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: the Dark Night, Early Dawn of BaconCamp

If you are wondering what to cook in the wake of the ground turkey recall, you can start by smoking some pork shoulder. Trust me, it does a body good, and even better a soul than you might expect. Since we've already covered the injection marinade and rub as well, let's move on to what to do with your prized beauties.

Now I have made the Holy Hog's Hell Chili before. But this time it's different; there's a competition involved. For some background on the inspiration of this version of the HHHC, I'm going to lay out some shamanic cooking 411. A few stories go into this creation.

One is from a sushi chef at the Benihana where a friend of mine worked. He was stricken with polio at a very young age decades prior. His body, needless to say, did not take the shape it was meant to take. Yet, as with so many people, where his body may have been an impediment to him reaching out, his heart remained strong and pushed through the layers. He was showing my friend how to make sushi; she had made a good roll, but his tasted different and she asked him what made his so good. "I fill every roll I make with love."

Pulled pork and gravy are two foods growing up that are as exotic to me as the grasshoppers I had on vacation were to my co-workers. Chili was as well; I remembered having it at my father's house a few times, and had a penchant for it a few years ago. My girlfriend at the time, who shares the blame with her brother for me having learned to really cook at all, decided we would make chili. I have always liked very spicy food, and she was willing to oblige. However, she was working that afternoon/evening or something, so I would have to watch it. (Side-note: I like cumin more than she does.)

It was on the lowest we could get that crappy range. The fire for cooking chili is a beautiful thing. The chili needs to be cooked at as low a direct heat as possible (especially with crappy pots). This means regular stirring, and making sure that the gas doesn't blow out on the burner. Checking a flame and a stock every 15 minutes for three or four  or five hours may sound uninvested. But as you begin to realize that you are caring for the flame, as much as the chili, as much as what you are preparing to eat; you subsequently realize that no matter how vulnerable the flame/food/self, tending and assuming responsibility for it is what is really happening. Every time you really cook, you learn a bit more to care.

The BaconCamp 2011 remix, of which this series of posts details, was surrounded (as was the whole year) by subterrestrial tremors both emotional, metaphorical, and physical (yes I felt the Virginia Earthquake here in Ohio; I work on the tenth floor of a twenty story building). When we are struggling with our demons sometimes we close off to the world; sometimes we need to let the world in to cleanse us. For me, I have taken something away from Sartre; his metaphor of the wind going across the land as consciousness. A recent meditation I have taken to constantly is one that empties the consciousness. Next time you are sitting or standing or otherwise being braced by the wind, I hope you allow your tenuous grasp on reality through the conscious mind to slip into the wind. I hope you allow that wind of collected consciousness to fill you up and press out the things you think you know, that you think you need or want.

So between preparations Tuesday and especially Wednesday, the building of this pot was already on track for the most epic solitary undertaking in cooking I have ever done (most epic anything?). Thursday was a chimera. It was something of a setback, a wound, a catalyst, an inspiration, a clarification, a betrayal, a good idea, a bad practice, a distraction. For all the things it was, it wasn't a missed opportunity. A lot of things go into the making of a missed opportunity; normally regret is a sure sign that an opportunity was missed. For instance, the OHSK8 show was a missed opportunity for me, and it was my own fault. I regret not being able to get my hands into the heart of that surface and format. My worthless entry is sufficiently unprofessional I don't know if I can show my face around the others in the show. Maybe next year.

• Frequently we can eschew something as a missed opportunity when in fact it was not; we simply need to focus on the wrong consequence, ask the wrong question. We can convince ourselves that an event was so significant that we can't see past framing the whole situation based on the wrong question. We can go so far as to hold it against another person, or ourselves, and get hung up in ligatures that serve only to preserve the survival of the ego instead of the growth of the self.

I pick up on personal tests occasionally. A test and an opportunity are very similar and yet distinct. A test can push you forward, but since it has no real import you can't let it set you back. Normally it is in the form of being honest with yourself. However, a test is a mind game; it's a head trick and exists to no one else but you. You may be able to articulate its significance but no one else will ever apprehend its meaning.

An opportunity is an external occurence that pivots on multiple persons interpretation of the significance of an event. Additionally, an opportunity is something that is highly circumstantial and practically qualified whereas a test is an illusion in the mind whose "win"/"fail" is arbitrarily dictated. Last, an opportunity is not framed as win/fail but as gain/loss/hold; as in it can actually set you back with another person.

• That said, because of the shared interpretation of a situation, and the ability to assign it significance based on asking the wrong question; opportunities are often interpreted afterward by participants based on the wrong question, creating inflated ideas of the outcome.

Well, from the moment I laid on my bed Thursday night, to the moment I finally had that chef's knife in my hand Friday afternoon, I had set to work letting every conceivable shedu, jinn, poe, Asura, demon, hobgoblin, satyr, elf, fairy run wild, coopting every gram of focus they could commandeer, with every fragment and shard of a feeling or an idea. They built a fantastic and horrifying mosaic of shattered glass, and wrapped me in it like some coccoon.

Knife in hand, it was my job to cook myself free.

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 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

Recipe - Holy Hog's Hell Chili: Bring your soul for a searing

So how best to begin explaining the Epic that is Holy Hog's Hell Chili? I suppose it is less an epic than it is a massively constituted collection of pieces. Similar to the journeys of Hercules, of Odysseus and Jason and most anything by Homer or Virgil.

For the sake of organization there are two principal components to the preparation of this; (1) the butt and (2) the boil.

A note on (2): For all intents and purposes, i really need to give it up, as usual to Homesick Texan's 7-chile, 'more precise texas chili' recipe. it really has a few techniques that I reference in my method and I draw a lot of inspiration from it. In this case I did not observe the no-tomato or pre-roast/soak dried chiles or use beer rules; but i did observe the no-bean, use coffee and bacon rules.

So you can read up on the smoking of the pig shoulder at the link above, but here's a synopsis: pre-marinaded by injection (no overnight), applied a mustard-honey glue then a salted rub of a bunch of good spices, apple-wood-charcoal-smoked for 6 hours at around 140'F. Had to pull it, refrigerated (wrapped in foil) overnight. Placed butt in casserole dish, filled bottom of foil wrap with orange juice and some coffee, poked some holes in the top; heated up to 160'F (measured internally) for 25-30 minutes with the oven running around 325'F. Separated by hand; separating and simmerating fat and ligaments in pan drippings and other left over liquids plus some more coffee & oj. Added what was rendered to the shredded pork. (Made a pulled pork sandwich) Pork butt = done.

So on to the chili. Now, it was Sunday I was supposed to make it; but i didn't have any onions and only 6 or 7 jalapenos (only other peppers were all dried and i didn't feel like hassling with roasting soaking etc). That meant I needed to go to the store for some onions and I was itching for some fresh peppers for this batch.

der bacon; it was about 1/8" per sliceBegin: Fry 1-aught pound farm fresh bacon (Folck Farms); half to extra crispy, half to medium done, chop and set aside, reserve all bason grease in a four quart stock pot. Chop a bunch of onion 2-3 medium, baseball sized guys. Start sauteeing at low in the bacon grease. Add in your spices, part of my selection; coriander, cumin, clove, rubbed sage, penzey's chili 9000, cinnamon, ancho chili powder, paprika, ground red pepper. For extra points you can try to remember to do this in the bottom of the pot while it is dry, dry-roasting them, but I always forget. Once the onions are good and ooey-gooey (look at the pic, seriously) finely chop 1/4-1/3 a bulb of garlic and throw that in, along with 6-7 jalapenos, and two habaneros (peppers de-pithed and de-stemmed, but don't worry about the seeds so much on this one, the bitterness will balance against the sweetness). Add in your bacon, 2 measuring cups of coffee and a splash of oj (covering that beautiful mess).  Bring to a simmer, let reduce (go smoke a cig).

der onions as garlic was added; looks like peanut brittle, mmmNow I can't say if this was a mistake of impatience, or if it had any pro/con/meh effect, but i threw in the shredded pork and realized I was a bit low on the moisture tip. Decision time; tomatoes or no? I went with yes; quickly chopped four nice tomatoes and tossed them in the pot too. Added a bit more coffee, and wow, it's already under pot? Well basically- I added some brown sugar, bay leaves, basil, oregano, parsley, fennel, over the course of the next three hours (while still in the pot and once in the crock pot).

So at any rate, where did everything go supernatural? This isn't the longest cooking chili i've done (i clocked it at about 7:40 under pot, 11:30 sample bowl), I didn't run into any problem-problems. So far it is not an exceptional bit of cookery, just a standard recipe chili with pulled pork instead of chuck roast or whatever. So far...

That is, around 10:45, the chili had been in the crock pot, on high for about an hour and I noticed as I was transferring and the fact remained, there was too much liquid in the chili. I know, I know; "You're from Ohio, land of Wendy's chili, and it has liquid, it's called a broth." Now I won't disqualify a chili qua chili based on it having or not having meat, similarly, beans and tomatoes presence or lack thereof do nothing to sway my opinion. But soupy chili will not stand, just as an 18 year whiskey is not aged 12 years and a 12 year isn't aged 6. It needs to be reduced and if not chunky or have some mode of saying "I will stick to your ribs." I am not a 'texture person', but this is a matter of principle and it shows you cared for it enough to let it cook thoroughly.

gyar that's a bowl fit for a mate!So what was the liquid that wasn't cooking down? I don't know for sure. I could have just skimmed it off the top and had a fantastic chili regardless. But this chili wasn't just about being fantastic; it was going to break down barriers, shattering glass ceilings, and changing minds. So all told I think I pulled a total of 2 or 3 cups of liquid off the chili. There was sufficient oil in it to create a roux. So I started browning flour in some of the oilier, initial skim. By the time I was done adding flour and liquid I had a solid three cups of mass. I folded it back in and let it cook for another 30-45 minutes.

I will post a picture here once I have a chance to actually photograph it. I have been to busy annihilating the bowl before getting a chance to shoot it. Here's a place-holder:

Update on 3:48PM by mfg

updated added a pic and a separate follow-up!

So me and the dog smoked a pig butt

So making this is the first notch on the belt of an item off my omnivore's bucket list

the final product; toasted egg rolls, grass-fed organic cheese with chives, tossed with some bbq/mustard, topped with crushed salt/vinegar chips

above: woods chips in the big blue bowl, trimmed fat, cider vinegar/orange juice marinade, rub, "glue" (honey+mustard)

here are the rest of the pics.

after trimming the fat, and setting it aside, i used a marinade injector to pump the butt full of orange juice and apple cider vinegar. then i hit it with the honey+mustard glue. then gave it a rub-down with a rub of salt, ancho pepper powder, paprika, chili powder, garlic powder, black pepper, red pepper.

i set the char-griller going; the one half was empty (waiting for the 5.41lb butt), the other half i stacked with charcoal and wet woods chips and lit with junk mail and put a foil pouch over top the flame with some more wood and a bit of water.

ready to put on the grill and smokethe smoking was supposed to last as long as it took. I got to the 130'F plateau and was ready to stoke the fire to get the temp up of the meat but then found out i was going to a birthday party. So, I was able to keep it at 130-140'F for about 6 hours, smoked with soaked apple chips. And then at 6:15p I pulled it, let it site for about 25 minutes to cool down (to minimize the release of liquids), and wrapped it in foil and put it in the fridge.

I woke up this morning, put it in that beautiful  blue casserole dish above, opened the foil enough to fill the bottom with orange juice and popped it in the oven for 325'F for 2 hours. I pulled it, it was still at 150, so it was basically cooked, but i was shooting to break the plateau of 160 and get it up to about 170'F for half of those minutes. Unfortunately, I had to just go with 30 minutes at 160'F. It's safe from Trichinosis; but it remained a bit tough in terms of the connextive tissues and a bit dense with the fat. Nonetheless, it looked great and tasted great when I called it.

the casserole, the stock, the buns, and the pullThose lovely components (minus the pot) was the buildings of my sandwich. So first, I guess I should explain the pot. In pulling apart the butt I noticed that the fat and connective tissues hadn't rendered down as much as is ideal because it didn't cook long and low enough. So while shredding the meat whenever I hit the connective tissues or fat I pulled it and put it into the pot, along with the residual drippings from the baking process. Once I had separated all of the meat; I began simmering all of the drippings and fat/ligaments along with some additional orange juice and a few ounces of coffee.  I'm planning on reserving this and using it to braise the shredded pork later.

(I also have the fat trimmings in the freezer, trying to use all the bits.)

Anyway, I grabbed two little handfuls of the pork threw it in a pan, tossed it with mustard and cajohns bbq sauce, and added some of that shredded chives cheese, toasted the buns and assembled.