When we left off yesterday, we were ready to light a fire in the kettle. Before we do that, though, we’ll need to prep the pork shoulder. Actually, you can light the kettle and then prep the shoulder, because it takes a while for the hardwood chunks to catch fire and really blaze, and there’s really not much to prepping the meat.
Now, typically, when you’re merely grilling relatively small cuts, such as steaks, you’ll want the meat to be at room temperature. Not so when we barbecue. You can take a cold (not frozen, mind you) pork shoulder directly from the refrigerator and throw it in the kettle. The reason you can do this is that you’ll be cooking the meat for hours, literally, at low temperature. The meat (any food, in fact) never gets hotter than the temperature at which you cook it (in the neighborhood of 225º F to 250º F), and it will take it a while to get to that temperature, regardless of whether you start the meat at room temperature (68º F, officially) or refrigerator temperature (in the neighborhood of 35º F to 40º F). This is because the difference between room and refrigerator temperature is not that great when compared to the 225/250-degree cooking temperature.
Incidentally, you may be thinking, ”hey, wait a minute here, there’s not that much difference in temperature between 35º and 32º, and 32º is freezing; so why couldn’t I cook a frozen, 32º shoulder and expect it to be done in the same amount of time?”.
That’s a reasonable enough question. The answer is, because water can be ice or liquid water at 32º, that you probably can get away with it if the temperature of the shoulder really is 32º. At temperatures even a little colder than 32º F, at which there's no liquid water, only solid ice, however, all bets are off.
The reason, while trying not to get too technical with it, is that meat is mainly water, and it’s the water that freezes when you freeze meat. When water freezes, it loses energy in the form of heat. In freezing, liquid water loses heat energy and drops to a temperature just below its freezing point and then spikes back up to its freezing point as ice crystals start to form. During this time, its temperature does not change, but the water continues to lose heat energy. This energy, lost during the formation of ice crystals, is called the enthalpy of fusion or heat of fusion of water. Enthalpy of fusion is expressed in units of unit heat energy (e.g., calories, BTUs, etc.) per unit of mass (e.g., grams, pounds-mass, etc.), and is the amount of energy, in the form of heat, that has to be put back into the frozen water to get it to turn back into liquid water again. For water, enthalpy/heat of fusion is significant, and has to come from somewhere if you want the ice to melt. When you’re trying to cook frozen meat, your fire supplies this energy.
But wait. It gets worse.
Not only must your fire supply the enthalpy-of-fusion energy in order to melt the ice during the shift of water from the solid phase to the liquid phase, but the amount of energy to do the shift depends on the amount of ice you’re trying to melt, and that depends on the weight of the meat you’re cooking - the heavier the meat, the more energy.
On top of that, your fire also must supply energy just to raise the temperature of the meat to the melting point of water before melting can even begin. And, as you probably guessed, the amount of heat it takes to do this also depends on the weight of your meat.
Now remember, your fire is by design only a puny little smoky, low-temperature one, and it doesn’t have the clout to raise the temperature of 10 to 14 pounds of frozen meat to the melting point of water, and then supply even more heat to melt the ice. The only thing to do under the circumstances would be to increase the cooking time significantly. But if you did that, you might still end up with barbecue that’s charred to cinders on the outside and uncooked and cold on the inside. And even if you got lucky and it cooked all the way through, your barbecue would almost certainly wind up being unappetizingly charred on the outside. Bottom line, if you’re tempted to try to barbecue frozen meat, don’t. If you do it anyway, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Okay, okay. I’m off my soapbox. Back to the task at hand . . .
All right. We’ve taken the unfrozen pork shoulder out of the ‘fridge. Now what?
We could just throw it in the kettle as is, but that probably wouldn’t be a good thing. A better idea might be to wash it first. The meat has been processed, remember, and there may be certain processing residues on the exposed surfaces of the meat. Not that these may be harmful in any way, shape, or form, but they may flavor the barbecue in ways that are unappetizing when exposed to the heat of cooking. It’s best not to take chances, so we rinse the shoulder under running cold tap-water, just to make sure.
Rinsing is sufficient to remove possible undesired substances. The shoulder’s ready for the kettle now, but I like to go a step further. I’m fairly sure that this doesn’t really do anything materially to affect the flavor of the outcome, but I still like to rub the fat-cap with sea-salt. Home cooks (especially barbecuers), like baseball players and gamblers, are a suspertitious lot, and my salt-rubbing ritual seems to bring me good barbecuing luck. You, on the other hand, need not be bound by my superstitions, so you can omit the salt. Besides, I only claim that it brings me good luck. It may (Heaven forbid!) have the opposite effect on your barbecuing.
We’re ready to start barbecuing - FINALLY! The pork shoulder has been prepped (with or without the inclusion of the salt-rubbing ritual), and the hardwood chunks in the kettle look like they mean business. We cover the kettle with the lid and adjust the intake damper in the base of the kettle, all the while eye-balling the fire through the fully-open exhaust damper in the lid. When there’s just enough air getting to the fire so that there’s no longer flame, we’re ready for the shoulder.
We remove the lid, place the shoulder on the cooking surface over the drip-pan, and replace the lid. All we have to do now is stoke the fire periodically, and think about what sort of sauce we want to serve with our barbecue. We’ll take up these rather important matters in future posts.
Happy cooking (or more specifically, barbecuing)!
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