BBQ Pizza

While at my folks house yesterday morning for our weekly pancake breakfast I had an idea for a use for the 10-12 lbs of pulled pork I currently have in my freezer. We were watching Food Network like always and Guy’s Big Bite was on, Guy had a friend on and they were making what they called “Le Hog Pizza” (recipe here). It is basically a white pizza with bacon, canadian ham, and pork meatballs crumbled on top with some regular ham added at the end, looked really damn good to me…

So, I got to thinking. How about a pizza with a little bit of barbecue sauce for a base, some cheese, and pulled pork on top? Sure sounds like something to try to me! I stopped at Publix on the way home and picked up a ball of pizza dough (and a Boboli crust just in case since I have had bad luck with fresh dough in the past) and some pizza cheese. We got home and I called Ashley to come over to be a taste tester and got to work… I set the gas grill to full blast with a pizza stone on the grates.

First, I reheated a package of pork by defrosting it in the microwave for 15 minutes, then chopped up some of the few larger pieces.

Next, I rolled out the dough (almost gave up on it, but I prevailed in the end) and spread a very thin layer of Williamson Bro’s BBQ sauce on the dough.

Added some cheese (Publix Six Cheese blend w/ mozzarella, provelone, parmesan, asiago, fontina, and romano), probably about 3/4 to 1 cup worth.

Last came the best part, pork.  Here I probably added about 1/2 to 3/4 of a pound, don’t want to scrimp, right? I also sprinkled on some Bad Byron’s Butt Rub for just a bit more flavor…

Ashley and I put the pie on the wicked hot grill and in about 10 minutes it was done. Sorry, I didn’t get any shots of it cooking, wasn’t thinking.

Here is a shot though of the finished product about to be tasted, will get better shots and some close up’s next time. I promise.

This pizza came out awesome! Sure there are some things to tweak (there always are). We all agreed that some more cheese would be a good thing, I went pretty light this time since I wasn’t sure how cheese and bbq would go, and a little more sauce toward the middle of the pie as well. Around the edges you could taste a little bit of the sauce, but in the middle it got overpowerd by all of the meat, and since I am not going to back off on the meat, more sauce is in order…

In the end, this is one of my new favorites. I will be playing with the recipe some, maybe add some sausage or bacon and trying new sauces. I will share all of these with you guys. I will also be serving this pizza as an appetizer on Smoke Day, May 23, 2009. Here is some info about WSM Smoke Day V

Thanks guys!

Two more cooks down…

I know, I know… I acknowledge that I am one of the worlds worst procrastinators, but here are my last two cooks. The baby back ribs I alluded to in my last post, and some boneless, skinless chicken breasts I cooked last night.

First the ribs.

I didn’t get time to go by my butcher, so I picked up a pack of ribs at BJ’s Wholesale. 3 racks to a cryovac pack, don’t remember the price…

I put on the same Texas BBQ Rub that I have been using exclusively for the last few cooks and wrapped the ribs to sit overnight in the fridge. Took them out the next morning and started to prep for the smoker.

Since 3 racks on the WSM are a real tight fit, I decided to try rolling the racks this time and skewering to free up some room.

I smoked the ribs @ around 265 for roughly 4 hours using a few chunks of hickory and turned the racks once. When I opened up the cooker to take them off, it was hard not to chow down right there.

Cut the ribs up and 3 of us (Myself, Ashley, and my brother Nick) polished off everything in front of us (I did give 1 or 2 ribs to the dog). After about 2 ribs, something seemed a little off, I realized that the membrane was still on the back of the ribs. After buying from the butcher every other time I never even though about checking that, oops. This did not deter us at all, just took a little longer peeling off where it was worst…

On to last night cook!

I came across a recipe for boneless, skinless chicken breasts on the Virtual Weber Bullet site and decided to try it out.
I picked up a 4.4lb package of chicken from my local Publix,

and put the same Texas BBQ Rub on for about 30 mintues as I started the charcoal.

I used one full charcoal starter of Kingsford and a couple of chunks of pecan wood (something new!)

I did add a link of kielbasa to fill up the grate and because I was jonesing for it and got the temps up to about 270. I also was only running a foiled water pan empty rather than the clay pot I have been using.

After about one hour in the smoker I basted the chicken with some new BBQ sauce I picked up from my butcher that morning (was ordering for this weekends cookout). I don’t remember the name but will post up tonight when I get home with it. Has some mustard to it and a good bite.

As you can see in the picture below, I had to pull the chicken off the smoker and finish in the oven when the meat temps never got over 145 for some reason and the charcoal was almost shot. I threw them in the oven @ 350 for about 10 minutes and got up to the safe 165 and my wife and I enjoyed our dinner… The pecan wood was nice and relatively light and the sauce worked really well I think.

I have a big cook coming up this weekend (2 butts and 3 beer can chickens) with about 20 people coming over so we will see how my organization skills are.

See ya then!

Sorry I haven’t been around

Just been a little crazy for the last 6 weeks or so… I did have a great cookout on July 4th. Cooked out for the family (my parents, my brother and his girlfriend, and my wife’s parents). We did 2 pork butts and 2 racks of babybacks on the WSM, also made about a dozen ears of corn on the gasser just before everyone got there. Came out great! Got nothing but compliments, which definatley helped the ego a bit. My mother-inlaw even mentioned the possibility of having me make some pulled pork for my father-inlaws birthday in September (looking now like that won’t happen, but no biggie…).

Unfortunately I haven’t even touched my smoker since the 4th due to being so busy. I am cooking this weekend though! Going to have a few friends over Saturday and will make ribs for lunch, dinner will be “hot sandwiches” (spam and velveeta ground together, put on a bun, wrap in foil, and cook in the oven). I will make sure to take a ton of pictures this time and will have a post up by Monday at the latest. I promise.

I do have a request to anyone who might read this, any ideas on easy side Items I might cook with the ribs? I am not a baked beans person, and ABT’s don’t do anything for me either. Not sure what else I can do for the guys.

Second smoke, pulled pork!

After the pseudo debacle with my first smoke I decided to dive in and cook a couple of pork butts last weekend. I invited some friends over for a “guys day” since my wife was taking the baby to see some extended family. The stage was set for pulled pork, PS3, and Hi-def movies…

A couple days before the event I went to my butcher and picked up 2 boneless pork butts cryovaced. On Thursday (06/05), I unsealed them and rubbed with the same Butt Rub that I tried on the ribs the weekend before and wrapped them up for 24 hours.

Friday night I fired up the WSM at around 8:30pm and put the meat on around 9:00. Looking back I think part of my problem with temps on the first cook was that I was reading between 2 racks of ribs and the cold meat was messing up my readings. For this cook, I found two little metal picture hangers in a “homeowners kit” that I had laking around. I hung these hangers from the top rack and set the probe on the “u” shaped end letting me get a temp from about 1 inch below the rack. Seems like this worked pretty good.

Since this was my first overnight cook, and I still didn’t trust my thermometer very much, I resigned myself to staying up all night and keeping an eye on the cook. Temps were holding pretty good around 240-250 until around midnight when a pretty good thunderstorm came through. I ran outside in the rain and opened up the vents a bit since the temp had dropped down to about 200. The rain stopped after about 1 hour and I got to go back out and adjust the vents again to slow down the rising temps. I let the temps stay around 250-260 this time and they held there all night long, even let me sleep a bit on the couch…

I went back outside to turn the butts over at 9:00AM and check the internal temp of the meat. They were around 170 at that time and I was shooting for around 190. Got to 190 at about 11:30AM and pulled the meat off of the smoker. Since I don’t have a cooler at the time to wrap the butts up in foil and hold in, I put them in foil serving trays and tented more foil over them.

Here are a couple of pics of the butts right after they came off of the smoker.

Unfortunately these were all of the pictures I took that day, sorry, I got a little excited and my hands were rarely clean enough to work an SLR… I promise to do better next time.

I let the butts cool for about an hour and a half until my friend Mitch came over and then proceeded to start pulling the pork apart. Each pork butt filled one of these medium sized trays from BJ’s with pulled pork. There was a good smoke ring and plenty of “bark” to mix in. I had trimmed the fat cap off of one of the butts (the first of the 2 pictures above) and left the other one as bought just to see how each turned out. The trimmed butt had a lot less waste when I was pulling and more of that tasty bark.

At around 3:00PM everyone (Mitch, Ashley, Nick, David, and Larry) had arrived and we dug into the pork. Since I am not yet to the point of making my own sauce (will one day) I bought a gallon of Williamson Brothers BBQ sauce www.williamsonbros.com

The pork went over very well as we watched Pans Labyrinth on HD-DVD and played Gran Turismo 5: Prologue on Playstation 3. Thankfully there was plenty of pork left over for my wife to enjoy and to take some to my folks the next day.

All in all a great day and for sure made me want to fire the smoker up again very soon. I think I will try to do some ribs again next and hopefully not make the same mistakes I made on the first try, after that it looks like I will do pulled pork again for July 4th and have my family and inlaws over for that. Wish me luck!

First cook, baby back ribs.

Well, Saturday May 31 was the day for my first foray into smoking… I decided to try baby back ribs since those are supposed to be pretty easy to do.

I went and picked up 3 slabs of baby backs from my local butcher (www.thecornerbutchershop.com) and put some Bad Bryon’s Butt Rub (www.buttrub.com) on them and let that sit for about 12 hours.

Got my WSM!

This is a little late, but just been busy… I got my early fathers day/birthday present on Friday, May 23rd. I wasn’t able to get time to put it together until the next Wednesday.

Here are the pics of the cooker going together.

1. The Weber Smokey Mountain Cooker as it came shipped from amazon.com

See all the steps to install after the break.

Hi!

My name is Nathan and I am about to start making real barbecue for the first time… I have grilled, but now comes the time to smoke some meat and really go to town.

In the coming weeks my wonderful wife is going to buy a Weber Smokey Mountain smoker for my birthday/father’s day (my first one!). My next post will be when that arrives and I get to decide what to cook first. There will be plenty of pictures and maybe a video or two for you to follow along on my journey.