Today’s post is about actually cooking traditional pork barbecue in a kettle.
For starters, let me explain why I prefer an uncured pork shoulder when I barbecue. There are two reasons.
Firstly, My experimentally-determined cooking-time formula for bone-in pork is one hour per pound, or fraction thereof, of meat. Weight of the piece is thus an important consideration. Consequently, I like a pork shoulder because it’s big enough without being too big.
At one end of the spectrum are pieces that are too big, such as a so-called green, or uncured, ham. While I’ve found specimens that are small enough to fit physically in the kettle, they tend to be too heavy to cook in a reasonable amount of time. I regard a cooking time of more than 14 hours as being unreasonable; I had to give up pulling all-nighters barbecuing, because I need my beauty-sleep. With that in mind, you can see why I’d consider the cooking time for an 18- or 20-pound ham to be unreasonable.
At the other end of the spectrum, there are pieces of meat that are too small to barbecue. Years of experience barbecuing with indirect heat and a drip-pan, and slowly, at low temperature, have taught me that there’s sort of a point of diminishing returns when your going in the direction of descending weight. Pieces of meat that weigh less than some minimum weight (the exact minimum weight depends on the meat, e.g., pork, beef, etc., and the cut) just do not turn out well using my method. Pieces that are too small always seem to turn out being too dry, and they aren’t good eating.
The second reason I prefer pork shoulder for barbecuing is its fat-cap. The fat-cap is a layer of fat on one side, usually, of the shoulder. which consists fat beneath a layer of skin. I say usually because I have seen examples that were minimally processed, where no skin and fat at all were removed. These are by no means the norm however. At the other extreme, I’ve seen pork shoulders with all of the skin and most of the external fat removed; more on this later. In any case, the fat under the fat-cap serves to baste the shoulder during cooking, resulting in a moist and succulent finished product.
Now, although pork shoulder is my cut of choice for barbecuing, I do like to experiment, and so I have fooled around with green hams and Boston butts - which incidentally, are actually shoulder cuts and not hindquarter cuts, as the name implies – from time to time. I’ve already mentioned that most hams are so heavy that I don’t regard their cooking times as reasonable, but butts are another story.
The Boston butt, also known as Boston blade roast, is part of the pork shoulder, but is taken from higher up the shoulder than the ‘picnic ham’ type of pork shoulder that I prefer to barbecue. Boston butts are well-marbled, this translates into too greasy a finished product, I think. There’s just too much fat. Now I realize that others will disagree, and that’s fine by me. Boston butt is, after all, the cut of choice for many barbecue restraunts. However, such establishments use commercial barbecue ovens, and these cook faster then my method. It’s just possible, I think, that the faster cooking, and the consequentially higher temperatures, renders more of the fat in less time than my method, and this is why commercially-prepared Boston but barbecue isn’t overly greasy.
Although many barbecuers swear by it, I do not use a dry rub when I barbecue a pork shoulder. A dry rub, or any other flavoring applied externally, would be wasted because the fat-cap would prevent the flavors from fully penetrating a pork shoulders. On the other hand, if I removed the fat-cap so that the rub could penetrate the meat, there’d be no fat to baste the meat during cooking. I suppose I could apply the dry rub to the fat-cap the day before cooking, marinate the shoulder overnight in the ‘fridge, and hope that some of the flavor gets into the meat, but I have my doubts about how well that would work. My thinking is that, bottom line, if you use dry rub, then do it to a shoulder that’s had all its skin and most of the exterior fat removed, and run the risk of a drier, less succulent result. Otherwise, don’t use a dry rub. The flavor will still be out of this world.
Happy cooking!
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