As you can see from the drip pan the shoulder was really fatty.

Look at that fat cap under the skin.  Once rested for thirty minutes it pulled apart beautifully and we had it on fresh buns with Dijon mustard and pickled red onions.  Stunning: juicy, tender, flavourful.

I had a de-boned whole pork shoulder in the freezer that was in two pieces.  After a good defrosting I applied a basic dry rub: equal parts brown sugar, kosher salt, black pepper and paprika.  Left the pork in the refrigerator for a day and then smoked it on my Big Green Egg.  I used the plate setter and kept the Big Green Egg at 200F for fourteen hours.  After about four hours I added additional charcoal but it went the whole night without budging; I was impressed.  As well I used four chunks of apple wood at the beginning of the smoking and that was more than enough.

I had a mop ready but every time I checked the pork was moist and dripping juice; the final product was extremely juicy and succulent.  I credit this to the fatty shoulder but mostly to the Big Green Egg.  Once off the grill I wrapped it in tinfoil, popped it into cooler and served it sliced six hours later.  It went so fast I didn’t have time for a slicing photo but this turned out so well smoked pork shoulder will become a regular on my table.

]]> http://food.ebabble.net/slow-roasted-pork-shoulder/feed 0 http://food.ebabble.net/eye-of-round-pastrami http://food.ebabble.net/eye-of-round-pastrami#comments Tue, 23 Mar 2010 23:04:18 +0000 Scott VanderPloeg http://www.ebabble.net/?p=1144 I love pastrami, corned beef and smoked meat.  I’ve tracked them down in New York and Montreal to savor at every deli.  I’ve made corned beef and pastrami based on Michael Ruhlman’s recipes in Charcuterie and enjoyed them thoroughly but continue to be troubled by the cost of raw ingredients.  Brisket was used because it’s a very tough cut and nobody wanted it so it was cheap; cured, cooked and steamed it became tender when sliced thin.  Unfortunately I can’t find it for less than $6 a pound which puts it past chuck and round.  I made corned beef last year with outside round and it turned out a bit dry: not enough fat to keep it moist.  I’d love to use short ribs but they’re almost the same price as rib eye.

Eye of round in Southern Ontario goes on sale for $2 a pound fairly regularly so I always have a few whole pieces in the freezer: I always buy the biggest cuts I can so the decision of what size and how to use it can be made by me at home when I’m breaking it down.  Anyway this cut has a nice layer of fat on the outside and isn’t too thick so it seemed the perfect vehicle for my smoked meat appetite.  I wanted a simple recipe to see if the meat could shine so I surfed around and came up with this.  It turned out really well; simplicity that pushed the pastrami flavour home.  I would have preferred it a little fattier as it seemed slightly dry; that may have been from leaving it in the dry cure for two weeks instead of the week I was shooting for.

Dry Cured Pastrami

• 7 Pound Eye Of Round
• 1/2 cup Kosher salt
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/4 cup black peppercorns, cracked
• 1/4 cup coriander seeds, cracked
• 2 tbsp juniper berries
• 6 garlic cloves, minced
• 2 tsp pink salt

Pre-smoke rub

• 1/4 cup black peppercorns, cracked
• 1/4 cup coriander seeds, cracked

Mix the dry rub and apply it to the meat.  Put the meat in a container (I used a gallon Zip Lock bag) and put it in the refrigerator for seven to ten days, turning it over every other day until the meat is firm.  Take the meat out and give it a good rinse in cold water to remove any of the cure.  Put the meat on a rack uncovered in the refrigerator for a day to let it dry out a bit; this will aid it during the smoking process.  Roll the meat in the pre-smoke rub, then smoke the meat at 200F until it reaches an internal temperature of 150F.  Put it in the refrigerator for another day, then steam it until it reaches an internal temperature of 165F.  I put it in a pot with an inch of water and put the meat on a metal steamer insert; on the stove at medium low so there was steam but not vigorous boiling.  Remove, slice thin and groan every so slightly as you relish every bite.

The front roast is my smoked slow roasted sirloin and in the rear is the cured and smoked bacon sirloin.  The sirloin is a big jagged as it had a bone removed so it’s best prepared by tying it together with butchers twine every 1.5″ or so as you can see in the above picture.  It holds it’s shape nicely for prep and once cooked and rested the twine can be cut off.

I like to prepare the sirloin roast by tying it and then covering it in a dry rub: I’m partial to Steven Raichlen’s all purpose rub from his book How To Grill but use whatever you like.  Once it’s sat for at least twenty four hours in the dry rub it’s ready for the barbeque.  I like to hot smoke it at 250 degrees F until it reaches an internal temperature of 160 degrees F.

As you can see it had a nice smoke ring and a wonderful fat cap that kept this roast moist and succulent.  Man oh man was that good eats.  Pork sirloin is a wonderfully versatile cut that can be had inexpensively.

Basically it’s slightly smaller in diameter than the normal rack and has the two folding legs.  It works as advertised, allowing me to fit a full fourty sausages on my large Big Green Egg at home time for smoking.

Two problems: the folding legs are a pain to work with once the rack is hot and you have stuff on it, and the way they swing out makes placement on the main grill difficult.  Having fixed legs on the edge would solve both issues.

For extending your smoking surface it gets the job done.

Or you can flip it the other way and use it as a baking stone for bread or pizza.

It’s made a big difference in the smoking I’ve done.  Well worth the additional investment.  Since I’ve only used it for indirect cooking the bottom is now charcoal black: not sure what effect that will have when I eventually get around to baking.

Our freezer was getting overcrowded with pork so I decided to take out sixteen pounds and make some sausage over the weekend.  My family seems to like smoked sausage the best so I made Hunters sausage (forgot the German name, sorry).  It’s a pork sausage with coriander and mustard seeds, dry milk powder and a little garlic.  I followed the recipe in Charcuterie and everything worked well.  The batch was too large to mix in my stand mixer so I did it manually and it was tough going.

The sausages above have grill marks because I smoke them in my Big Green Egg with the large plate setter; more on that next week.  I keep the temperature at 180 degrees and the sausages are smoked after about two hours; that pile above was done in two batches.  Unfortunately the edges of the grill get hot enough to leave grill marks, but they’re not for commercial consumption anyway.

I’m trying to perfect my sausage stuffing skills but they seem to come up lacking: I get too many air pockets and when I twist them there is breakage.  Both issues will be ironed out with practice.

With the Weber Smokey Mountain I can maintain smoke indefinitely and keep the bacon’s internal temperature to around 100 degrees.  I smoked this batch with sugar maple charcoal and maple chunks for six hours.

The texture of the finished product was a lot softer.  The skin was a real pain to remove since the fat didn’t heat up: normally with hot smoked bacon I can peel the skin off quickly and easily.  I save it for baked beans or wrapping a porchetta.

Frying it up I found it to be chewy; definitely something wrong.  I think it needs more heat, say 110 degrees internal.  Was smoking some pork loins the next week and hot smoked this bacon to get a product I was happy with.

Mushroom Stuffing

• 1 loaf bread
• 2 tbs fresh savory, finely chopped
• 2 tbs fresh marjoram, finely chopped
• 2 tbs fresh sage, finely chopped
• 2 tbs fresh thyme, finely chopped
• 1/4 cup fresh flat leaf parsley, finely chopped
• 12 tbs salted butter
• 2 cups mushrooms, sliced
• 1 large onion, finely diced
• 4 stalks celery, finely diced
• 2 cups turkey or chicken stock
• 3 eggs, beaten
• 2 tsp freshly cracked pepper

Use whatever type of bread you’d like: I used a white sandwich loaf.  Slice the loaf of bread into 1/2 to 3/4 inch slices and leave out to dry for two days or put in a 200 degree F oven for 30-40 minutes.  Once dry cut into 1 inch cubes: this should yield about twelve cups of dried cubes.

Heat a skillet on medium and add 8 tbs butter until it melts.  Then add the celery and onion, cooking until softened, about 8 minutes.  Add the sliced mushrooms and cook until softened, about 4 minutes.

Mix the bread cubes, vegetables and herbs in a large bowl.  Add the stock, eggs and pepper and mix throughly.  Pour mixture into a buttered casserole dish and dot the top with the remaining butter.  Cover with buttered aluminum foil.

Bake for 30 minutes at 375 degrees F and then remove the aluminum foil and continue to bake until the top gets nicely toasted and crunchy, 30-45 minutes.

Which leads to patty formation and what actually works.  I’ve tried leaving the meat loose and barely forming the patty but that leads to the burger being so loose when you eat it there’s no cohesive mouth feel.  That doesn’t mean go the other way and abuse the meat like you were kneeding dough.  Get your meat, form it into a patty that doesn’t crumble and give it the thumb indent.  With enough fat in the meat and a little pressure the patty will stay together nicely.

I use a gas grill for burgers: for some reason burgers on the Big Green Egg seem dry to me.  Medium to high heat, adding salt and pepper to the top side and then again after the flip.  Don’t press on your meat or all the juices run out: Just like steak a hamburger should be left alone to cook.

Cooking burgers inside requires a cast iron pan, medium high heat and no oil.  Get that pan hot so that a little smoke starts and then get your burgers in there.  Don’t crowd the pan or the sizzling juices will get all over and you won’t get a nice crust on the burger.  I have a Le Creuset 9″ cast iron skillet I picked up at one of their outlet stores: two hamburger patties go in at a time, and once they’re done I put them on a wire rack to cool.  Catching a theme here?  Steaks and hamburgers should be cooked the same way since we want the same results: a nice crust and a juicy center.

I’m going against the burger aficionados here but I like my burgers medium well.  I just can’t each a medium rare burger: I want the crunch of the crust and a good feel from the beef inside and medium rare seems too soft for me.

I just had a big party for my grandmother’s 80th birthday on the weekend and pulled out my Weber Smokey Mountain Cooker. I bought it about four years ago but didn’t know anything about using it so it sat in my garage, brand new and ready to go. After getting the Egg and using it for grilling and then for smoking I finally knew what to do with the Smokey Mountain. Reading around the web pointed me to using charcoal briquettes for it, and I just happened to have a bag of Kingsford in the garage with my camping gear (another errant purchase waiting to be used).

I used the low and slow method for the charcoal: get a nice pile of unlit charcoal in the base and add some lit charcoal to it. With four bone-in pork shoulders filling the the Smokey Mountain I was able to get twelve hours of cooking at 225 degrees Fahrenheit with the one load of briquettes, something I haven’t attained with lump charcoal. I was making pulled pork for about 100 people so I needed to get it done in one shot. I also did a brined fresh ham on the Egg that was just stunning. In all the furor I didn’t get any pictures!

What really turned me off was the toxic gasoline like odour coming from the briquettes: it was just nasty. Since it was my first time using briquettes it may be common, but it’s night and day with the smell of lump charcoal.  I’m sure this is from having lit and unlit briquettes together, and each time a briquette lit the smell came out.  Kingsford gets raving reviews from cooks Illustrated and is well respected in the charcoal briquette world, but all briquettes are manufactured to get an even heat and long burn.  I know I won’t be able to get twelve hours out of it, but this experience makes me stick with all natural lump charcoal.