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Mother's
Day 2006
How lucky am I to have a mom whose only real request for
Mother's Day is "one of those pork butts"?
It just so happens that my good friend Doug's parents
are in town this weekend as well, so it was a Mother's
Day bbq feast for two families. Two pork butts
cooked for right at 16 hours, three chickens
brined/cured then smoked for about six hours, and smoked
chorizo just for the hell of it.
The butts were @ 5lbs each and cooked separately
to be done at different times. I started Friday
night and finished up Sunday evening - cooked one butt,
then the chickens, then the other butt, then the
chorizo. The chorizo was for eggs later anyway and
there was plenty of food so it wasn't missed.
I tried curing chickens along with the
brine for my first time. Curing is basically
adding sodium nitrite to the brining solution - one
pound curing salt to five gallons water - and
letting it soak into the chickens; curing salt (6.25%
sodium nitrite) is available under the trade names
Instacure or Prague Powder. Cured poultry only
needs to be cooked to 160F rather than the recommended
180F. Kutas' meat curing book calls for cooking
cured poultry for @ 5 hours at 130F, then raise the temp
to 140F for four hours, then raise to 165F until a
thermometer inserted into the thigh reads 160F.
Someday I'll have a cooker that will hold low temps like
that for the 12-18 hours necessary to cook a bird that
way, but with my little offset I could only manage five
or six hours before they were done. The cure gave
the chicken that traditional smoked meat flavor and an
attractive pink color. Smoked
chorizo was an experiment. The stuff for
sale in the grocery stores around here is made for
frying with eggs, I guess, it ends up looking like
greasy chili when you fry it up and just looks like
little brown specks in the scrambled eggs. This
smoked chorizo will make breakfast tacos or migas fit
for a King. Happy Mother's Day!
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I'll
be building a new cooker from a 300
