Bacon Redux

So Sunday the pork belly went on the smoker. Many of the recipes I've seen call for running a cool smoker for bacon, around 160 F. At its peak I think mine was at 200 and by the time I took the bacon off it was running around 125 F. For fuel I used several pieces of apple wood and one chimney of charcoal. Instead of my usual fire basket, which is usually elevated a bit to let the ash fall, I had the fuel in an old aluminum roasting pan at the very bottom of the smoker and the pork belly was up on the top rack, putting it as far from the heat as possible. I left it on the smoker for about 3 1/2 hours.

After removing the bacon from the smoker, you will be tempted to cut into the bacon, fry some up and taste it. Go ahead. But then put it on a rack and let it cool. After cooling for an hour or two, put it in a plastic bag and set it in the fridge for a few hours. This really helps set the meat up and makes it much much easier to cut.

You may notice that the bacon above doesn't have that deep read or mahogany color you are used to seeing in bacon you get from the store. The main cause of that is that I did not use any nitrites or nitrates at all in curing the bacon. You can use any of a number of curing salts that contain those ingredients to get that color if you so desire. I won't comment on whether or not they cause cancer, because I'm too damn lazy to do the research.

So now I have roughly ten pounds of bacon. Five of it has been cut up. The other five is still whole. All of it is going to our family Thanksgiving gathering. I'm sure we'll figure out what to do with it.

Also, the rendered pork fat came out great. After it was done rendering I drained it then let it sit in the fridge. Some was used for cooking eggs over the past couple of days, and then I felt like making biscuits, so the rest of it went into the biscuits in the place of the margarine or shortening most recipes call for. It was a good move.

Bringing Home The Bacon

I am taking my first step at home smoked bacon. A 10.78 pound pork belly is in the fridge, curing. In the fridge Wednesday evening, on the smoker Sunday afternoon. I cut the belly in half and trimmed off a good amount of the rind and fat.

The cure is 1/2 cup brown sugar, 1/2 cup kosher salt and a few turns on the pepper grinder. I mixed this by hand, covered the pork belly generously, put it into a storage zip bag and it's in the fridge.

The amount of fat I had left from trimming was a lot, so I am rendering it on the stove top in a sauce pan. About 1/4 cup of water went over the fat after putting it in the pan. It is on low heat. I'll let you all know how it comes out.

Smokin' For The Homeless

I want to take a short break from competition recipes and such to talk for a minute about something I did last Friday for the second time and plan on doing in the future as many times as money and circumstances permit.

I go to church with the people that run Hearts Community Service. One of the activities they engage in is feeding the hungry in Ann Arbor. To help out I've smoked pork shoulder and brisket for them on a couple of occasions. Here are some of the reasons I help out in this way in particular.

1. I like to cook. Anybody that has known me for more than about 30 seconds knows this.
2. It's cheap. I get pork shoulder for $1.79 per pound sale. The regular price for brisket at GFS is less than $3.00 per pound. You can't even buy decent bologna for that little.
3. My employer is very generous with allowing its employees to work at home, which means I can get up early, fire up the smoker, get the meat on, get 8 or 9 hours of work in and then take the meat off the smoker and get it ready.
4. It is a very visible way I can show my kids the importance of giving back, helping the less fortunate, etc. Talking about all of these things is one thing. Tangible examples are quite another. Actions speaking louder than words and such, I suppose.
5. Barbecue lends itself to cooking large amounts of food at a time and, sadly, there are plenty of hungry people out there.

There are plenty of people that help out with assembling the sandwiches and getting the food where it needs to be. This part of the prep is, to me, a very small part in a much larger effort. But I know it's a part I can do well, so I pitch in when I can.

I felt particularly inspired to share this because, after the idiocy in France that transpired last Friday, November 13, 2015 and the subsequent turning away of Syrian refugees in various states in this country, a lot of the complaints and support for this knee-jerk reaction were along the line of "Why don't we worry about OUR homeless and OUR veterans and OUR poor first!". I cannot help but wonder how much these people that are complaining have actually done to help anybody. If you are truly concerned, I would strongly encourage you to change that phrasing from "Why don't we" to "Why don't I". What can I do today, maybe right now, to help out somebody less fortunate? Maybe if more people were worried about what "I" could do instead of what "we" or "they" could do, there would be a lot less people out there in desperate need.

God Bless.

Competition Ribs

The ribs placed 2nd in their category. They were the one thing coming off the smoker that I taste tested and knew would do well. My wife said they were the best thing I've ever pulled off that smoker.

Of all the meats to prep after check-in, I did the ribs last. They were the only thing to not get any sort of brine, so they were the easiest to prepare. Before I go into gritty detail, here is a rundown of the food and associated rub and sauce

The ribs: 3 racks of baby back ribs.

The rub: After doing a lot of reading, most competition bbq seems to prefer sweeter tasting sauces and rubs, whereas I normally like things more savory and spicy. I also read that a lot of competitors tend to use store bought rubs as their base and then proceed to doctor them to get the flavor profile they want. To this end, I got the local grocery store's Kansas City Steak Rub, took about 1/3 of the rub out of the container and replaced it with brown sugar. I used this rub on the pork and the chicken.

The sauce: I really, really like the Brownwood Farms Cherry BBQ sauce. It has great flavor and is a nice change from your normal Kansas City style sauce that most people are familiar with. For the sauce I did something similar to the rub. I started with this sauce, mixed in about an equal part apple cider vinegar, then added brown sugar to taste. Equal parts sauce and vinegar was a little too tangy in my opinion. Adding sugar back in helped. When the mix was right I simmered this on the stove top for about an hour. This was all prepared Thursday night before the competition. After it was done cooking I let it cool down then put it in a container in the fridge and packed it up in the cooler Friday morning. As with the rub, this sauce was used on everything but the beef. Brownwood farms is located in Traverse City, MI. They make great sauces.

To prepare the ribs, I hit them with a generous amount of rub, wrapped them in foil and then put them in the cooler. Most people recommend trying to remove the membrane from the bottom side of the ribs. I attempted to do this in the manner I saw in many, many youtube videos. I failed miserably, so rather than hack the back sides of the ribs into an unrecognizable mess, I left them alone. The membrane on these ribs was super thin. I don't know if that cost me first place or not.

The ribs sat in the cooler from when I seasoned them in the middle of the afternoon on Friday until they went onto the smoker at about 6 AM Saturday morning. Ribs were the first meat to be turned in. Lots and lots of people recommend the 3-2-1 method of cooking. It is widely recommended because it works. So when the ribs first went on they got another light sprinkle of rub, then went directly on the smoker. At about 9 am they got taken off, lightly sauced, wrapped in foil and then put back on the smoker for about 2 hours. Right around 11 they got unwrapped, sauced, then put back on the smoker. They were sauced at 11:15 and 11:30. Each time they wee sauced they just had a thin layer of sauce brushed on.

At about 11:45 they were pulled off, cut, boxed. There were seven judges so seven pieces of meat were required to be turned in. In order to get the seven thickest, meatiest pieces I needed all 3 racks. The ribs that were turned in all came from the front third of their respective racks, where the meat on the back of the rib was thickest. I tried for seven pieces that were as close to the same size as possible so they looked uniform in the box. Each rib was hit on all sides with a thin layer of sauce. Before shutting the box they were hit with a spritz of apple juice from a spray bottle to give them a hint of sweetness and a nice sheen.

The smoker was running between 250 and 275 the entire time the ribs were on. They were tender, juicy and not overdone. Most people like their ribs falling off the bone tender, but for a competition that is considered overdone. You want to be able to take a bite of the ribs and have the bite come off easily but still have enough texture so the bite mark remains and the rest of the meat stays on the bone.

That's it for the ribs. A little bit of work and a whole lot of patience turns out some tasty, tasty eats.