April fool’s smoke

No April Fool’s here today… I’m doing some some pulled pork, some spare ribs and some fatties and armadillo eggs… What a great day!  As I’m writing, I can see past my computer and look at the woods, with blue pecan smoke wafting up… it looks great, and, since it’s warmer, the screen doors are open so I can smell that incredible scent!

I started out today injecting a 6 lbs pork butt with a mixture of coffee, liquid cane sugar and chipotle hot sauce.  Not a great cup of coffee, but a great injection!  One tip if you want to inject… splurge on the all metal injector; it makes a huge difference!

WARNING:  Lots of pictures!!!  Starting with a spectator from my woods…

Next, I trimmed a couple of racks of spare ribs to St. Louis ribs.  In the picture to the left, I’m showing that I cut through the tip of the bone; I like to do this so that there’s not cartilege on the ends of the spares.  I think it gives a neater appearance.

I used a modified rub from Alton Brown (not known as a barbecuer, but I
like this simple rub).  I basically take 6 parts sugar, 3 parts kosher salt, 1 part chili powder, and 1 part whatever else I feel like.

The ribs turned out very good, and I used the rib ends to doctor up some baked beans. Very tasty stuff!  I’m going to be switching the rub, though, as I don’t think there’s enough kick to this one.

I also tried something a bit different with pulled pork, using my standard injection, but then rubbing with a commercial rub.  The rub tasted ok, but didn’t add the flavor to the bark that I really like, so I’ll probably go back to what I’ve done in the past.

Now to the fatties and armadillo eggs.  The one fattie I did was done with a simple bacon wrap, but I basted with some barbecue sauce before putting on the bacon.  The armadillo eggs were varied in what I did, and varied in results, too!  One of my experiments didn’t actually work, but the good thing is that I’ve gotten decent enough that even my failed experiments turn out very edible!  it’s kind of like a science experiment; I set a hypothesis, try it, and determine whether my hypothesis was right.  Here’s a pic of the fattie and 2 armadillo eggs just off the smoker…

The fattie turned out good, with the layer of barbecue sauce under the bacon keeping a good moisture level.  And anything is better with bacon, right???

One of the armadillo eggs was country sausage with chipotle white cheddar cheese in it, then a simple rub applied.  The rub turned out nicely, and the cheese was nice and gooey.  The other normal armadillo egg was Italian sausage with a well caramelized onion, mozzarella and parmesean cheese, then parmesean cheese on top of the whole egg.  This one was GREAT, and would be a good addition to a pasta, with a marinara sauce ladled on top of the whole mess… great substitute for meatballs!

 

The final armadillo egg experiment was to make sausage eggs with egg centers.  This was the
experiment that didn’t really work; it turned out that

the egg white made it almost impossible to close the sausage back up.  I ended up just putting egg yolk in
the middle.  What did work well as applying panko breadcrumbs to the whole thing.  I’ve decided that

next time, I’m going to do something fun; I’m going to form small sausage egg shapes around a core of grated cheese formed into a ball.  Roll that in panko breadcrumbs and smoke until done.  I’ll take strips of bread and toast them, laying them down on a plate like a nest, then cut an egg in half, letting the cheese melt out like an egg yolk.  On top of that, lay a poached egg, making something of an armadillo eggs benedict.  Actually, I like that name!  They still turned out kind of cool.

Finally, here are just some pictures of the process…  As always, comments, questions, critiques are welcomed!