Archive for May 2011

I’ve been wanting to follow-up with more pictures of our big barbecue event at the Open House on Mother’s Day weekend. Here are a few more shots to feed your eyes and make your stomach rumble.

I cooked on my SQ36 offset smoker both days of the Open House, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. We smoked bone-in chicken breasts, Italian sausages, pork ribs, and Boston butts and got rave reviews.

So here is a little to make you wish you were here. 🙂  Click a photo to enlarge it.

Please leave a comment to let me know what you think.

Have fun,

Lavern

Recently, one of our customers asked for advice on how to handle pulled pork cooked in advance since Boston butts can take all day to cook. He’s cooking on a Meadow Creek TS120 BBQ Smoker with a BBQ42 Chicken Cooker added to the front. Here are some tips for cooking Boston butts for crowds.

In catering, most of the time it will be very impractical to serve pulled pork fresh off the smoker. Not only would you need to be on-site extremely early, but also you would need to guess how long it will take and try to meet deadlines, which can be terribly stressful with Boston butts.

You can smoke your meat the day before. Pull it, put it into foil pans, and cover it with foil. Make absolutely sure you cool the meat correctly. Then pull your smoker out to the party the next day for show and use it to heat the pork in the foil pans. You can also use your smoker to cook chicken or meats that get done in a few hours if needed.

If you don’t want to use your BBQ smoker to heat the pulled pork, you can heat it at the party in an electric roaster.

You could also experiment with smoking the butts the day before and refrigerating them overnight. The next day put them back on the smoker at the party to heat them and after they reach temp, pull them on-site at the party. This is just a idea. You need to experiment with it before doing it large scale. With this you need to make sure you cool these large chunks of meat properly. I think it could easily be done if you have adequate refrigeration.

We are having a great time today with the SQ36 BBQ Smoker and the PR42 Pig Roaster fired up, cooking 28 pork butts. If you doubt the seriousness, come on over and you’ll see what I mean. Cold Springs Garden Center (parent company of Yoder’s Smoky Mountain Barbecue) is having open house and Mother’s Day celebration Friday and Saturday (May 6 and 7).

On the menu is homemade donuts and coffee in the forenoon, pulled pork sandwiches and BBQ samples around noon. If you drop by tomorrow (Friday) we’ll be cooking more pork butts for the next day. We plan to have the SQ36 Offset Smoker fired both days with chicken, sausage, and pork ribs for samples (until they are consumed). All free, by the way.

If you are close enough and it suits, please do come by. While you’re here, you can check out our fresh load of Meadow Creek inventory, watch the Meadow Creek equipment in action, and the best—fill your belly with authentic southern-style BBQ!

Here are some pictures I shot today to show you what’s happening around here.

Click a photo to enlarge it and start the slideshow.

Leave a comment to let me know what you think.

Have fun,

Lavern Gingerich