I like to cook and make food.
Not that I call myself an expert by any means, but I do enjoy it and when other people eat it they seem to enjoy it too, which I think is a good thing.
Often as I cook, I have some base recipe that I start out following, but I don't usually finish following. More commonly, I find a couple different recipes, compare what is similar, and start to find what the rules are for that particular food. Then I combine them in some interesting way. My lady then tells me that the food was delicious and I need to write down what I did. I didn't measure most things, and I don't remember exactly what all I did, but in that moment I can at least make enough notes to re-do it, I think. But two weeks later, when I try to recall what I did, and I didn't write it down, its gone. So I make something up again.
So I decided to do something about it tonight. Silly time to make that decision, but I am waiting as my food cooks to do the next step, and it seemed like the right thing to do. Tonight's food: Pulled Pork.
I got a pellet smoker about a year ago. Probably the most expensive birthday present for me ever, but so delicious and convenient, and my lady who got it for me gets to enjoy the spoils as well. Before that I was using a "manual" vertical barrel smoker. My neighbor is a smoked food master and had too many smokers, so he gave me that one two years ago. Before that was attempting to use my charcoal grill as a smoker. It worked, but that barrel was so much better. I learned a lot from it. Then the pellet came along, and it is so much easier. Long smokes like brisket or pulled pork became feasible. I digress. I can write a post about just learning to smoke another time.
One of my favorite sites for recipes is Hey Grill Hey, and I started there today. Following roughly the plan for Bourbon Brown Sugar Pulled Pork as my baseline. This calls for a "mop sauce", which after broasting the meat a few times, you basically put it in a disposable pan in the smoker covered in foil. So, completely covered, in delicious juices, under slow heat. Sounds like a slow cooker! I'll just change to the other appliance at that point in the recipe.
Next problem: no bourbon. Actually, no alcohol at all. We don't drink, I don't even know what bourbon tastes like. A quick search for a substitute suggests sweet juices, like apple. So I went to make the mop sauce with apple juice instead. Easy enough, pork and apple are great together. I improvised on the sweet rub to mix in, and just added lots of delicious seasonings to the sauce. Garlic powder, brown sugar, onion powder, more brown sugar, paprika, crushed red, jalapeño powder, salt, black pepper, and molasses (so the brown sugar is darker).
It is sitting on the smoker as I write this, beginning its slow climb to 165 so I can transfer to the slow cooker. In a few minutes I will slather on that sauce and go to bed, to be woken in the too early hours of the morning for the transfer. And tomorrow, after we consume the foods, I will probably write a follow-up edit on here for the results.
Update: It arrived at 165 this morning at about 7:00 AM, which is nice so I didn't have to wake up too early for the next step. The downside is, it became one of those nights when you are expecting an alarm and you keep waking up to see if it is about to go off. That is not the recommended way to sleep. It is in the slow cooker with lots of extra sweet juices, and my house smells fantastic.
Update #2: I forgot to take a picture. Worse yet, I forgot to let the meat rest. Yeah, rookie mistake. My in-laws arrived and I got all excited for the food and just started shredding the meat with my Bear Paws and halfway through realized my mistake. I couldn't do a lot at that point, but I decided my best bet was to put the meat right back into the crock pot and serve it out of there, where all the juices were waiting. It worked out pretty well in the end.
It turns out that giving you a smoker was like giving the gift of meat to myself. Selfish, but I don't regret it.
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