I love to eat a nice big chunk of juicy animal. It makes me happy. So several months ago my dad and I cooked up, so to speak, the idea of having a nice big barbeque for my family reunion this year. A father-son bonding experience, if you will, doing what men do best: roasting the hell out of some pig.
First things first: I met up with Len on Thursday night and we hit the Mellow Mushroom near Emory. As a Tech student, I was more a fan of Fellini’s, but in recent years either my tastes have changed or it has really gone downhill. MM, begun in Atlanta by GT students but now a somewhat extensive chain, serves up some damn good pies, and that’s something I’ve missed around here — the only decent pizza I’ve found in this area is the highly yuppified California Pizza Kitchen that you can get anywhere. And MM’s atmosphere is, well, interesting, what with the murals of psilocybin mushrooms dancing with Jimi Hendrix, and that guy on the right.
On Friday my dad and I got up early and began the six hour grilling process. We planned to make four pork shoulders and two beef briskets, not realizing that this would probably be enough to feed a small state. We applied a rub to all of the cuts. For the pork, we used the store-bought KC Masterpiece rub, which I have used before and like pretty well. It is a little salty, a little sweet, with a good balance between the two. (A homemade rub that I tried out from a recipe a few weeks ago was way too salty, so we played it safe and went with what we knew.) For the brisket rub, we followed the recipe in Steven Raichlen’s How To Grill. We got the fire going and set these meats up on the grills: the pork shoulders on a smoker, one of the briskets on indirect low heat on a gas grill and the other in an electric roaster. We also prepared some vinegar-based mopping sauces to baste the meats with as they cooked.
Keeping the charcoal at an even heat is quite a skill, as I learned partway through. Trying to get the temp just right, I opened the flue up some and a flareup commenced almost immediately on the pork. I rescued them at great risk to limb (many arm hairs died that day). They were scorched but the meat was still good so we decided to steam them the rest of the way by encasing them in foil with some of the mopping sauce. A couple hours later they were ready to take off the heat, and fell apart beautifully.
The briskets came out looking really good too. Briskets are really fatty but they don’t have that much internal marbling, so of the two I would say the pork was the winner, just based on cut of meat. The outer edges of the brisket hardened to a nice crisp crust that was delectable with spices of the rub. I could’ve eaten that by itself.
In all, the experience left me with an urge to replicate the process at my house sometime soon. And just typing this has made me hungry for a farm animal.
