The great smoked turkey experiment 11/25/20

 

Since we're staying away from everyone this Thanksgiving,  just for grins, we decided to smoke a couple of 4 pound turkey breasts.  One was prepped and brined overnight using Aaron Franklin's brine recipe.  The second was prepped straight out of the bag.  Both got a good dose of North Main BBQ All-N-1 seasoning.  The plan is to smoke for 3 hours, check the temperature, then finish wrapped in the oven with a lot of butter.

In the zone.

3 hours in and we are here.  Temperature is only around 130, so time to butter 'em up and into the oven for another hour or so.

The final results.  Fabulous.  My Mrs and I agreed the brined turkey was a bit juicier, but it was also a bit salty (well, duh).  Both had excellent smoke flavor and sliced like butter.  As we discovered with salmon filets, sometimes all the extra prep doesn't add much.  We will definitely be having a happy Thanksgiving with these smoky meats and some extra happy days as well.

Pot infused beef jerky

Yes, it's a thing in Colorado.  Can pot infused brisket be far behind??  Thanks to my buddy Dave in Austin for the link.

https://www.aspentimes.com/news/high-mountain/

Green's Texas BBQ, 11/21/20

 

http://greenstexasbbq.com/

My brother wanted to do a social distance get together this afternoon in their back yard so we loaded up with Green's to take over to Oak Cliff.  Mighty fine.  He now has something similar to North Main's "All N 1" spice and I look forward to trying it out once he offers it in larger bottles.

I was first in line today at about 10:15.  By the time I left, about 11:15, there were about 30 folks waiting.

Another pork belly experiment, 11/1/20

 

We visited our friend John out in San Angelo earlier this week and he gifted us a 5 1/2 lb slab of apple wood smoked bacon.  Our freezer is full, so we had to cook it this weekend.  Dang it.  I'm still looking for the tenderness Don Green gets on his pork belly bites so this will be an experimental batch.  Previously we had smoked the pork belly then wrapped tightly in foil and finished in the oven.  That still didn't have the tenderness factor.  This time we will smoke for 3 hours, chop them up, then finish in a crock pot for as long as it takes.  We'll see how that works out.

We sliced it as super thick bacon slices, maybe 3X extra thick bacon.  We are smoking with oak and pecan from our yard, as usual.  We'll add sauce once it hits the crock pot.  

After 3 hours on the smoker here's what we found.

A few samples found that some more tenderizing was needed so we chopped it up into small bites.

Into the crock pot they went along with my last bottle of Dr Pepper BBQ sauce.  We'll let the crock pot work its magic for a couple of hours and check and see how they're doing.

After 3 hours in a crockpot tenderness was achieved.  However I learned we should probably leave the bites un-sauced til the very end.  We'll be enjoying the experiment with some rice for the next few days.