doing that".

I pretty much followed the recipe as written, except I used pork loin instead of bone-in butt. We had it in the freezer and I couldn't justify buying another big hunk of meat above thawing this one out and using it. Saturday night I made (and applied) the rub, and then made and stored the mop sauce. The pork looked pretty good the next morning.




I found out that my gas grill holds temperature pretty darned well, but I also found out that it's really difficult to get wood chips to smoke on it, even beyond the trouble the author mentioned using hardwood sawdust. The chips mostly just dried out and took forever to start generating smoke, which led me to continually screw with the process. Screwing with the process led to two fires in my wood chip pan. In retrospect, it makes sense - it takes a lot more heat to get smoke out of a relatively thick piece of wood than a flake of sawdust. So much so, that you risk open flame. In the 6.5 hours I probably got 30 minutes to an hour of good "smoke".




Other than that, the whole thing ran rather smoothly, if busy. When I wasn't mopping the pork, putting out fires or checking the temperature, I was making the barbecue sauce, and making homemade coleslaw. As a variation on finishing the recipe, when the loin was done, I cut the twine holding the two halves together, opened it up, and mopped it with barbecue sauce. I let it smoke for another few minutes, then set about cutting and shredding it.




I cut both halves into thick slices before shredding. As I was cutting it up, I tried a bite. WOW. This was going to be amazing. Shredding the pork was hard work. I believe this was because I was using boneless loin with little intramuscular fat, instead of a bone-in piece of meat with a fair amount. So I shredded enough to make everyone a couple of sandwiches and mixed in some barbecue sauce, and left the rest sliced. I had two sandwiches. One shredded, with barbecue and coleslaw, and one sliced, drizzled with extra mop sauce and barbecue, and then topped with coleslaw.



Best. Pork. Evar.

I have another piece of meat, some brisket, in the freezer. I plan to take it out and smoke it this weekend for my son's first birthday party. To solve the wood issue, I had thought about either dropping the $50 on a smoker, or ordering some hardwood sawdust. The smoker would be the easiest way; wood chips are easily bought, and the thing is made for cooking this way. However, though the pork was awesome, I am not satisfied with how I tackled this attempt at smoking on a gas grill. So I went ahead and bought the sawdust. It shipped today. Can't wait.