Fish Loin d'Kevin

So, Mary caught me a little by surprise last Saturday night when she asked me if I might like to grill something. Honestly, I'm pretty much up for that most nights - the only challenge being what to grill, and should I go to the store to pick something out. 

Of course, here in Alexandria there is a freezer full of Kevin Bacon, the hog I butchered over the winter, to choose from as well, and we picked out the tenderloin for Saturday.  Mary had picked up some sweet corn and kale to pair it up with, so we had the makings of a nice spring dinner going.

Pork tenderloin, sauteed in bourbon and gently
rubbed with smoked chipotle.

Now, David calls this cut "the fish" - I don't know why, but left to my own imagination I have come up with three potential etymologies:

• 
  

-It's called the fish because it looks like one when it is first cut away from the carcass;
-It's called the fish because you have to fish around in the carcass to find it; or
-It's called the fish because it is tender enough and easy enough to separate out, simply by fishing it out with your fingers.

Actually, I owe that last one to Nathan Anda, chef at Red Apron Butcher, who Mary and I watched butcher half a hog once in downtown DC - he doesn't call it the fish though, he just demonstrated the technique.

In any case, as far as the approach to cooking Kevin's fish loin last Saturday, I decided I might saute it in some bourbon first.  This seems to lock in the natural juices so the tender meat doesn't dry out as much on the grill.  After that, I lightly rubbed it with smoked chipotle.

With more time to complete the cooking, I would normally use indirect heat to keep this cut tender and juicy, but instead I put the roast over direct charcoal for about seven minutes a side.  While it still had some pink inside, this was just a little past where I would typically like it, so I'll plan ahead next time so I can apply the preferred "low and slow" technique.

Finally, A Ham

After three years of butchering hogs with David and the crew, Mary and I finally had the chance to enjoy one of the hams.  In the past, we've lost them due to power fluctuations in Alexandria (surprisingly the power here can be flaky - we have a generator now to stabilize things), when they went through a freeze thaw cycle that left them freezer burned.

David offered some good advice for dealing with this, however, by cutting the ham (a market hog will provide hams in the 25-30 pound range, but the hogs he raises are bigger) into smaller parts and freezing them separately.  This year I had two thirds of the ham cured and took the other piece home - we smoked it BBQ style, as I mentioned in the previous post.

While "Kevin Bacon," as the hog Chris and I shared was known, was the centerpiece of the dinner, we had good company with some neighbors and with one of Mary's college classmates, and her mother.  Mary broke out the china and glassware that we received as wedding presents, and made a very festive spring table.

We used a "Joy of Cooking" process for preparing the ham - which weighed in at 12 pounds -  there are plenty of leftovers.  It was a simple minutes x pounds calculation, and came out perfect.  Both Chris and David helped us out on figuring out how to prepare it (thanks!).

Rounding out the dinner were a couple of family traditions from Mary's side, spring vegetables, a home brewed Dubbel, and a chocolate birthday cake (both Mary's and her classmate's birthdays are coming up).

Our neighbor is an accomplished baker.  She took one of Mary's handwritten family recipes and deciphered it - including some adjustments that had to be made for one entry: "add flour while needing" - and turned out a fabulous "babka."  This was a Polish soda bread with raisins and currents - totally a highlight of the meal.

Now that we know how to deal with the hams and not lose them, I'm looking forward to making a ham dinner an annual tradition.

Pork Diaries: Ham, Bacon, and Pork Chops

This week marks to occasions for a "pork diaries" post about this year's hog - the bacon and ham came back from the smokehouse, and Mary and I enjoyed our first meal of pork chops.

Last year David sent our hams and bacon away to a smokehouse and custom meat cutter over on the other side of Massanutten Mountain.  We were all really happy with the results, so we repeated this year.  The process usually takes a month or so, and we had a snow delay in there, but everything got back last weekend.

I have two hams, a hock, and then 10 packs of bacon on hand for the year.  We'll be enjoying that for a while.

Meanwhile, given the snow day Monday, I decided to put together a meal of pork chops and vegetables from the grill.  This year, I cut the chops, bone in, thicker than in the past.  They cook slower, but they also retain their juices better.

It was hard to cook in that cold the other night, but everything came out fine:  chops grilled and glazed with that chipotle-peach sauce I made recently, yellow squash sauteed with onions, and mixed blue and yellow potatoes with rosemary.  I can't wait to grill again.

Although I may wait until it warms up.

The Pork Diaries: First Ham 2014

The ham (and 1/4 rack of last year's ribs),
just getting started on the Big Unit.

By now, most readers who follow my butchering experiences know that the hog Chris and I shared this year had a name:  Kevin Bacon.  To clarify I should mention that I don't think the origin of the name is the movie star (I'm a fan, by the way) - I think they took the first name from the Disney Pixar film Up!, where it was the momma bird's name, and the second name, of course, came from the breakfast meat.  This weekend, I grilled a first roast from Kevin - actually part of one of the hams.

The first year we did the butchering, I had the entire ham cured.  After it came back from the smokehouse, I broke it down into a couple of large chunks - the hams we get range from 25 to 35 pounds, and it's just Mary and me, so we'll still have leftovers.  However, power in Alexandria being what it is, I lost two of the three ham cuts I'd frozen, and I swore I'd manage the meat differently going forward.

For sauce, I used Jared's competition recipe
to start, but substituted chipotle in the mix
for a portion of the paprika.

I've settled into a routine where I cut the ham into fourths on the band saw in the butchering shed.  I send two off for curing, and take two home to freeze.  This was one of the ones I'd frozen - we're waiting for the hams and bacon to come back from the smokehouse, maybe next weekend.

My plan was to roast the ham on the Big Unit in Alexandria, planning about a 4 hour cooking time at between 275 and 300 degrees.  I had to transfer from the charcoal side to the gas side in order to recharge the coals, so cooking time stretched out to 4.5 hours.  But it finished really well, and I did get some hickory smoke flavor worked into the meat.

To kick it up a notch, I decided to use the competition recipe for sauce that Jared shared with me.  This is a top secret recipe that I cannot reprint due to a promise to him.  But I will note that I substituted chipotle seasoning for a portion of the paprika - adding a little heat - and used the peach preserves at quantities specified.  This is good stuff, if I say so myself.

The finished meal, with chard and yams.

We paired the ham roast with yams and some chard.  Although we didn't finally sit down to eat until 8:30 on a Saturday night, you're looking at one satisfied barbeque chef right here.  Plus, we've got leftovers; I don't usually eat them, but I am looking forward to a couple of meals from this one.

So here's to the first roast off of this year's pig, Kevin Bacon.  Can't wait for the rest of those cuts - ribs, chops, and shoulder...later this summer.

And still to come:  BACON!

The Pork Diaries - the Breakfast Sausage

Checking in with Chris, who shares the pig with me every year, he tells me they've already made it through most of the take - there's only Iowa-style pork chops and ground pork left.

Meanwhile, I did a check of our freezer and we're still holding our own.  We still have bacon, a few packs of brats, breakfast sausage, a rack of ribs (I've been lucky and found them on sale at Food Lion a couple of times, so haven't prepared the ones from this year's hog), and some roasts.  Still have a couple of the big ham steaks I got from cutting down the ham the way I did this year.

Mary thought it would be good to break out the sausage a couple of weekends ago, and she did, pairing it with some fresh eggs from Public House Produce and some fresh bread from Main Street Bakery - both in Luray.

I think there's enough pork in there to get us through the winter.

The Pork Diaries: Brats

When Mary isn't able to join me for weekends at Hawksbill Cabin, I usually head over to Luray for dinner - a take out from Anthony's, a burger at Artisans, or those Oysters Rockefeller that I love so much at the Speakeasy.  With my ankle injury tying me down, I decided to stay in and grill on the brick terrace.

I found a small pack of brats in the freezer - from the pig Pork Chop, Jr. and this year's butchering outing. I grilled them up with some summer squash and a red pepper on the side.  I got a nice spicy brown mustard for them - tasty!

Incidentally, here's a post about making the brats.  It includes a little video of me using the sausage stuffer...

http://hawksbillcabin.blogspot.com/2013/02/everything-but-oink.html

Another Quiche - from the Pork Diaries

Smoking the ham on the grill was a success - I still have a few things to perfect about cooking that way, but we had a nice dinner.  And typical of hams, we had plenty of leftovers, so I made a quiche on Sunday.

This time, I just pulled together some diced onion, a bit of cheddar, and the ham, basically whatever we had in the fridge.  I used the Betty Crocker recipe that I always do, adding an extra egg, and doing the two-step baking process (15 minutes at 425, and then 30 minutes at 300, if I remember correctly).

I sprinkled a little paprika on top along with some chives for color and presentation.  I was good, and we had it for dinner Sunday, lunch on Monday.

Mary has found another recipe that uses leftover ham - a ham salad.  She mixes in some vegetables, diced egg, and dressing.  It's kind of old-timey, but you can eat it plain or on a sammich.

More adventures with pork follow.

The Pork Diaries: First Ham

The hams we get off of the pigs at Public House Produce are so big that it is a challenge to feast on them in one sitting.  And so we lost quite a bit of ours last year in the freezer, due to freezer burn after a couple of power outages (power in Alexandria, four miles from the White House, can be surprisingly flaky).

This year I decided not to send the ham out for curing and used the band saw in the butchering shed to cut it into six pieces.  On Saturday, I cooked the first piece on the backyard smoker.

I figured I could cook it more or less as I would the shoulder roasts I’ve been doing, with a rub and then indirect heat for a couple of hours.  It worked out, we had some tasty ham – there is absolutely no similarity to pulled pork in this outcome despite my using the same cooking method.

I used a bit of cayenne in this rub, just enough for a pleasant bite.  The Florida corn is in (there's no comparison to what I get during the summer out in Page County though), so I paired the ham with it and some green beans.

Now my thinking is to do the same thing with the ham next year, except send out half of it in these smaller cuts for curing and smoking.  I’ll keep the other half in these small ham roasts.

I’ve still got quite a few of these to cook though – for now!

The Pork Diaries: The New Bacon

A St. Patrick's Day breakfast - with the new bacon.

Two weeks ago, I got a note from David that the pork products we'd sent off to be smoke cured were ready to be picked up.  This year we worked with a new place on US 11 north of Edinburg - Byler's Custom Cutting.  So with the news I gave Chris a call and we arranged to meet up for a drive to the farm to pick up the ham he'd sent off, our hog's jowl, and the bacon.

I decided not to have my ham done this year and instead had cut it into roasts when we were working in the butchering shed.  That's because I'd lost about 2/3 of last year's ham during the power losses - when I went to get a portion of it to cook last summer, it was all freezer burned.

We haven't settled on what we're going to do with the jowl meat - it was cut in half and frozen, so we need to split it up.  I guess I could look up a recipe for preparing it into something good.  At first, I thought we might go ahead and slice it into bacon too  - I've bought packages of this before at Whole Paychecks.

The real treat of the weekend was a big breakfast Mary and I had on Sunday morning, St. Patrick's Day.  In honor of the holiday we decided to have an Irish country breakfast like you might get at Murphy's in Old Town Alexandria - eggs and bacon, and cottage fries.  We'd also picked up a loaf of soda bread from the Main Street Bakery in Luray to go with it, and Mary sauteed some leftover kale in the bacon pan, so we added that too.

Byler's had smoked the bacon to perfection, of course, but the big plus was how the slices had been thickly cut.  As they sputtered and crinkled, they generally held together in nice long ribbons - just great.

And to think that we have about 7 pounds of it to carry us through the rest of the year.  Looking forward to many more breakfasts - and maybe some nice BLTs once the tomatoes start to come in!

Day Trip to @redapronbutcher in DC (Pork Diaries)

With work deadlines upon me, we decided not to head out to the Hawksbill Cabin last weekend.  We did carve out some time for a little urban adventure Saturday, however, and went into town to visit the Red Apron Butcher at Union Market in DC.  Mary and I were introduced to chef Nathan Anda’s work there when we enjoyed a butchering demonstration and charcuterie tasting at a Living Social event last month. 

(post link: http://hawksbillcabin.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-pork-diaries-another-february.html)

We had a great visit to the butcher – we chose the Porkstrami and Italian Beef sandwiches.  I saw a couple of folks having the meatball sandwich that looked like a winner too.  And of course, there was the display case with the sausages and other delicacies. 

What I didn’t expect was how much attention was given to the beers on tap at the Red Apron – there were at least 8 to choose from.  I took the Avery IPA, which was tasty – and I saw a number of folks getting something that was poured in a pint style glass.  I didn’t get a chance to ask about it, but they were enjoying it as much as I did mine!

The butcher shop is located in the Union Market – a restored market in DC up in the area of Galludet University.  Traditionally there had been a farmers market in this location, and the building that houses the current establishment dates to 1931.  In 1962, the city banned outdoor sales of meat and other farm products, which killed off the operation – but lately, these kinds of establishments have been making a comeback all over the country. 

Union Market in particular reminded me not only of nearby Eastern Market on Capitol Hill, but also of the Flower Market area in San Francisco, and the “Rynok” Market I visited in 1995 in Kiev.  While we were in the vicinity, we also visited a warehouse store and picked up some supplies I can use for next year’s hog butchering – some knives and a couple of food grade plastic storage trays.  Those are things we always run short of in the heat of the moment.

All in all, a good day trip to DC.  Make a point of getting out to check in at the Red Apron Butcher and Union Market.

Links:

http://www.redapronbutchery.com/

http://unionmarketdc.com/themarket/

The Pork Diaries: A Roast and A Quiche

We've got new pork.  It's time to get cooking.

When Chris and I did the hog this year, one of our decisions was to use a lot of the shoulder meat to make sausage.  As a result, there aren't many shoulder roasts - also called butt roasts - in the freezer.  But I had been wanted to try slow roasting one after marinading it in Goya's Mojo sauce - so I dug around and found a little blade roast to cook.

We let it marinade over night in the sauce, then I let it cook on the grill, offset over charcoal, at between 250 and 300 for a couple of hours.  That's a tasty sauce - I'm going to use it again.

I thought we might use some of the breakfast sausage over the weekend, but we were too busy to cook in the mornings.  So yesterday evening I used it in some quiches.

These are made with the farmhouse breakfast sausage from the butchering episode, so kale that I sauteed in the sausage fat and some beer, a mixture of jack and cheddar cheese, and a teaspoon of dehydrated onions in each.  I follow a Betty Crocker recipe for the quiche and we use frozen pie crusts.

The recipe calls for five eggs each - and guess what?  I had a new dozen from Public House Produce.  I put them to good use - we have quiche for days!

The Pork Diaries: Another February Butchering Event

Chef Nathan Anda of Red Apron Butcher demonstrates butchering.

A few weeks back, one of my work colleagues sent along an email from DC’s Living Social – the event they were promoting featured a butchering demonstration, charcuterie tasting, and beer pairing.  Who am I to say no to such an ingeniously cobbled together event?  I was like a fly attracted to a blue light – especially since this would be only a week after David, Chris and I had completed our own hog butchering event with friends out in Luray.

So last Monday, Mary and I went downtown to F Street NW – for a moment, I relived so many 9:30 Club concerts since we were on  the same block that the club used to be – and joined a warm crowd of 60 or so folks for the show.  

When I first saw the invitation and considered the butchering part of it, I thought, “Well, perhaps the butcher will take a loin and show how to cut pork chops or something;” needless to say, when we got there and there was a half carcass laying out on the stainless steel table, I knew we were in for more than that – and then the chef proceeded to saw off the head.

The chef – Nathan Anda – is a man on a mission, offering charcuterie and salami and specially prepared sandwiches made with them.  He described how he’d developed a passion for butchering over the years, and now travels to gourmet destinations like Napa and Italy to learn about new ways to cut and prepare meat for consumption.  These days, he butchers as many as 30 hogs a week, all raised at an “Animal Welfare” approved farm in North Carolina.

He runs a shop out of farmers markets called Red Apron Butchery (link:  http://www.redapronbutchery.com) but will soon open three stores that you can read about at the website. 

The charcuterie tasting included salami, bologna, mortadella, finocchio, and
and a pleasant surprise, the bourbon fig rillette.

For the charcuterie, we were offered Nate’s version of Bologna, Mortadella, Finocchio, Salami Cotta, and a Bourbon Fig Rillette.  At first, I thought the rillette was scrapple, but I’ve learned that there is a major difference – the rillette contains no corn meal or any other cereal product.  The combination of pork, lard, bourbon, and fig was quite an innovation, and one that should inspire all would-be pork enthusiasts.

I don’t know what to make of the beer pairings – we liked one of them very much, a smokey pilsener-styled beer, but there was a second that was more like a barley wine, a bit sweet for my taste.  Although the event flyer described an Eggenberg Pilsner and Schlera Marzen, I’d hesitate to say that’s what was offered. 

Overall, even though the beer pairing was something of a let down, the event was a success.  Mary and I had a great time, and I plan to follow Nate’s offerings at the Red Apron Butcher.

In part because of this event, I’m very much looking forward to cooking up some of the pork I brought back from this year’s pig, now that I think of it.

The Pork Diaries: Scrapple

That's the scrapple - front and center!

Last year, it was at least a week before Mary and I were able to enjoy some of the fresh pork from my butchering adventure.  This year, the delay was less than 24 hours - for me at least, since Mary is still waiting - and the first thing I tried was the one furthest from my mind!

David’s family was out of town and we decided that we’d go and enjoy a beer at the Mimslyn Inn on Saturday night.  There was a good scene there as always, this time with Acoustic Thunder playing, and with a mix of out-of-towners and locals hanging around the bar and at the tables.  One of the out-of-towners good-naturedly yelled “Free Bird” at the end of each song during the second set…I have to admit that I don’t remember if that request was honored.

Soon enough it was closing time, and David started telling me about the new “smoke free environment” over at Uncle Buck's.   I was surprised at the thriving scene happening in the lounge there – very surprised, and I’ll leave it at that.

It was getting late, and David suggested maybe some breakfast when we got to his place and I dropped him off.  That sounded good, and next thing I knew, he’d broken out some farm-fresh eggs and some (even fresher) scrapple from the butchering that we’d just completed that morning!

The scrapple maestro.

I made note last year of the authoritative Wikipedia article about scrapple, which is also called pon haus by the Pennsylvania Dutch (or simply “pudding” in our butchering shed).  You can find that here:   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrapple.  However, the unfortunate redundant use of terms like hog offal and mush in that article are not likely to win many new fans.

Getting back to the fine breakfast David was whipping together, he fried the scrapple up in the traditional style, getting it crisp around the edges.  I dressed mine up with some sweet pepper jelly (thanks again, by the way, for sharing a jar of that!).  It was pretty good…still not the first pork product I’ll reach for in the freezer, but I can enjoy it once in a while.

And that’s important to remember.  Because if you don’t have scrapple, “What the hell is the point of butchering a hog?”

The Pork Diaries: Found a Half Rack

Here are the finished slow cooked ribs -
with kale on the side.

With butchering bearing down on me - we're set to work the new batch of hogs next weekend - Mary and I have panicked about how full the freezer is.  By surprise, I found a forgotten half rack of ribs in there over the weekend and I came up with a quick recipe to take care of them.

Since we’ve had snow flurries off and on for the whole weekend, I didn’t feel like getting out to fire up the big unit to smoke a half rack. Instead, I decided to try putting them in the crock pot – slow cooking them – and looked up a few random recipes on the web.

More or less, the recipes went as follows – remember, this is for a half rack! –

The ribs at the start of slow cooking in the crock pot.

Cut the ribs individually.  Rub them with your favorite spice mix.  In my case, I used the last of a mix a friend gave me for Christmas, adding a little brown sugar, cumin, paprika, powdered mustard and chili powder.  On a baking sheet, put them in a 400 degree oven for 15 minutes.

Here they are, just out of the oven, before
going in to the crock pot.  (I used Sam Adams
for the half cup of beer>)

Mix up a basting sauce of your favorite BBQ sauce and ½ cup of beer.  I added a tablespoon of honey to this, playing fast and loose.  Put the sauce in the slow cooker, and put the ribs in there too when they come out of the oven.  Make sure they are covered with sauce. 

Cook them on low until the meat is falling off of the bone, which could be up to six hours, turning them halfway through.  These ribs came from the pig Pork Chop and were quite large, so I expected to go the distance. 

As I am writing this, they’re looking good – and the whole house smells great.  I can’t wait to try them!

Pork Diaries: Last of the Pulled Pork (2012 version)

We’re getting close to butchering day on the new bunch of hogs, so Mary and I did a quick freezer inventory to start make room for all the port that’s going to be rolling in here in a couple of weeks.  To my surprise, there was still a four-pound blade roast left from last year, along with a few miscellaneous other cuts.  So on Inauguration Day last week I made some pulled pork.

My approach to this isn’t always formal, but for the most part I get consistent results.  I’m going to work a bit more on it though – I would like to get to the point that it comes out like what my team produced at the Smokin’ on the Tracks contest last September 

(link here:  http://hawksbillcabin.blogspot.com/2012/10/whats-cookin-at-smokin-on-track.html).  That was as moist and tender as I’ve ever made, and I would like for it to come out that way every time.

As far as last Monday’s grilling effort goes, for the rub I used three tablespoons of a mix that a friend gave me at Christmas, mixing in a tablespoon of light brown sugar and just a touch of cayenne.  I slathered that on and let it sit a half hour while I fired up the grill – it was ready shortly with the temperature topping out at around 325 degrees.

I put the roast in and let it cook for an hour or so, periodically opening the grill so that I could recharge the hickory chips.  Then I just let it cook on its own for another half hour, taking a temperature reading at that point.

I recharged the coals during this roast once, and I have a feeling that might be where I had some trouble.  The pork tasted fine, but it was a little more dried out than we like it; now that I think about it that might have been due to the large blade bone in there too. 

I’ll pay some more attention to that next time, but we still made a fine dinner out of it – putting it together with some kale and sweet potatoes.  I also had some home brews to go with that.  

The Last Brats (Pork Diaries)

Well, after all that grilling the last few weeks, I decided that we needed a quick dinner last Sunday night.  I dug into the freezer from some bratwursts - finding that I was going to cook the last pack of them from last January's pig.

Mary had bought some sweet corn at the Alexandria   farmers market - some Maryland variety, unfortunately, and no where as tasty as the Page County Grown stuff we've been used to.

There are still a few pork chops left, two roasts, and a bunch of the ham.  But that's not much variety.  We'll see how it goes.

Ribs Again - the Pork Diaries

Mary's plate - ribs, sweet corn, and summer vegetables.

Saturday was a long day of cooking for me.  I brewed a small batch of "Brussels Black" - a dark Belgian ale that is fermenting away in the basement as I write this, and then I set out to do a practice run on some ribs. Those were cooked over charcoal with hickory smoke on the big unit out in the back of the Alexandria house.

My plan was to work a bit on the rub recipe, and I decided to go with a Kansas City style that features brown sugar and cayenne.  If you Google this type of thing you'll find that some ink is given to the difference between the K.C. and Memphis styles.  They saw K.C. style uses a sauce in addition to the rub, while Memphis style doesn't...neither Mary nor I found that any sauce was needed on these when all was said and done.

As you can see I started with a very meaty half rack.

The recipe I was using called for gobs of spices, and I figured that since I was using a half rack, I should reduce the recipe.  I cut it in half, and then saw that two spices I like were missing, and I added them back in - powdered mustard and cumin.  So that's where I am coming from...but I may leave the cumin out if I'm ever competing with this recipe.

The big unit, as the hickory smoke started.

Once the prep was done and the half rack rubbed, I went out to start up the big unit.  It wasn't long before those coals were going.  I put the meat on - indirect, since I have a lot of real estate in there, and after a little time to sear started adding hickory.

I had some other prep to get back to - I had to shuck some sweet corn, cut up vegetables, and things like that.  I also wanted to make some ice cream for dessert - I bought some fresh raspberries for this to combine with some dark chocolate chips I had stored in the fridge.

Boogs is bored.

After all of that, Tessie and I went out onto the deck while the ribs cooked.  As usual, she was a little bored with the whole thing, but she liked being outside with me.

I enjoyed a stogie while things were under way, and I'll admit to having a nice Fat Tire IPA for accompaniment.

Late summer dinner of ribs and grilled vegetables.

The upshot of all this is the ribs, which were done in about 2.5 hours or so.  I took them a little farther than I did in the last batch I made a few months ago, so they were done well enough that they did literally fall off of the bone.

There's a photo below of the platter.  Usually we have a little left from a half rack - we did this time too.  But they were gone by lunchtime Sunday.

And neither of us used any sauce on the leftovers.

The Pork Diaries: Pig Roast 2

During the farm tour last weekend, the first stop was at Khimaira Farm.  While I am still gathering the material for some posts on the tour, I thought I might post on the coincidence of running into the caterers for that night's event at Khimaira.

Just as the tour caravan was preparing to leave the farm, the sound of the caterers firing up their cooker filled the air.  Not long after, there was a distinctive smell of oak smoke.  As we turned the corner from the wedding area back to the parking area, well, there they were, setting up a pig roast.

My friend John and I walked over to chat them up - John cooked the roast I posted on the other day.

They had a 100+ pound piglet that had been raised organically over in the other part of the Valley.  They told us that the grilling apparatus they were using would get up to 375 degrees or so at the top of the cylinder, but would stay around 225 to 250 down at the level where the pig would rest.  The roasting time would range from 8 to 10 hours overall.

Here are a couple of photos of this visit - we left just as they put the pig in the grill.

The Pork Diaries: Whole Pig Roast

A few weeks back some friends of ours out in Page County invited us to a summer party to celebrate a birthday.  It was a beautiful setting - I could go on and on about how wonderful the scenery in Page County is, don't you know - we had a great time with friends that evening.

And there was another highlight - they were working a whole pig roast for dinner.  It was supplemented with some fine fresh produce from the farmers market that morning, and wine from our favorite local vineyard Wisteria.

I took a few minutes to get an overview of how this set up worked.

The pig came from a local farm that raises them organically.  It was a youngster, only at 50 pounds or so.  My friend has installed a BBQ pit in his back yard, which you can see in the first photo above.

The pig turned on a spit over those coals for between four and six hours.  It was done to perfection, and then we pulled it off of the heat.

We moved it off to a nearby table to take it off the spit and to begin carving up the meat.  First step was to remove the skin, which comes off easily after roasting at these temperatures.  Racks were installed over the pit, and the skin roasted again - to become cracklings.

Meanwhile, the "menfolk" all jumped in to strip down the carcass.  I had a little flashback here to my experience butchering last winter (click on the label butchering at the end of this post).  But I jumped right in too and started carving down the beast.

Among the last photos here are one of some of the meat that came off of this roast, and what was left of the carcass after we got through with it.

It was done perfectly, as you can only get on a pig roasted this way. Someday I'll give this a try myself!

The Pork Diaries: The Half Rack

It was with much trepidation last weekend that I reached into the freezer and pulled out my first half rack of ribs.  There is so much lore about cooking this particular cut of meat - so many approaches to the task and so many recipes - that I was very worried about my effort living up to all the hype.

Adding to the pressure is our local BBQ place, Rocklands, where Mary and I have been enjoying meals of ribs for more than 15 years.  As a matter of fact, when I decided I would use a sauce on the ribs, theirs is the one I chose.

In the end, just as with the pulled pork effort, there really wasn't much that could go wrong.  If you're careful about the heat and you live by the "low and slow" rule - they'll probably come out fine.

After the ribs were thawed, there were two key prep steps that I took.  The first was to prepare the ribs by cutting the skirt off (we cooked this on the grill with simple seasonings and had it a couple of days later, after the ribs were gone), and stripping off the shiny membrane that covers the "inside" of the rack.  The second step was putting together a rub for the meat, which I did based on what we have in the spice rack and on some refinement to what we had enjoyed on the pulled pork.  I let the meat sit with the rub on it for three hours this time - I like to think that added to the flavor.

Next I stoked the Big Unit.  I have been using hickory exclusively for smoking the meats out there, and this was no exception.  At first, the heat in the Big Unit gets up to around 300 degrees, but since I am using indirect heat I figure this is just searing whatever cut I am cooking that day.  I start with the smoke immediately and continue that for the first hour to hour and a half as the heat adjusts downward to around 225.  So far that approach has paid off with a fine red layer that permeates the meat when it is finally done.

I cooked the ribs for about 2.5 hours,  They weren't at a "fall off the bone" state, which was fine by me, but they were definitely done, and besides, my charcoal had burned out.  I haven't quite mastered the charcoal recharging process - I'll have to keep practicing that.

With about 15 minutes to go, I slathered on the sauce and moved the half rack over to the gas side.  There I lit the left and right burners, turning them to medium, and kept the center burner off.  The ribs rested there between the two heated burners while they soaked in the Rocklands sauce.

In the end, Mary and I were very happy with the results of this recipe.  We paired them with another go at the curried summer squash soup I had made before and some fresh cucumbers, all from the truck patch. (Tomatoes, peppers and eggplants are all coming soon, by the way, but not ready yet.)

There is a photo above of the final product.  They were - tasty.  I can't wait to try this one again.

FYI, here's a link to Rocklands, our local BBQ place in Alexandria:  http://www.rocklands.com/