Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Barbecue Dinner

This is going to be pretty lengthy, which explains why I've been putting it off for, oh, four days.
We were snowed in Friday, and having joined the mad rush of "Ohmygod, the world is ending! Grocery store! Grocery store!" (except our version involved not toilet paper and milk and bread, but a nine-pound cut of Boston butt and potatoes because that's how we roll), we were set (or I should say the husband) to smoke the pork for 10.5 hours (the husband is saying he should have let it smoke for 12 hours).

Sometimes we have sous chefs in the kitchen. And by sometimes, I mean all of the time.

The husband started out by mixing black pepper, cayenne pepper, and lemon juice and rubbing it into the pork (a sort of dry/wet rub).


He then brought to a simmer distilled white vinegar, orange juice, and water with any "citrus-y" fruit found lying around the house and sliced (i.e., apples, oranges, lemons, etc.) and let it cool.


Afterwards, he poured about a half a cup of the vinegar/citrus mixture over the pork. Reserving a cup or two of the vinegar mix for basting, he poured the remainder into the liquid reservoir of a "pre-heated" smoker and added water to the fill line (oops, I should mention that we have a smoker; if you don't, just get a smaller cut of Boston butt or pork shoulder, season as you like, and drop into a crockpot filled with homemade barbecue sauce, below, and let it go on high for about 8 hours). Setting the reservoir in the smoker, he put the grill over top, added the meat on the grill, and added some pre-soaked hickory chips over the lava rocks.


He let it cook on its own for three hours, then basted and added more hickory chips every hour after that for a total of seven hours. The ideal internal temperature for pork is around 165 degrees; however, the hotter you get the internal temperature, the easier it is to shred the pork. At 165 degrees, you'll be slicing the meat instead of shredding it.


While the husband was working on that, I prepped a few sides. First up was a homemade barbecue sauce. I'll admit that, if anyone were to see the page on which this recipe is found in the cookbook "Bon Appetit, Y'All," I would be thoroughly embarrassed. The page no longer requires a bookmark--it's actually naturally stiffened from the amount of ketchup, lemon juice, and all manner of ingredients I managed to spill on the page (hey, a sign of a good cook is messiness). The recipe makes about 6.5 cups of sauce, but you can halve it. Anyway, here's the so-called "Mama's Barbecue Sauce," and as the intro for the recipe claims, once you've "had homemade you will go off the store-bought kind for good."

1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter (I actually like to do a mix of regular butter and unsalted butter, 1 stick of each)
1 onion, preferably Vidalia, very finely chopped
2.5 c. ketchup
2 c. apple cider or distilled white vinegar
1/2 c. Worcestershire sauce
1/4 c. Dijon mustard
2 Tbsp. firmly packed brown sugar
Juice of 2 lemons
2 Tbsp. freshly ground black pepper
Coarse salt (kosher works well)
-In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat; add the onions and simmer until soft and melted, 5-7 minutes. Add the ketchup, vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, mustard, brown sugar, lemon juice, and pepper.
-Bring to a boil, decrease the heat to low, and simmer until flavors have smoothed and mellowed, at least 10 minutes and up to 30 minutes. (I usually let it simmer for about 45 minutes; I feel like I should warn you that the fumes that come off of this sauce are pretty strong, so if you decide to hang your head over the pot to get a whiff, you're going to burn a few nose hairs in the process, but I swear it's tasty.) Taste and adjust for seasoning with salt and pepper. Store in an airtight container in the refrigerator. It will last for months.

I normally set the sauce aside to cool, so it's pretty low maintenance. If you want to pop it into the fridge after it's done simmering, you can just reheat later on the stove.



Another make-ahead side to dinner was a Creamy Cole Slaw, a Bobby Flay recipe that nails one of my favorite childhood taste memories on the head. My grandmother makes the best cole slaw I've ever had, and I could never find the right recipe to replicate it, until I stumbled across this one. It's just a classic taste, and adds so much to barbecue. Now, I've tried to cheat this one by buying the pre-bagged cole slaw, and it just does not work. If you want to make this, I would suggest just toughing it out and shredding the cabbage and carrots by hand. Alternately, if you have a food processor with a slicing "wheel," you can knock out the shredding in no time. This is best if made a few hours ahead of time and left to chill in the refrigerator until ready to serve.



And lastly, fried pickles. If you've never tried fried pickles, you're missing out on a great appetizer. I think the first time I had fried pickles was on our honeymoon, at a great restaurant in Charleston, SC, called Virginia's on King. I've made them at home several times since then, but this one, I think, really tops them all. It's another Alton Brown recipe, and the coating/breading doesn't look like much initially, but if you are really patient and let them fry until a golden brown, the breading really holds up to the crunch of the pickle. I like to use Klausen whole dill pickles for this and serve with a Honey Mustard Dipping Sauce (or Ranch dressing in a pinch).

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