When Ted isn’t busy giving Unsolicited Advice, he loves to kill animals and smoke them until they are delicious. Now you can too!
Hello loyal readers,
People often ask me “Ted, when you aren’t giving out advice to strangers on the internet what are the passions you pursue in your free time?” Well you weirdos getting up all in business like a bunch of stalkers, I should tell you technically, I write this advice column in my free time because I don’t get paid for it. I’m just passionate about letting people know how dumb they are. But I know what you mean. So this article is not going to me answering Twitter questions, its going to be me talking about the one thing I really care about. I would even say its the one true god, and that’s Barbecue. I don’t know if this is going to be a regular thing but I’m going to see what happens with this first one.
So this last week I made smoked pulled pork and I’m going to tell you about the adventure I had preparing it. A lot of BBQ blogs will give you tips on how to select meat based on the characteristics of the meat. Well all my main tip is just buy the largest pork butt you can find. I came up with this method when I realized I have a bunch of gluttonous friends who have no self control and can’t stop shoveling delicious pork in their faces. I mean these guys are monsters. They usually go through ten or eleven pounds of meat in a sitting, barely stopping chewing enough to savor the taste of the meat. So, I have a few secrets on where I get my meat but I’ll hypothetically walk you through the buying process. Now you’ve gone down to your local butcher, supermarket, or whole sale club. You’ve asked for the largest piece of pork in the building. They brought out Susan the cashier and you both had a good laugh and she ran away crying.
The butcher has now retrieved a large piece of meat and you struggle to get into your cart because this interaction has taken so long you are now suffering from malnutrition. Don’t worry though you are only several days away from having a delicious smoked pork dinner.
I got home with a huge piece of meat, I mean this pig must of hated itself and you can really taste the sadness in the meat, but that sadness will only get your taste buds so far. The first step to enhancing the flavor of sad, is the brine.
Now, brine is a fancy culinary word for marinade. So you mix some water and some salt and some sugar. I’m not going to to give you my secret mix but the internet is lousy with tips for this sort of thing so you’ll figure it out. I also like to stuff a bunch of garlic into the pork. If the Italians have made one contribution to society besides fascism, it was stuffing food with garlic. I put the meat into a big vat of flavor and then it goes into the fridge for a good 24 hours. What you do for that 24 hours is up to you, just don’t go and blow your brains out because I would hate to waste all that pig meat. Am I talking about the the pork or you, you decide.
So its the next day and you just couldn’t muster up the courage to pull the trigger and you’ve taken the gun out of your mouth. Now is the time to give the pig its next level of flavor. I pull it out of the brine and dry it off. This is the point where you are going to get your hands dirty. Now we rub the meat. A rub is a fancy term for the seasoning you “rub” on the meat. Now again the internet is lousy with tips on how to what seasoning to use. I will take some mustard so the rub sticks to the meat better. Once that’s done it goes back into the fridge and you can put the gun back in your mouth.
Now it goes with out saying, I am a genius, but I’m not going to claim to have invented this next part. I have never seen it written in any literature but I’m sure some one else has done it. But since I’m the first person to write this down it will forever be known as the Pettingell Technique. I take some vegetables.
‘Vegetables?’ you ask.
Don’t worry they won’t physically make contact with the meat.
I roughly chop the veggies, onions, carrots, celery, peppers, maybe a jalapeno, and place them in a roasting plan. Then I put some left over rub on them and some apple cider vinegar and oil on them. We will get back to this later.
The rub has taken a few hours to seep into the meat, the veggies are ready to go now its time to get the smoker ready. SMOKER! I DON’T HAVE ONE OF THOSE. Well if you just said that you are shit out of luck so maybe you should just go ahead and blow your brains out. If you do lets get to it.
I like a mix of apple and cherry wood. You can choose your own wood but it probably won’t be as good because you are an idiot. I get my smoker going, I put the veggie tray on bottom rack and let the temperature in the smoker come 225 degrees Fahrenheit, not Celsius.
Smoking is all about low and slow and if you are using metric you will surely burn the shit out of this meat like a typical European. Remember BBQ is an all American art form like Jazz, Stand Up Comedy, and Nuclear Warfare.
Once you have the right temperature and plenty of smoke put your pork butt on the top rack so that any juices it releases will drip down on to the veggie mix.
Is your mouth watering yet? If its not, good because we’ve got almost an entire day to because at this temperature it takes an hour and half a pound to cook so if it was watering you probably would have died of dehydration at this point. To pass the time maybe call Susan from the grocery store for a love making session. You’ve already made her cry and that,s half the battle. Man, even in my BBQ Column I can’t help but give advice.
Why do I choose to smoke? Couldn’t I just get the same effect using my oven or a crock pot brand slow cooker? You could but it wouldn’t taste as good. See, many people believe the key to great taste is suffering. We’ve already covered how this pig must have suffered in life as a fat pig of a pig. What could taste better than that? How about the soul of a tree. Yes, trees, one of natures greatest wonders. All they do is exist to give us fruit and oxygen and we still choose to murder them simply to burn their flesh so our food can absorb their essence.
Every fewer hours you need to check the smoker and add more wood to the smoker and probably a little water to your veggie tray you don’t want them drying out. Set your alarm because you will probably going to have to go to sleep at some point. After nearly a day of smoking we can pull out the swine as well as the veggies.
The veggies have probably turned black and are sitting in a greasy pork juice. I stain the them out of the veggie pork juice and get rid go them. I just throw them out into the yard, not as fertilizer but so nothing will ever grow there again. I now have a thick liquid full of pork and roasted vegetable flavor. I put this in the freezer so that the fat on top solidifies on top. I take the pork and put in a crock pot brand slow cooker and begin to pull it apart. You’ll know you’ve done it right if the bone pulls right out.
You take out the pork juice and scrape off the smoke flavored lard. One more time we strain out the little bits of junk in the juice so now you are left with nothing but pure pork flavor. This is the Pettingell Technique come to fruition. I then make a simple Carolina style BBQ sauce with this and pour this over the pulled pork. You are now finally ready to enjoy the pork, except all your fat friends are now there and they have consumed all of it while you were getting pickles and coleslaw, or at least that’s what happened to me.
Join me next time where I revolutionize chicken wings or I give more idiots advice on the internet. We’ll see where the night takes me.
