Barbeque

Yesterday we had a fabulous barbeque picnic in the park. A real barbeque, not a cookout. (For those not from the south, that means slow cooked, smoked pulled pork.) The weather was supposed to be partly sunny and 23°C (73°F), but ended up with no clouds to be seen and feeling like about 29°C (84°F). There were 10 of us there and people brought side dishes and/or desserts, so we had tons of food!

The pork took about 40 hours to fix from start to finish. I bought 2 pork butt roasts for a total of 3.2 kg. Then I rubbed them down with a flavorful dry rub and let that chill in the fridge for 24 hours. (Cracking peppercorns with a hammer is tons of fun.) Next they each went into their own Crockpot for 11 hours, each with 1/4 of the mop recipe. They were broken into chunks and leanified, then went into the chiminea over charcoal and hickory chips to smoke for 30 min. Finally, I forked the meat to shred it up for premium sandwich stacking. I think the pork ended up with more kick than it should have, so maybe next time I'll leave out the cayenne pepper.

I also made up the authentic vinegar & mustard based barbeque sauce from central SC. The sauce had to sit for 2 days in order to reach the right flavor of not too much vinegar or mustard. Note that a "normal" barbeque sauce would just ruin the sandwich. You need the vinegar to enhance the flavor of the pork.

And since I must always bring a dessert, I ended the meal with some Ohio buckeyes (alter the recipe to only use 3 cups of powdered sugar and enough chocolate to make them actually look like real buckeyes, unlike that horrible picture with the recipe). That was, of course, after Brad's deep fried twinkies, which was after Stephanie's drug-test-failing poppyseed roll.

Thanks to Meghann, photos can be found here.