BBQ Pulled Pork & Ribs
As Autumn rolled in, I saw a clear day coming up on the weather forecast and decided to spend it in the garden working on my barbeque smoking skills. I wanted to run out my latest bible of meat, the Pitt Cue Co Cookbook, but I’m far from a barbeque expert, so I decided to keep it simple and try some pulled pork. The book says that a full smoker works better, so I decided to whack some ribs in too to keep it busy.
The nice thing about these two recipes is that they both use one rub and one sauce, so I didn’t have too much to do in order to throw it all together. The Pitt Cue Co House Rub was simple enough, and is absolutely gorgeous - I’ve been throwing it in everything since. The Mother Sauce, on the other hand, is, in my kitchen, pretty tough to put together, so I doctored it rather heavily. Here’s my ingredients list:
Cheapskate Mother Sauce
400ml beef stock 1 shallot 10g butter 40ml Marsala 40ml Ketchup 15ml Cider Vinegar 8ml Worcestershire sauce 1/4tsp Tabasco 15g brown sugar
I have no doubt that it’s nowhere near as good, but who the hell has dry-aged beef trim and pork dripping knocking about in their kitchen?
I have a 57cm Weber Kettle. I used the minion method for my coals, piling up a load of coals on one side of the kettle and pouring lit coals on top. This works, but it’s quite hard to get the coals into a decent pile that will burn well - I’ve since learned about the snake method, which I’ll try next time. I stuck a water tray underneath the meat, and also put one above the coals as the Pitt Cue Co book suggests. Apparently a full smoker stays quite moist inside, but with less meat it’s worth adding more water to help recreate that environment. I soaked a good few handfuls of whiskey chips in a bucket and threw about half of them on top of the coals at the start, adding the rest bit by bit throughout the day. I’m not very happy with this method: I shouldn’t have opened the grill as much. In future, the snake method plus a load of wood on top of the coals should make this better.
The pork prep was pretty straight-forward - I trimmed some fat and covered it in rub as thoroughly as I could. The ribs were basically the same, but with the extra step of removing the membrane from the underside. This is a bit weird and I’d never done it before, but it turned out to be super easy. Weber has a handy guide that’s pretty easy to follow.
With that, I fired up my chimney starter, poured the lit coals in, put the meat on the grill, and left it. I’m pretty bad at this bit - I’m not used to the temperature of my grill yet so I check it a lot, and I peek at the meat too much to see how it’s cooking. Once I’ve done a few more smokes I’m sure I’ll calm down a bit!
1kg of pork took 8 hours, and probably could have coped with another. The ribs took 3 hours and 40 minutes.
The ribs got a brush with mother sauce, then went back on the grill for a bit. The pork got wrapped in foil to rest and then torn up and smothered in that lovely mother sauce. The end result was some really nice pulled pork, and the best ribs I’ve ever eaten. I’m no rib expert, mind. I’ll definitely be doing both of these recipes again: they both fit onto my BBQ nicely and they make for an incredible meal.