Day 4: BaconCamp qua Chili, the rundown and the recipe

[The whole journey] Nights: 28 Hours Inward

• Night 1: BaconCamp by Moonlight and the Holy Hog's Hell Chili
• Night 2: BaconCamp by Smoke and Lightning
• Night 3: the Dark Night, Early Dawn of BaconCamp
• Night 3.1: the afternoon, and Dark Night
• Night 3.2: Early Dawn and the afternoon  

In the midst of this Freddie Mercury weekend, another chili cookoff, and some amazing stuffed peppers / chiles rellenos I got to getting to the point where I had to wrap up the HHHC whether or not I had final pics or not; so continuing from Night 3.2: Early Dawn and the afternoon...

So particles, waves, whatever; after cooking for 18 straight hours (and only a few incremental doses of sleep), your nerves eventually take over. The morning sun was gentle a calm a few hours before it was time to leave. But once eleven rolled around and the final touches had gotten their executions, it became a race to the finish.

I got all packed up, my cousin and roommate got to try the chili and gave big approving thumbs up. We raced to the Dispatch Kitchen at the North Market where the comp was being held. Unfortunately, I was a bit more than all nerves by the time I got there and didn't have enough mental bandwidth to really get to talk to everyone, or share in our bacon delights. The three that stuck out were the banana-nut muffins with avacado-bacon frosting (there were these mini-dynamos of the subtlest kind of rad), bacon pop tarts (the most amazing shortbread with good bacon and fantastic frosting), and cayenne bacon ice cream (so smooth and then a little burning zing and oh crap I'm chewing a little bit o' bacon!).

I didn't get to try any of the winners, though I saw the one and wasn't compelled by the winning bacon sandwich, mostly because I was vying for an alt. The bacon sandwich that should have won (if a sandwich instead of chili were to have won) had bacon integrated into every facet of its composition, even the bread's fat and the fat the bread was fried in. Granted, I didn't eat either, and the plating by the latter wasn't very good. Oh well.

The winning people were great though. I wanted to win, but was so happy to share in this kind of a competition where it was really just a bacon celebration. Having the judges giving the goody bags to winners was cool, and the lady who won the sweets category was so amazed, but above and beyond the competition aspect, the camp aspect really shone through. I've never seen such satisfied grazing before. There were 200+ people there, in this tiny room, and bacon everywhere. There was a kind of gluttonous, deadly peace that settled on the packed venue.

Sure, we were reveling in clogging our arteries. Yes, the exploitation of animals was clinging to our lips. But you only live once. And if you're going to bother killing yourself, bacon is a great way to go. In terms of myself, I said it before, "no win, but all win." The process and project was epic. I was able to come up with a vision and see it through to completion. There is no trophy or prize that quite competes with that.

If you wish to pursue this vision journey, here is a rough of the steps. You might refer back to the linked posts to find all of the details:

For Meat:

• Make spice base. Begin by toasting anchos, guajillos, and pusillas then processing down (blender, processor, mortar & pestle; whatever works); then combining with your favorite mix of spices. Take half and that's your chili powder. The other half (may need more) you will add some brown sugar to, that will be the rub
• Injection marinade pig butts using orange juice, vinegar, sugar, chili powder, and rub
• Apply glue (honey+mustard), then cover with a thick layer of rub
• Let rest overnight
• Apply a second layer of glue lightly if necessary, then really cover with rub
• Smoke meat for 7 hours (I used a mix of mostly apple, with a bit of hickory)
• Wrap in foil and stick in refrigerator, let rest two days unless you're using quickly

For Chili:

• Do a pseudo-braise in roasting pan in oven (skip this if done and ready to pull to integrate in chili immediately); open top of foil pouch and pour in orange juice, coffee, and beer (I used a white ale), re-seal pouch
• Prepare stock by frying up bacon, pull bacon keep grease
• In the bacon grease, carmelize onions, then add garlic and peppers (the fresh ones I used were jalapenos, anaheims, and habaneros), wait until really good and gooey
• Reduce with a nice quantity of coffee (3-4 cups)
• Once it get low and looks a bit like a yellow-y tar,  add dry spices starting with a quarter of the chili powder you set aside. Now start trying to figure out what you will be missing. Make a note of it but don't act on it.
• Add tomatoes; simmer low for a while with a nice quantity of orange juice (~12oz)
• I like to add the clove and fennel (aids with digestion, cuts down on the impact of chili's acidity and matches any tomato sauce well) sooner than later. Once you have a nice amount of liquid, and a tomato-y vibe it would be a decent time to start adding the spices that need time to distribute themselves and mellow and marry.
• Now is also the time to start gauging the sugar you will be using. I had a few; unrefined cane sugar, brown sugar, and honey (along with orange juice). Don't be shy in the beginning. I learned over the weekend the reality of trying to get on top of it too late in the pot. The point of the sugar is to compensate for bitterness and to buffer capsaicin; so use it. Although chocolate isn't there to work toward the same end as sugar exactly, it also can make its entry now so you can judge the play between sugar and chocolate.
• Now get ready to really just leave your pot alone. Stir it now and then, but your main job will be tasting it from here on out; you're basically committed to the rest.
• Once the meat has braised a bit, you can open the pouches and dispense with the liquid by poking holes in the aluminum foil and fanning it out. The point now is to toughen back up the bark (smoked rub) on the outside, and make sure you have juiced the connective tissues above the 140'F mark for all you can without breaking too far into the mid-160s.
• Pull the pork. Dump it gradually into the chili. Pour in the drippings from the pan with the first pig butt if you have two; then add more beer and orange juice and coffee with the second butt's worth. Add bacon
• Bring pot to a simmer to get rid of some liquid, stirring regularly. By this point you should have a very rich looking and tasting pot. Reduce heat after the color of the chili returns
• You still want to have been tasting the stock itself regularly. Now is a good time to add some more peppers if necessary; these peppers' heat will be dissipated like the ones from early on.
• Sugars are also still able to get some good play. If you added fennel and clove you might want to touch them up a bit more (if you overdose the clove, cinnamon and cardamom will help you take the edge off it).
• Once you can taste that the meat has gotten a good uptake of the flavor of the stock (maybe 30-45 minutes), you can move to crock pot.  This is a nice low maintenance way to get some of the side work (i.e. candying bacon, cooling garnish). So in other words; migrate chili to crocks, make candied bacon, and cooling garnish if you haven't had a chance to yet.
• When you decide the chili is distributed and tasting good, it's time to take the chili to the next level: gravy. Whip up about (what amounted to) 4+ cups of roux.
• Drain off all of the chili liquid from the crock pots into the large pot, tilt to one side and start flopping the roux in there, and incorporate it by stirring it in gradually. Do this too all the liquid of the chili to ensure a smooth, cohesive texture. If you have some bacon grease from candying the bacon use this instead of butter or some other fat.
• Taste the gravy. This is the home stretch and your priorities and options are as follows; pungent spices, peppers' heat, and bite. Depending on how much more time you will be cooking you can also add fresh herbs at this point. I like adding them throughout, but in reality its just to gauge what I want it to taste like later, they don't really persist after hours of cooking. Most of the spices will have a wider distribution and benefit from longer cooking and having time to marry.
• You should not have any bitterness by now. That's what all those sugars were for. If you do have a bitterness, you will need to mask it at this point. I recommend very finely ground coffee, orange rind, lemon/lime zest/juice, and chocolate. I have also used pureed mandarin oranges to compensate for too much heat.
• Add the meat from the crocks and you're done.

That's a lot of steps, and no measurements and no list of ingredients. Mostly it's pork shoulder, peppers, tomatoes, onions, bacon, beer, orange juice, coffee, spices, herbs, bittersweet chocolate, honey, brown sugar, cane sugar, more spices, some herbs.

Some Notes:

• Cooling garnish - made with sour cream and cream cheese (with powdered candied bacon, ground orange rind, and chocolate). Incorporate bacon fat as a thickening agent. P
• Candied Bacon - go with the brown sugar on cookie rack over cookie sheet method with foil underneath. Use foil to create a spigot for pouring off and reserving grease. Try to engineer a way of creating bacon brittle.
• Chili - try adding 4 pounds of bacon to the 15 pounds pork shoulder; try with a thicker cut of the bacon and chop into bigger chunks
• Magic Dust - grind some orange peel, mix with into a bunch of nutritional yeast and a little coffee grinds; sprinkle on top instead of cheese

Side-Note:

The music was essential. Woods, some Bon Iver, but really the majority of the work was done by good 'ol Basia Bulat and Gillian Welch. It's an emotional experience. It's a low, low burning and you need whatever goes deep, deep for you. The twists in the emotional narratives kept my brain limber. I was looking for cracking open and I needed repetition and repetition. Make sure you've got headphones too. The idea of me bip-bopping around the kitchen at four am listening to depressing girl music makes me assume my roommate would have killed me. Headphones help you go deeper anyway.

went through four of those chafing dishes, plus the judges' samplesSo there were a lot of gratifying comments and shocked faces (when shock turns to smile is most gratifying of all) at my sampling table. I overheard one say he'd pay fifty bucks for the recipe. I know that is a paltry sum relative to my own idea of its worth, but it was something kind of tangible in terms of one person's appreciation. Granted, he could basically have as good a recipe as I could write up for free reading it here, but it's the thought that counts.

I was super pleased with the outcome. I wish I'd had more time where I was decompressed. Helping out in the back washing dishes with people was a ton of fun somehow, mostly the camaraderie was high and the stress was done.

The first layer of winning that came out of this really was having a vision and implementing it with precision.

The real winning that came out of this was the journey. It wasn't work, it wasn't 'the doing'; there were 28 hours spent cooking a single dish and its components. 34 hours invested counting other preparations, but 28 hours inward (18 of which were synchronous and basically alone). 'The doing' ends after the four or five hour mark. It's a journey when you are on a stretch of road, and you know intuitively n the right direction, but it is comepletely alien and seems to have no apparent bearing on where you're headed.

I like the adjective epic. Consequently I don't want to throw it around or abuse it. So with all due respect and knowing full well just how much I sound like I have my head up my own ass; this chili recipe is epic. The results are epic. The journey an epic.

There are things we toss around as, 'do this, it will change your life.' We might start accessibly with a dish at a restaurant, a movie, or an album or something consumerist like that. I don't mean consumerist in a negative slant, but these are passive experiences; they appeal to our self that doesn't like to put itself on the line but enjoys consuming what other people put on the line. You move on to the next level which are experiential things; climb a mountain, jump out of a plane, bike a century. These experiences put us in touch with a part of ourselves that is getting put on the line - the emotions in exertion, life and limb, and our idea of physical boundaries.

I can't fit this experience into the latter category as I would have assumed. There was too much of me in it. It was more than overcoming a fear or an obstacle. Beyond barriers, there was a ferocity to pursuing this road. Mostly, what I would say is, if you feel burdened; in your heart, if you are feeling knotted and crippled, but filled and ready to scream; come to this chili recipe and make your peace. I am sure the timing could be condensed by at least 8 hours, but for every minute, hour, that your pour into it, the deeper you go. At first you can let yourself get trapped /in it/. So wrapped up in your own head and bullshit and rationalizations and judgments and fears and egotisms and the ligatures you use to suspend your sense of self. For every minute, hour that you plod the road your head will begin to loosen and eventually it can crack open if you let it.  

Anyway, for an epic chili recipe that will render bacon fat and connective tissues and souls alike, go down the Rabbit Hole with the Holy Hog's Hell Chili.

 Nights: 28 hours inward

• Night 1: BaconCamp by Moonlight and the Holy Hog's Hell Chili
• Night 2: BaconCamp by Smoke and Lightning
• Night 3: the Dark Night, Early Dawn of BaconCamp
• Night 3.1: the afternoon, and Dark Night
• Night 3.2: Early Dawn and the afternoon

p.s. It's not the Droid Bionic, buuuut I did get an HTC Evo 3D recently, and the picture quality surpasses the Droid 1 from Motorola by far. You can look forward to newer food porn being ever so slightly prettier. YAY APPETITE PORN!

Night 3.2: Early Dawn and the afternoon

Eight O'Clock came around and it was time to take the travails of the night and set them aside. We burn ourselves down from time to time. We become fluid and swallow fire and evaporate, but there is a law of conservation, and these are old lessons.

I had struck against walls before and backed down. Was something different this time? Was the idea of ego permanently and irrevocably relinquished? Had the self been transcended for good? No of course not. I'm just cooking a couple gallons of chili for a bunch of people I don't know, seven of whom will be judging me.

So what changed in me that made it feel so fresh, so different? I had taken the bramble and torn it from the rose. Slowly, bit by bit, pulled them apart. I had bled out. Fallen asleep, woke up stirred the pot. And then I walked to the store. I felt a different smile that had evaded my face for a week. It had had itself shaken for a week.

There was a fresh glow on the road. The load in my arms seemed lighter. I was tired and delirious and reallyy had probably recouped about 35 minutes of sleep total between two hours of stirrings, but my brain was putting itself gradually back together. I had put everything into what was there. It wasn't going anywhere. It was what it was; stock, butt, and bacon.

When I arrived home and was preparing to do a final boil down before the gravy, I collected myself and waited. I turned up the heat on the pot until all 16 pounds (minus shoulder bones and 1 qt of blob)of pulled pork and 2 pounds of bacon and watched it started to simmer. Once it had a nice roll to it, and a skim started to form on top, I added the beer. The 24 ounces of Chambly just rushed up like linen and hops and sweet and sour and astringent. I let it froth for a minute or so, then followed with a pot of coffee (Costa Rican, earlier I had been using an AMAZING roast out of Brazil from Brioso, but decided it was too good not to just drink; and besides I had bought the CR for the chili).

So basically the chili is full steam under pot. All you need to do is kick back and push it with reduction after reduction, keep adding spices as you see fit, add more peppers as necessary (I think I added three more anaheims, though I know I should have topped it off with another cup of peppers). Remember, you're going to gravy this up so stronger than you think will be fine at this stage.

What's next? Cooling garnish and Candying bacon.

Here's the rub:

What we're going to do is pour this chili in those miso bowls. There will already be a spoon and a 2/3 stick of candied, apple-smoked bacon in there. Then we're going to drizzle with a sour cream / cream cheese garnish and dust with magic dust.

This chili hits like a truck. Or, more specifically, once you put a nice big old bite in your maw, it's like someone hits you in the face with a palm. After a few bites it is like someone has filled your head with cement. But once the sting of the facepalm wears off and you open your eyes, you chew down and there is this rush of textures playing all over your mouth. From the three typical textures of bacon, to the six or so different textures in pulled pork, you start chewing your way through the coriander flavored cement. Then, all of a sudden, sparks start shooting down your throat from the peppers and gradually the feeling of suffocating inside your own head throbs down to calm from the soothing olfactory spices and the garnish.

The magic dust is a combination of nutritional yeast (has a cheesy taste and is more interesting to present than shreds), ground orange rind (to pick up on all the orange juice in the chili), and ground coffee (to take the bitter edge off the rind). Also, having a dust was meant to do a 'inform the nose to condition the mouth' kind of thing.

Candy Bacon:

Easy peasy here.

Put skewers or a cookie rack on a cookie sheet. Put a few cups of brown sugar in a big ziploc. Toss bacon in light brown sugar until good and coated. Lay across rack. Add extra brown sugar. Bake until shiny.

Now for as easy as this is, do it up.

The cookie sheet is going to be spitting grease. It is going to be covered in brown sugar. There's a couple of ways to play this. What I did was siphon off the grease into the chili.

An alternative, and something I kind of succeeded at by complete accident, was create bacon brittle and bacon candy (in addition to the candied bacon). It was amazing. you could try to render the crystallized bacon-sugar in such a way as to have a topping. Anyway, this is the home stretch, have fun, but give it a moment's thought ahead of time in case you want to try to do any of those things effectively.

Cooling Garnish:

At any point that you had five minutes, or at this point, you can mix this up. For this quantity, I used two blocks of cream cheese and two pints of sour cream. Now I mixed in chopped chocolate, and then some black pepper and salt. The insipration for this was that I wanted something stiffer than normal sour cream, and I looked to bacon ice cream. The first suggestion was to thicken the cream cheese and sour cream mixture with arrow root. I've never used it before, have no idea what it would have done, but was willing to try. Another suggestion was to turn it into ice cream. 

Where I should have gone with this, it was BaconCamp after all, is added some bacon fat to the mix. I ground up some of the candied bacon and crumbled some of the leftovers in later; but to really knock boots I should have candied the bacon earlier in the night, and reserved some of that fat for the garnish. Oh well, next time.

Competitive Rush:

For anyone that had been following my twitterfeed, the time between 'good morning sweet chili' and 'ready to pack' encapsulated the whole of this post so far. My cousin Jimmy was able to help out with the transportation, my room mate Glen also offered too. As basically happened with the last batch of HHHC, they were the only people that I know who got to try it.

The emotional exercise of the night had given way to an endorphin fed electricity; whereas I had been a capacitor for the night, the dawn was turning me into a conductor. I was channeling energy and focus and attention I had not seen in a long time. There is a purity sprinters talk about, I feel close to it on my bike occasionally, but I was in it that morning. My mind was operating at a level of clarity and accuracy that I'd never felt before. There had been minor tastes while working as a line cook, but a 12 hour marathon of cooking was a different matter entirely.

I had to delegate a few tasks toward the end. Jimmy was kind enough to also wash the plating dishes and spoons, I stopped taking photos but Glen got in a couple (hopefully I will have those up soon). At this point I knew what needed to get finished and done and what it looked like, but they proved invaluable for making sure loose ends got tied up.

Basically, aside from pulling together everything I would need to take with me (big pot of chili, cooling garnish, magic dust, plating stuff, serving stuff, towels, utensils), the last step to the chili itself was to make a big ol' mess of roux (approximately 11 o'clock) and fold the liquid back in to gravy it up. I got this taken care of and by 11:45 was sitting on the back porch smoking and going through last minute details.

The picture of the roux was the initial beginning of it (yes, that all roux, all from bacon grease, no liquid yet). I probably rouxed up about 3-4 cups of flour or more to thicken up the chili.

The chili came out like velvet. I know that doesn't sound right. Normally it's chunky and chewy. Now mind you, its is chewy; just in a very pleasingly smooth way like ice cream. The shredded pork layers sublimely between everything and the flavor explodes.

Honestly, there's nothing quite like it. HHHC takes a long time. You need to walk through a lot of hoops just to get to the fundamental animal itself. All plating and judge considerations aside. Just getting this stuff to the bowl is an epic journey. From the injection of the marinade, to the hours spent smoking the meats, to the time laboring over the stock and the incorporation of the meat and the final turn of the stock to gravy, this is a greater labor of love than any other pot of chili I have ever made. Cooking it in such a quantity I really took stock of the minute transformations.

Every note came out a surprise. Every step an immersion in focus. Shinzen Young, in his book the Science of Enlightenment, builds a metaphor around the particle/wave duality of nature. Whereby there are times, like when you're turning the wheel, driving a car where you are operating from a particle sense of self. There are other times where you are opening yourself to the world around you, letting your guard and expectations drop and embracing your inner wave nature.

When you marathon cook you start off at the particle end of the spectrum. Each item has a corresponding action, each movement has a corresponding meaning and purpose. As you drill down, keep working through the particulate layers, dissolving them with sustained rigor. Eventually once you notice everything is happening the way it will happen, you can open your mind up to that wave mind. The wave mind will push you through to the end; it electrifies every moment, it creates space inside to facilitate conductivity of wave in the world.

Learning to harness and manifest as the wave  self is what is happening when you flow. You are prepared for every outcome without anticipating any like water washing against the shore. When you are open to this, and unexpecting everything, you will also begin to savor every step more; and for what is really there rather than what's next or what is past.

By pushing past that particulate self, and opening to the exact thing you're doing, whether it's pulling pork or pouring off burnt brown sugar and bacon grease, or talking to a friend, transitioning into the wave self can help us handle situations more fluidly. We become locked in protecting that particle self too often, we are thrown into disequilibrium when that alfredo turns grainy from simmering at too high a temperature. We become blocked and can't salvage it because we fixate on the past instead of the pot in front of us.

PBS: Really entering this openness, where what's really there is actually present to the mind, and whats past and next is not observed, we are able to interpret better. Some of us people are mixed message machines (myself), or over-think too much (myself), or assign too much significance to events without considering what is actually present (frequently). These things either distract us or rely on distractions. Whether we seek to immerse in focus, or pushing distraction to the point of a hard reset of the mind set we are working with, the goal is to surpass disequilibrium. Acting from distraction is not a way to re-enter equilibrium.

Being goes on being regardless of distraction; but the mind becomes blocked, switching from the particle to the wave disregards our tenuous grasp on the correspondence of reality with our internal ligatures, and turns on the ability for us to thread coherence through action in being.

Up next, BaconCamp itself and a rundown.

Update on 4:50PM by mfg

 Nights: 28 hours inward

• Night 1: BaconCamp by Moonlight and the Holy Hog's Hell Chili
• Night 2: BaconCamp by Smoke and Lightning
• Night 3: the Dark Night, Early Dawn of BaconCamp
• Night 3.1: the afternoon, and Dark Night
• Night 3.2: Early Dawn and the afternoon
• Day 4: BaconCamp qua Chili, the rundown and the recipe

Night 3.1: the afternoon, and Dark Night

So I left work 1.9 hours early (says so in Outlook and on my time card); snuck in some vacation leave to get the shopping over with and the ball rolling. i had put together quite a list of items. As far as the farmer's market went, they yielded my jalapenos and tomatoes. Aside from that it was a bit of a wash. But beyond ingredients, I needed kitchen hardware and serving hardware.

So first we went to Wasserstroms so i could get a roasting pan big enough to braise both butts at once. I also picked up a probe thermometer to monitor the butss without opening the oven (didnt use), serving bowls and spoons. From there we went to the communist market a.k.a. clintonville community market; our local coop. I got a half dozen or so spices, a 750ml Unibroue Chambly, nutritional yeast. My cousin and I argued about which cashier was cuter. I liked dark hair. He said both, and he wasnt wrong, but he wasnt right.

Next up, world market; odd-ass upscale big lots pier 1 bastard child. Anyway, I got 7 miso soup bowls and 7 spoons. Originally I was going to go big with my plating, then decided something more refined with a more manageable serving size might work a bit better. From World Market we tied it up at Giant Eagle Market District in UA with a few odds and ends of groceries.

Got home at 6:00, did a quick clean over the kitchen. I started laying everything out around 6:30. Here was my quick game plan, in terms of what needed made:

• Braise pork butts
• Fry bacon
• Build chili stock
• Pull pork
• Make cooling garnish
• Candy bacon 

Obviously each of these had many steps to it, so these posts will lay them out from start to stop.

Braise pork butts:

Take the two pork butts, previously smoked and wrapped in one sheet of foil fatty side down, into a large roasting pan (disposable). Open up foil pouches at top. Pour in a splash of apple cider vinger, then an even mixture of orange juice (juice used in injection marinade), coffee (Brioso, Brazilian), and Unibroue Blanche de Chambly until the butts are about 1/3 - 1/2 surrounded. Place in oven at 325'F. Forget about them for a few hours.

When they come out they will be ready to pull. However, you want to monitor their cooking temperature to control their texture. You need to be above 140'F (internal) for the connective tissues to start melting all over again (like they did when you smoked it). You want to juice them as much as possible to get them where they need to be by cooking as low as possible. They will be done when they hit 165'F; so you want to get them to 120'F within 20 minutes, then 140'F  shortly thereafter, but the longer it takes to get to 165'F the better.

Fry bacon:

Frying two pounds of bacon isn't as unwieldy as it seems. That said, you do want to be peppering and spicing the bacon  as you see fit. I go for a black pepper, red pepper, ancho pepper, paprika, garlic powder mix. At any rate, once it is all fried up you want to shake off all the grease you can into the pot you will be using for the stock. Then refrigerate the bacon.

Bear in mind, we will not be discarding or recycling any of the bacon grease. We will be upcycling every drop of it that we can. Now my setup was three pots wide (two active duty, one reserve for finished bacon). So I had three pots to combine. Do whatever is comfortable for you, though deep-frying bacon in bacon grease is less avantageous unless you are just straight eating the bacon, which you should do a little, but you need it for the chili.

Anyway, fry up all the bacon, save up all the grease, it will get upcycled.

Build Stock:

So if you look at the chili operations pots above, you'll see one with a gurgling overflow of grease. That's where we will start building our stock. It currently contains the grease from two pounds of bacon, and the residual spices from flavoring all those tender strips. Next we will chop up three onions and carmelize the shit out of them. I mean it. I think it took a full 30 minutes to get them all ooey-gooey. I started with two due to size limitations, then added the third after the first two broke down a bit.

You should also have a cup or so of the rub left over from the pulled pork. You can dump this in at any time. After you've got a sugary goo going, add about a head of garlic chopped finely. (This recipe probably yields about 18 quarts of chili, so measurements will seem a bit wonky.)

Next we get to the fresh peppers. I used two habaneros, eight jalapenos, and eight anaheims; chopped and seeded. Mind you, this was for a bacon competition, not a chili cookoff; so yeah I toned it down. Do some deglazing as much as is possible with a few ounces of your beer. Scrape the edges, get it centered. At this point I did my first reduction using just coffee. Leave it alone for a while and let it gurgle on. You can take this time to skin and shred three full size carrots and to chop up six tomatoes. Once your reduction is well under way, add the tomatoes and five bay leaves. I would also take the time now to start adding in spices that you know will need to be there eventually but should get started marrying sooner than later; fresh ground allspice, cumin, coriander, cinnamon, clove, fennel (at least that's a combo I tend to like; complex yet familiar). You could mediate coriander and cinnamon with cardamom, but I haven't started down that path yet.

    Marrying flavors is what this step is about. Look above and remember what you are cooking for; that is the midway point. Clove is a great example of a spice that needs time. You're likelier to put too much in as opposed to too little. But if you give too-much-clove enough time to cook down, it will blend itself out. Similarly, with coriander or cumin, you need a solid base early on to figure out how much more you'll need before it becomes too-much-cumin/coriander (either can sink a ship).

You should spend about two hours getting the base where it needs to be just for it to be considered started; i.e. you have completed the base work, building the chili. After you've got a nice bit going, you'll start adding your sugars. Brown sugar, unrefined white sugar, chocolate, honey, shredded carrots. For this reduction we'll use orange juice. All of the other steps work to condense the flavor; this time we want to turn up the heat and bloom it out a little bit and get the marriage kicking in so we know what we're staring at before the meat comes in. Keep adding in liquids and reducing to get those flavors churning. Add more tomatoes, peppers, carrot; keep building it. It's going to be a while before the meat gets in there, so you might as well cook the stock low and slow too. Care for it. Keep it tender. Close your eyes every time you taste it. Once you've gotten it to big for it's britches, and the meat is ready to pull, switch the stock to a larger pot. I used a 32ish (?) quart stock pot (and it was about 2/3 full once all was said and done).

Pull Pork:

So your stock should be ready to leave on its own at this point to simmer down and need only occasional stirring. You have a few hours ahead of you, so also get some music on the headphones you won't get sick of.

Leading up to that point, I had been listening to Memory Tapes and Woods. Around the midnight mark (3.5 hours), the first butt was ready to pull; it was the smaller of the two, had smoked very well, and had braised very well. It was at a perfect temperature.

All the same, it still took 50 minutes to pull all that pork. 7.7 pound, shoulder in. It was amazingly well-cooked though. The scapula just twisted right out, no knife, no nothing.

Anyway, I do a three thing set up. I've got a nice casserole dish I keep the pork shoulder in, a small 1 quart part for the blubbery parts, and a big bowl for the good bits. I wear gloves so I can pull the meat apart while it's hotter. Let it rest 20-30 minutes after pulling from the oven, but it will still be hot. I like to rip into it roughly at first and break up the shoulder to see what the lay of the land it. You can end up discarding (well I freeze it for later) a lot less of the blubber if you rip up the meat strategically. Basically, if it looks funky, press into it with your thumb and question whether anyone would want that in their mouth. If the answer is no, save what you can and move on.

The hands are very busy, the mind is planning up until this segment. Take this time to hit your stroke. There will be two of these segments. With every tear, every pull, look at what you will be serving. Try to savor it with your fingertips; smile when you get an especially tender and moist piece. Grin and feel your tongue twitch with the especially crispy, bark encrusted parts. The best is the uber-browned fat section on the top. The fat should peel away easily from the meat, but you can salvage the remaining bark; it should peel away like crispy pliable strands of flavor. Someone is going to love getting that.

For the latter hours, from about midnight until 5 am, I was listening to Basia bulat's two albums. I found that while pouring myself into the meat and growing that energy, it was a good time to work through some inner turmoil I had been dealing with; or more accurately, not dealing with. I was having trouble putting myself back into a situation. In all honesty, my hands were busy and so was my mind. I had been working this stuff over and over since 6p Friday with an earnest focus. Up until then it had been a scattered, frivolous distraction. This was my opportunity to really work through some personal stuff.

So after six and a half hours of it being 1 of 3 things happening, working through this stuff suddenly came into focus while I was pulling the pork. It had a good current to ride, savoring each tangible piece of meat in hand. I found that the more I poured happiness into the meat, the more joy I experienced in vicariously chewing each bite, that the more energized I became to dig deeper in myself. The less afraid I was of what I would find and the less attached I was to what I was working through. The deeper I pulled the more exposed I became. The more exposed I became the more hope shone through to illuminate what I was really looking at.

After you've gotten through that beast (the first one took me fifty minutes), pushed it into the stock, take a breather; from the pork and the self. You'll need to relax, pace yourself. If you rolled like me, you've got an 8.3 pounder coming out soon.

Around 4 am I got the first batch of pulled pork into the pot. I pulled the second one. It pulled through that one even easier than the first. It was more tender and with tenderness comes understanding. The threads of muscle fiber becomes so pliable that you are no longer in need of forcing anything. You stop needing to do things, and you begin to do what is really there. Once the muscle has given up the last shred of survival, it yields. There is no special insight, it happens on its own once you truly see and are open to what is happening. It takes patience and the ability to see, which is an extension of being open.

Update on 1:35PM by mfg

 Nights: 28 hours inward

• Night 1: BaconCamp by Moonlight and the Holy Hog's Hell Chili
• Night 2: BaconCamp by Smoke and Lightning
• Night 3: the Dark Night, Early Dawn of BaconCamp
• Night 3.1: the afternoon, and Dark Night
• Night 3.2: Early Dawn and the afternoon
• Day 4: BaconCamp qua Chili, the rundown and the recipe

Night 2: BaconCamp by Smoke and Lightning

Wednesday night I took the pig butts and got smoking. I should have live blogged it. It would have read something like: 

9:00 - add chips

9:05 - bleach kitchen floor

9:16 - scour bathroom...

I also got my laundry done, kitchen and bath super clean, and general tidying up done over the span of the 7 hours I spent smoking the pig butts. I managed to turn my twitterfeed into an inane collection of tweets on smoking pig butts.

Here's how the cooking went down. First fill your heart with love because this is a process that you must be full on. You cannot walk into this with some half-hearted loveless desire to cook; youve got seven hours ahead and if youre going to be stoking the fire and blowing the coals like i do, sitting on your ass and drinking a beer isnt conducive to that (especially if you're pulling a 7:40pm to 3am worknight smoke like I did)

Next, following some knol's instructions (for time and general approach), I pulled the flavor/marinade injected butts from the fridge, ran to the store while the fire was warming up and the meat came to temp (to aid in applying glue and rub and dropping on the grill). When I returned, I applied the "glue" of honey and mustard, along with a bevy of spices, to the beasts. I then took the rub I used to them (via 1 dry, 1 wet hand method; dry hand picks and drops rub by wet hand that touches meat and applies rub). Once both sides were dne I did another quick dusting and dropped them on the grill not to be seen for another 2 hours.

I got the fire started around 6:20, it was at temp around 7:30, and the butts were on the grate at 7:41. Though they flipped and got basted three times, they did not return to the human world until about 3 am.

Every 45 minutes or so I stoked the fire, added chips, and maintained the general smoky goodness of the meat. Most of the time I used applewood, but there was a few handfuls of maple I threw in there too.  Around 11:40 I realized I might run out of charcooal so I went to the store, grabbed a bag and some smoke, and headed home.

This was, for the sake of my own ridiculous self-absorption, an emotional smoke. My brain was somewhere else, far far away. Around the 1:30 am mark, a lightning storm started. A spectacular storm crossing the sky, with activity SSE and NNW if my house; both hemispheres competiing for my attention. I sat there soaking it in; I reached out with my arm to draw it in. I could feel the current cross the sky and charge the follicles of the hairs across my entire body. Seeing electricic discharges in the sky during the witching hour is not something whose significance bypasses  the neuronal circuitry of an epileptic. I know I am small but "there's disaster in me" and being up at that ungodly hour, staring into death while stoking a fire next to a big metal box, is one way to come face to face with it.  How ridiculous is it to smoke meat at  2 am? 3am? What was the point. There was a kind of resignation. There was a kind of devotion. There was certainly a confusion in my body and mind and the tracings of atmospheric imbalances across the sky only drove that point home. I kept to it but I couldn't bring anyone else into it at that time; no not yet. 

• There is a certain kind of awkward cowardice of being 'in it'; there is also a certain kind of responsibility you have. It is good to let people know where you are, and let them share in your catharses and cleansing; but to imposition them in when they resist is a different story. I know why I was awake, sitting through the lightning and thunder and a bit of  rain. If no one else volunteers, I understand.
• Anyway,3ish am: the beasts came out. I got some of the outside on my finger and hungrily licked it off; it sent shrill icy tendrils of apple smoke lightning forks down the exterior circumference of my throat.

I was glad to be done even if it meant only getting 150 minutes of sleep before the next day. I did need to take a shower before I laid down on those clean sheets (I also did three loads of laundry). They smelled like home and I needed my rest.

I was covered in grime and soot and smoke; it felt great but I still work for a living and they might not understand that I want to smell like my kill.

butts ready for a two night rest

Update on 1:31PM by mfg

 Nights: 28 hours inward

• Night 1: BaconCamp by Moonlight and the Holy Hog's Hell Chili
• Night 2: BaconCamp by Smoke and Lightning
• Night 3: the Dark Night, Early Dawn of BaconCamp
• Night 3.1: the afternoon, and Dark Night
• Night 3.2: Early Dawn and the afternoon
• Day 4: BaconCamp qua Chili, the rundown and the recipe

Night 1: BaconCamp by Moonlight and the Holy Hog's Hell Chili

roasted last night, will be incorporating into dry rub with food processor today when my roommate isn't sleepingPhase 1 is by far the easiest, or should have been anyway. Basically, inject the pork with marinade, rub with mustard/honey glue, apply rub. I did numbers 1 and 3, skipped the glue.

Last night while shopping for the goods I realized that I wanted to try to coax a bit more flavor out of the meat for the sake of the chili as a whole. Upon reflection, it was a bit flat in the chili (on its own it was great). Sure it ends up with a great consistency at the end, and I still want a good bark on the outside (going straight to rub without the glue+rub will compromise the exterior bark a bit), but I want to incorporate some more flavor into the mix.

So I think that in addition to a lot of the liquid coming from a pot or two of coffee and maybe a liter of malty beer, I'm going to be fetching hydration from carrot puree. I may add 1/2-2 cup puree and 1-2 cup chopped shreds.

Hmm, carrot?

My hope is fourfold, that;

• the carrots will add a bit more spectrum to the sweetness (it will accompany honey, white sugar, brown sugar, chocolate in the mix)
• they bring a unity between the orange juice marinade of the meat to an analog in the chili (carrots and oranges = yum)
• they can buffer heat pretty well
• they can add some color to what will be a gloom and doom affair

there's 15.7 pounds of butt under that aluminum skirtSo deviations from recipes are definitely my norm, but in this case it is more than justified. Consequently I juiced the shit out of those butts.

To the point that had i tried to apply the glue last night it probably would not have stuck.

I still did a shake rub on tops and bottoms with the spices listed below, then covered in foil and threw in the fridge (and yes, I will be doing the glue tonight before I smoke them along with a real rubbing down of those butts).

The marinade is an orange juice, apple cider vinegar, honey, some garlic/creole stuff in a bottle (it came with the injector im using; mostly a worcestshire tasting thing with sugar and spices, it was better than adding water), liquid smoke and spices (granulated garlic and onion, paprika, ancho, ground red pepper, black pepper, chili 9000).

So tonight I will be doing the smoking of the pig shoulders. I bought a 7.7 and 8 pound split to equalize cooking times and so I wasn't cooking a 15 pound behemoth. (I rode my cache home on my bike last night all giddy with glee at the contents of my bag.)

Not trying to be up until 3 am tonight in scattered thunderstorms. Nonetheless, our mantra is "BaconCamp is not a spectator sport."

Update on 1:31PM by mfg

 Nights: 28 hours inward

• Night 1: BaconCamp by Moonlight and the Holy Hog's Hell Chili
• Night 2: BaconCamp by Smoke and Lightning
• Night 3: the Dark Night, Early Dawn of BaconCamp
• Night 3.1: the afternoon, and Dark Night
• Night 3.2: Early Dawn and the afternoon
• Day 4: BaconCamp qua Chili, the rundown and the recipe