Say "Sharing is Caring" or I'll f**king sue you!

A friend passed along this blog entry from AmLaw Daily, a legal industry website, about three lawyers from Pennsylvania against whom we will be competing next month.

http://amlawdaily.typepad.com/amlawdaily/2008/05/bbq-qa.html

For those readers who aren't close Friends of Shirtless Mike's (FOSM for short), both Chris and I are attorneys and developed our passion for smoked meat while roommates at William and Mary Law. [ed. note. Adam developed his love of smoked meat in his Uncle Jimbo's woodshed in 1989. He doesn't like to talk about it.]

Much about the practice of law lends itself to barbecue-- it can be tedious and frustrating, every step depends on the precise execution of the previous step, and, in competition, barbecue is a zero-sum game. But these basic similarities give way to a unyielding disconnect-- barbecue is all about sharing something you love with others-- whether they be family, friends, strangers or judges.

With that in mind, I'm expecting the down-time spent with our fellow competitors to be the highlight of this competition. I've spent most of my adult life attending barbecue competitions, blues festivals and pretty much every other outdoor-booze-and-food-themed-event that costs less than ten bucks in the mid-Atlantic region. It takes a certain type of personality to enter into these events. You need discipline, a naturally stratospheric energy level, a love of barbecue and, most of all, you need to draw pleasure from the act of sharing.

The prospect of a challenge from within the legal community is a surprising twist on what will already be a memorable experience for the three of us.

...and there's the rub.

Reading back through my past few posts, I've realized that I haven't paid much attention to our mission here-- the mechanics of barbecue.

As I've discussed earlier, barbecue is built on two basic elements-- meat and heat. However, this is a vague and fairly misleading characterization of what makes good barbecue. To make the jump from a charred piece of chicken slathered in bottled sauce to something that would make these guys lick their chops and beg for more, we need to focus on the wide range of mechanics and techniques within the process of adding heat to meat.

In a future series of posts, I'll share with you everything I've learned about heat as it relates to barbecue. These nuggets of wisdom have come from years of experience and enough heat-related accidents to merit their own blog. I plan to discuss the processes of smoking, direct and indirect grilling and detail the wide range of commercially available combustibles that make up the science of barbecue.

But first, I'd like to talk about the meat-- specifically how meat is prepared prior to being exposed to heat. While I really love seafood (I'm a Baltimore boy, after all), this discussion will focus on the two types of meat we will be entering in June-- pork shoulder in this post and whole chicken in the future.

In prepping a piece of meat, you want to make sure that it is clean and dry. Rinse it thoroughly and blot with paper towels. This is true for both chicken and pork, as well as beef, lamb and most firm fish.

When prepping a pork shoulder, trim the fat cap (the heavy 1/4 inch layer of pork fat that covers one side of the shoulder) on the top of the meat so that it is uniform, but do not remove it. This fat is the key to keeping the meat moist as it spends 9 or more hours smoking. By the time you remove your shoulder from the heat, the cap will have melted into the meat and been absorbed, yielding that one-of-a-kind richness that makes barbecue lovers everywhere worship at the shrine of the pig.

The preparation of a pork shoulder is simple and straightforward, relative to the marathon cooking process. Take the pork shoulder and cover it completely with a dry rub. Make sure to cover every loose flap with rub and try to get it in every fold of the meat. Wrap the shoulder tightly in plastic wrap and let it rest, refrigerated, for at least an hour. For our competition, we will let our shoulder marinate overnight in the dry rub.

Once you've let the pork sit in the rub for a sufficient length of time, it's ready to go on the smoker.


The only nuance in pork shoulder preparation comes when you decided what goes into your rub. Most traditional dry rubs are a mix of a small handful of key ingredients-- salt, black pepper, paprika, brown sugar. These ingredients alone are enough to make a delicious piece of pork. Our dry rub includes a few additional ingredients-- garlic powder, onion powder, ground mustard, cayenne pepper and dried oregano-- but remains simple.

There are a very wide range of commercially produced dry rubs out there and many of them are delicious. Experimenting is a big part of barbecue, and the best part about learning to 'que for yourself is that you can tailor your rubs and sauces to your own taste.

Hate Oregano? Leave it out.

Love Coffee? Mix your favorite french roast with paprika and smoke away.

Chocaholic? Take grated dark chocolate and mix it with paprika cayenne pepper for an unforgettable sweet, spicy and smoky ambrosia.

Try what you like. Ditch what you don't. Be creative and have fun. Just remember, the ingredients of your dry rub will do more to flavor your pork than any other single step in the process so make sure you taste it before you use it.

...and there's the rub.

Shirtless Mike Loves the Spatchcock. Loves it.

[ed. note. In this space, I've written extensively about barbecue and its role in our lives and I will continue to do so. Barbecue is a singularly cathartic experience for many guys-- an opportunity to bond, to escape and, most of all, a forced exercise in relaxation. While all of this is and will remain my focus, sometimes it needs to just be about the food. This is one of those times.]

Below is a previously written post about a thanksgiving masterpiece we whipped up in 2007. The recipe is original, adapted from several we discovered on the web. Pictures are of Karen, our Thanksgiving Turkey and of my 22.5" Weber One-Touch Gold.
















Each year on a Sunday around Thanksgiving , our friends get together, eat too much, drink too much and really give thanks for just how cushy our young-adult lives have become. This year a friend and I combined our respective "friends Thanksgivings" and hosted it in my apartment, Shirtless-Mike-style. The side dishes were potluck, with our teammate Adam contributing his legendary Mac and Cheese. All-told, the 23 people who came to gorge and imbibe produced quite an impressive feast, the centerpiece of which was our BBQ Spatchcocked Turkey.

The technique behind a "spatchcocked" bird is simple-- remove the backbone completely by cutting along its edges and snipping off any bits of rib that remain. Once the backbone of the bird is removed, splay it out breast-side-up and lay it flat on your cooking surface. This technique greatly reduces cooking time and allows the white meat and dark meat to cook evenly, producing a far juicier bird. For a great step-by-step guide to spatchcocking poultry, check out this article from the San Fransisco Chronicle.

For you extra-curious food geeks, Alan Davidson, in The Oxford Companion to Food, provides a brief etymology of the term. "The theory is that the word is an abbreviation of 'dispatch the cock,' a phrase used to indicate a summary way of grilling a bird after splitting it open down the back and spreading the two halves out flat." [thanks to nakedwiz.com for the quote].

I had my butcher spatchcock a 26 lb. Bell and Evans turkey in preparation. With chickens, I normally do the prep work myself, but a bird of this size is heavy, clumsy and likely too thick for my poultry shears to handle.

I brined the turkey for a full day in my homemade cider brine, removed it from the brine, patted it dry and rubbed it with an herb/garlic/oil paste that I made in a food processor. The brine and rub recipes are below.

You can just chop everything up by hand, but the fine texture of the paste allowed the oil to both bronze the skin and infuse the skin with the herbs. I grilled it over indirect heat with a drip pan full of apple juice under the bird and I used more apple juice to baste. I'd guess the dome temperature was around 250-275, but it could have been a little hotter than that-- my weber one-touch gold didn't have a thermometer at the time.

I pulled the turkey off of the grill when the white meat reached 170 (approx. 5 hours), tented it and let it rest for 25 minutes. It was golden and crispy on the outside and juicy and tender throughout.

The one thing I would change from the way I grilled the bird was the cooking time for the dark meat. I should have pulled the dark meat when it reached 175, since detaching it from the rest of the bird only involves slicing off two small flaps of skin. It was a little bit drier than the white meat as a result, but still tasty.

Click Here for Ingredients and Basic Prep Instructions.