Pork Barbecue: Kettle Cooking Method, Part IV - Let's Recap

We’ve finally arrived at a point where we have all the information we need to make pork barbecue.  However, there are an awful lot of details, so let’s recap to make sure we're all on the same page:

We’ll be barbecuing a 10- to 14-pound bone-in, uncured pork shoulder.  Our shoulder has had half its skin and external fat removed so that a fat-cap remains on one side.  We will not use a dry rub.

We’re cooking in a round kettle of relatively large diameter.  The kettle is equipped with adjustable ventilation dampers in both kettle body and lid.

We’ll be cooking slowly, at a low temperature.  Total cooking time is based on the rule of one hour per pound or fraction of a pound.  For example, if the shoulder weighs 10-1/4 pounds, then total cooking time is 11 hours.

We’re cooking with smoldering hardwood. and we’re using the indirect method with a drip-pan.  In order to do this:

• We first place an oblong metal-foil drip-pan - one that’s large enough to catch any drops of liquid fat that fall from the shoulder during cooking - in the center of the fire-grate.
• Then, alongside the drip-pan on either side (i.e., along the two opposite sides of the pan that are longest, where there’s enough space), we lay down splints of fat wood in a crossing, or ‘star-like’, pattern (or at least as near to such a pattern as space permits).
• Next, we build a stack of hardwood chunks on top of the fat wood on both sides of the drip-pan, in such a way that all of the chunks will be exposed to the flame of the fat wood when we light it.  We stack our hardwood chunks on the fat wood so that there’s enough fat wood exposed under both stacks to be able to light them.

At this point, we’re ready to fire up our kettle and actually start barbecuing, which is the topic of tomorrow’s post.

Happy cooking!

Pork Barbecue: Kettle Cooking Method, Part III – Selecting the Cut

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!

Pork Barbecue: Kettle Cooking Method, Part II - Fuel and Temperature Control

In Friday’s post, I talked about barbecue kettles and fuel.  In today’s post, I’ll pick up where we left off and discourse further upon the topic of hardwood fuels.   Then we’ll talk about the role temperature plays in barbecuing, and about temperature control.

It occurs to me that I left you hanging when I mentioned wood chunks, and didn’t say exactly what wood chunks are. Let’s remedy that right now.  Wood chunks are simply chunks of wood, as opposed to logs or cord wood (fireplace wood, which are logs cut crosswise,  or bucked, to a length of 12 to 18 inches, and then split).  Wood chunks are roughly cubical in shape, and are typically 2 to 4 inches on a side.  Wood chunks are available at most barbecue and outdoor living specialty stores, at most big-box home improvement stores, and on line.

Wood chunks, due to their size, are the ideal fuel for kettle barbecuing using the indirect heat method - in which the food is cooked/smoked indirectly by hot combustion gases, not by direct radiant heat - and a drip-pan to catch juics and fat as the food cooks.  This is because fire-grate space is already at a premium in a kettle, and available grate area is further reduced by a drip-pan.  You’ll be using a drip-pan large enough to catch all the drippings from the meat during cooking, so the drip-pan will occupy significant area.  All you’ll have left for the fire are narrow areas on either side of the drip-pan, but that’s plenty of room for 2- to 4-inch cubical chunks.  You really don’t need to stoke the kettle with that much fuel at a time, anyway.  After all, pork barbecue, cooked the traditional way – slowly, at a low temperature - is a time-consuming affair, but it’s worth every minute of it.  You want to cook barbecue over a low, smokey fire, and in order to get the smoke, your fire needs to smolder, rather than burn with a flame.  Hardwood smolders at a lower temperature than the temperature at which it burns.

The benefit of smoldering is that it produces more smoke than does burning with a flame.  This is because fuel smolders instead of burning due to oxygen starvation.  There is not enough oxygen for the fuel to burn completely, and the result is adequate heat with an abundance of smoke, which is the reason you’re going to all this trouble in the first place.  On the other hand,  it’s possible to starve a fire of oxygen to the point that your fuel can’t even smolder, much less burn.  If this happens, the fire will go out completely. Therefore, you must control the temperature carefully

Temperature inside the kettle depends, assuming there’s a fire of some sort in the kettle, upon the amount of air you allow into the kettle during cooking.  The fuel burns faster if it has more oxygen available, and burns more slowly if there’s less oxygen available.  The trick is allowing just enough air into the kettle so that your fuel smolders instead of flaming.

As to temperature control, I think it helps to have a basic understanding of the physics of gases, and of how gases at different temperatures interact.  It’s not very difficult, so please bear with me while I try to explain it.  Alternatively, if you’re really not all that interested in explanations, you can simply skip the next three paragraphs.  You won't miss anything important if you do.

Okay.  We all know that hot air rises, right?  Well, air is a mixture of different gases (collectively, gas), and our observation is true of all gas.  A gas, be it air or any other gas, that is hotter than a surrounding gas, be it air or any other gas, is displaced by the surrounding gas.  The reason this happens is because the hotter gas molecules have more kinetic energy than molecules of the cooler gas.  That is, while molecules of any gas are always in motion, molecules in the hotter gas fly around faster and collide with each other more often, and thus are farther apart, on average, than the molecules of the cooler gas.  The result is that the hotter gas is less dense (it weighs less, or has less mass, per unit volume) than the cooler gas in the vicinity of it, and is displaced by the cooler gas.  This displacement happens because the cooler gas, being more dense than the hotter gas, and therefore heavier per unit of volume than the hotter gas, is drawn under the hotter gas by the Earth’s gravity, and the less dense hotter gas is displaced upward.  (This is analogous to oil floating on water because water is heavier per unit volume than oil.)  The net effect is an upwardly-directed flow, or current, of gas.  Moreover, in general, the greater the difference in temperature between the hotter and the cooler, the greater the current,&bnsp;or rate of flow.  In a barbecue kettle, it is this gas current which drives the smoke, which is not a gas but is composed of particulate matter, up and out of the exhaust vent/damper in the lid, flavoring the meat along the way.

Incidentally, the above explanation is somewhat of an oversimplification.  Firstly, combustion is a chemical reaction, and gases of combustion have compositions that are different from those of atmospheric gases.  Thus individual molecules of combustion gases may (and do!) have masses that are different from those of individual molecules of the gases that make up the Earth’s atmosphere.  It would follow that equal volumes of the gases of combustion and atmospheric gases may have different masses at a given density.  Also, my explanation, strictly speaking, applies only to gases that are unconfined; that is, gases that are free to change volume by expanding and contracting.  A kettle, however, can be reasonably regarded as a confining vessel.  Nevertheless, pressure of magnitudes commonly associated with confined gases are not present in back-yard barbecue kettle.  Consequently, the general idea, that a mixture of cooler gases displacing a mixture of hotter gases causes an upward gas current, still applies.

Are you still with me?  All right, then.  In a barbecue kettle, hot gases get that way because the fuel burns, and the amount of heat depends upon the rate at which the fuel burns, which in turn depends on the amount of air present – the more air, the hotter the fire.  But by the same token, the less air admitted into the kettle, the cooler the fire burns because there is less available oxygen.  Thus you control the rate of burn, and the amount of heat thus generated, by controlling air flow into the kettle.  To control air flow, you adjust the dampers.

Now, what exactly is a damper, anyway?  The word damper has many meanings, but for our purposes, a damper is merely a mechanical device for varying the size of a ventilation opening in the kettle.  It’s a movable piece of metal attached to the kettle in such a way that is adjustable so that openings in the bottom and lid, respectively, of the kettle, openings which admit air or which exhaust combustion gases, can be fully open, fully closed, or partially open.  Two dampers, one on the kettle itself and the other on its lid, are each mounted in close contact with, and snuggly attached to their respective parts.  The closeness of fit is intended to prevent the leakage of intake air into, and the leakage of exhaust gases out of, the kettle.

With a little practice, the volume per unit time, or current intensity, of both intake air and exhaust gases, can be controlled fairly precisely.  The trick is to balance the volume-per-unit-time of intake air and the volume-per-unit-time of exhaust gases,nbsp;which is always greater than the volume-per-unit-time of intake air because there's more matter in the exhaust gas, and have the fuel smolder instead of burn. This is not as difficult in practice as it might seem.

Now, after what I just wrote, and with me being one of those engineering types and all, you might think that I use all sorts of fancy, complicated, and expensive scientific instruments, such as digital thermometers, pressure gauges, flow meters, etc., to get my fire regulated precisely.  Well, I don't.  I'm not that anal-retentive.  Nope. I just eye-ball it; here's how.

What I do is, after the drip-pan's in and I've arranged (as described in yesterday's post) my fat wood and hardwood chunks on either side of the drip-pan, I open the bottom (intake) damper fully and light the fat wood.  Then, when the hardwood chunks are fully in flame, I open the (exhaust) damper on the kettle lid fully and place the lid on the kettle, tightly so it seals good.  Next, I adjust the intake damper until the flame disappears.  I determine this by looking through the exhaust openings in the lid at the fire, i.e, by eye-balling, to see if the flames have disappeared and the fuel is smoldering.  When the fuel is smoldering, I remove the lid, throw my pork shoulder onto the kettle's rack over the drip-pan, replace the lid, and adjust the exhaust damper so it covers about half the total area of the openings.  At this point, I'm barbecuin'!

Tomorrow, I'll get to the "meat" of the matter, and describe in detail how I barbecue a pork shoulder using a cooking kettle.

Happy cooking!

Pork Barbecue: Kettle Cooking Method, Part I - Introduction

First of all, please note that, despite what I wrote yesterday about 'sacred truth', and despite the outrageous (or is it???) theory I postulated, about the true origin of the name barbecue being suppressed by a special-interests conspiracy, kettle cooking works not only for pork shoulders, pork butts, and uncured hams, but also for beef brisket and whole chickens.  It's probably good, too, for whatever else you want to cook, but I only say probably because pork, beef, and chicken are the only foods with which I have personal experience, and I wouldn't want to mislead you.

Anyhow, you do know what I'm talking about when I say barbecue kettle, right?  You don't fill it with water and light a fire under it.  Instead, a barbecue kettle sits up off the ground on metal legs, and both the food and the fire go inside it (not necessarily in that order).  The remainder of this post deals with selecting the right kettle and the right fuel.

The most popular barbecue kettles, and the ones with which I am most familiar, incidentally, are manufactured by Weber®.  Over the years, I've owned several of these kettles, and I can vouch for them.  They're inexpensive, well-designed, simply constructed, made of high-quality materials, they last for years, their cooking performance does not degrade over time, and they have convenient, fairly precise, and easy-to-use controls (i.e., ventilation/damper system).  The only maintenance a kettle needs is a good cleaning at least once a season.

There are even kettles available that come with LP gas-fueled starter systems.  If your kettle pulls double duty - you use it for both barbecuing and general charcoal grilling - such a starter system can be convenient.  When you use your kettle for charcoal grilling, use the starter system to ignite the charcoal instead of charcoal lighter fluid.

Bottom line, kettles give you a lot of bang for your buck.  That's a good thing, too, because a little kettle won't do for the kind of barbecuing we're talking about here.  You'll need a middling big one.  My kettle's a no-frills thirty-six (or thereabouts) incher, which is plenty big for a 10- to 14-pound pork shoulder.

Now, as to fuel, it's been my experience that hardwood gives the best results, and so I recommend it.  My kettle, which is used only for barbecuing and, hence,  has been fueled only by hardwood - chunks of hickory, mainly, with a few chunks of mesquite thrown in for some spiciness to the smoke - since the day I brought it home.

For starting my barbecuing fire, I use fat wood.  Fat wood is a by-product of tree farming.  It consists of long, thin slivers, called splints, of highly resinous - and highly flammable - pine wood.  The splints are taken from the stump of the pine tree after the tree itself has been harvested.  Since fat wood contains a lot of resin, it burns really hot.  This ignites the hickory/mesquite fuel very quickly.

Fat wood (also spelled fatwood) itself leaves no residue to affect food flavor, and it has been consumed entirely by the time the fuel wood is burning sufficiently to start the cooking.  I just lay a few splints in a crossing, or "asterisk", pattern in the grate of the kettle, and carefully stack wood chunks on top of the fat wood.  I pile the wood chunks high, in order to expose more of them to the flame of the fatwood.  Then I light the end of a fat wood splint, which I made sure would be sticking out like a fuze from the wood chunk pile when I stacked it, and before long, the fire's blazing nicely and I'm ready to barbecue.

Now, it's ironic that the first fat wood I ever saw for sale was labeled 'Georgia Fat Wood', and yet fat wood is not available year-around in Georgia, or at least it isn't in the Atlanta area.  Oh, well.  This just means that I have to lay in a goodly supply of it when it is available.  I hope this is not the case where you live, but if it is, you can do like I do in a pinch and order the stuff from L.L. Bean (http://www.llbean.com).

Monday, we'll talk in detail about fuel and temperature control in kettle barbecuing.

Happy cooking!

Barbecue - from Barbacoa or from Barbe à Queue?

Now that I’ve gotten on the subject of barbecue, let’s talk about it some.  A good place to begin is with the word barbecue itself.

According to Webster’s New World College Dictionary, Third edition, barbecue comes from the American Spanish barbacoa, which was adopted in turn from the Tainó, a people indigenous to the Caribbean region.  In the Tainó language, barbacoa means, literally, framework of sticks.  According to the Wikipedia article barbecue, not only is the word barbecue derived from the word barbacoa, but also the word barbacoa is found in the language of the Timucua people of Florida as well as in that of the Tainó.  The Wikipedia article differs with Webster, however, as to the literal meaning of the word.  According to Wikipedia, barbacoa means sacred fire pit.  One thing that there’s no disagreement about, though, is that the word barbecue is not derived from the French barbe à queue, which means from
beard to tail

Well, hell. For all these years, that’s where I thought barbecue came from.  It’s just a damn shame that it doesn’t.  If it did, we in the Southeast might have some real leverage when we insist that if the dish is to be called barbecue, it must be pork.  According to legend, you see, French visitors to a Caribbean island saw the locals cooking a whole hog over a fire in a pit, and one of the visitors remarked to the others that the unfortunate porker was being cooked from beard to tail, or barbe à queue.  Anyhow, again according to legend, the term caught on and the rest is history.  If that were really how the name barbecue came about, not only could we Southeasterners insist that barbecue has to be pork, but if push came to shove in cook-off showdowns with non-believers, we could insist that in order to call it barbecue, it had to be a whole hog.  Either way, we’d have them disqualified on a technicality.

It is just possible, incidentally, that barbe à queue is really the origin of the word barbecue, but the truth is being suppressed by a conspiracy.  There is a significant segment of barbecue society who believe that you can have barbecue beef and barbecue chicken and barbecue turkey, and on and on, the important thing being the belief that you can have barbecue that isn’t pork.  It follows that there might be certain individuals among us with private and nefarious reasons for not wanting the sacred truth, that barbecue must be pork, to get out.  Certain wealthy but unscrupulous people, you see; renegade Texans or Californians, maybe.  Anyway, such a gang of rascals might have pooled their resources and approached the world’s etymologists – scholars who study the origins of words.  Well, everyone has his price, you know,  and scholars as a group are not exactly known for their wealth.  Thus would the scalawags have been able to bribe a majority of these scholars, impoverished creatures that they are, to say that barbacoa is where the word barbecue comes from, even if they knew or suspected otherwise.  Hey, it could have happened . . .

Happy cooking!

Special Barbecue Sauce for Ribs

Barbecued pork ribs were the topic of yesterday’s post, and if you’re going to do them, I think you need a special barbecue sauce to go with them; well, at least I do. Here’s the sauce we had with our ribs last Sunday.  My wife usually avoids sauce when we have barbecued anything, but this sauce was so flavorful that she made an exception.

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1 recipe dry rub, from yesterday’s post.
1/2 C distilled vinegar.
1/4 C prepared mustard.
1 C tomato catsup.
4 thin slices lemon.
Tabasco® sauce, to taste (optional)

In a saucepan, dissolve the prepared mustard in the vinegar and mix thoroughly. Add the dry rub and stir until dissolved. Now, add the catsup and mix thoroughly. Float the lemon slices on top of the mixture.

Bring the saucepan to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 30 minutes. Stir gently periodically. The intent here is to extract some lemon flavor while minimizing extraction of the bitterness in the white membrane under the peel of the lemon.

Remove saucepan from heat and allow contents to cool. When cooled, add the Tabasco® if you want it.  Makes about a cup and a half.

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Incidentally, a little bitterness is a good thing in a barbecue sauce; hence the turmeric in many recipes.  Too much bitterness, on the other hand . . .  That's a different story altogether.  I once had the bright idea of trying to cook a different barbecue sauce recipe, one which also calls for lemon slices, in a slow-cooker, overnight.  Come next morning, I sampled a sip:  yuk! it was just gawd-awful - unsalvageably bitter - and lemon was the culprit.  I ended up tossing the sauce and starting over.  Learn from my mistakes.  Please!

In my opinion, barbecue sauce of any sort is best when made a day or two before it’s to be used, and held covered in the refrigerator.  Just let it to come up to room temperature before you serve it.  I guess it’s a little like home-made chili – refrigerate it overnight, on account of "it ain’t fit to eat the day you make it."

Happy cooking!

Labor Day Weekend - Barbecued Pork Ribs

Whew!  Glad that's over.  This laboring is for the birds.

Well, not really.  I 'labored' in the kitchen (and on our back deck), cooking, but as I've said before, that's not really labor.

On Sunday, I barbecued two racks of pork ribs, using a method that I'd never used before. We'd seen an indoor/outdoor method for barbecued pork ribs on an episode of America's Test Kitchen (PBS). Since I wasn't particularly enthusiastic about tending the fire in the kettle all day, and worrying about it raining, I thought it would be worth a try.

Although we cooked the ribs on Sunday, the preparations began on Saturday.  First, I mixed dark brown sugar and spices into a dry rub  for the ribs.  Then I put enough rub on each rack of ribs to cover the top completely, and massaged it into the meat.  I rubbed the top of each rack only and not the bottom.  After the rub-down, I covered the ribs loosely with plastic wrap and put them in the refrigerator so they could fester (a technical term we use at our house to describe the process of flavor exchange among food as the result of mutual physical contact) overnight.

Incidentally, I made enough dry rub for two doses on each rack and then some, and covered the remaining rub tightly and refrigerated that, too. Also, I did not remove the membranes from the ribs because I needed the membrane to test the slab for doneness, as explained below.

Sunday morning, I fired up my barbecue/smoker kettle.  I usually use mainly hickory with just a little mesquite for fuel, but I used only hickory this time because the idea was to smoke the ribs without cooking them through completely, over a coolish but smokey fire, and I just didn't want to go to the trouble of getting out the mesquite. 

Anyhow, after the kettle was smoking along nicely, I put the rib racks in, membrane-side to the grill surface, and put the lid on.  I smoked the ribs for 3 hours. Then I brought them indoors, gave them another dose of the dry rub, and finished them in the oven.

I lay the re-rubbed rib racks, membrane-side-down again, on a wire rack in a shallow roasting pan and covered the pan tightly with aluminum foil. I then put the pan of ribs in a 200-degree oven. At the end of 3 hours, I removed them from the oven and tested them for doneness by bending them in such a way that the membrane is stretched to see if, and how easily, it breaks. Nothing happened.  The membrane held firm.

Now, this was an experiment, remember, so I wasn't disappointed.  We just crimped the aluminum foil back around the pan and threw it back in the oven.  I raised the temperature to 300 degrees, and after an hour, I repeated the test. This time, the membrane broke easily.  We let the ribs cool for 30 minutes, then sliced the racks up into individual ribs and served them.

The ribs were delicious, but just a little chewy for my taste. Next time, I think I'll cook them in a 300 degree oven for 4 hours after smoking them for 3 hours. That combination should result in meat that is fall-off-the-bone tender.

Here's my recipe for dry rub for pork ribs:

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1 C dark brown sugar, loose - not packed.
1/4 t ground allspice.
Ground cayenne pepper, to taste.
dash ground cinnamon.
1 t ground clove.
1 t ground mace.
1/2 t dry mustard.
1 t ground nutmeg.
1 T ground paprika.
1/4 t garlic powder.
1/4 t onion powder.

Combine all ingredients in a bowl and whisk thoroughly, being careful to break up all lumps.  Makes about 1 cup of dry rub.

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Note that brown sugar is moist, while dry mustard seems to attract moisture, even when it's kept in a hermetically-sealed container.  Thus, if your rub wants to stay lumpy, blame it on the sugar, or the mustard, or both.

Our racks were larger than average, but 2 cups of the rub was plenty for two application on both of our racks.

Happy cooking!