Garlic Fennel Pulled Pork in the Vertical Smoker

hey what do you say weekend lawyers today we are smoking up this four pound boston butt we're making a homemade garlic fennel rub this is one of those recipes you have to start the day before let's get back here and make this homemade rub and i'll show you what we're up to this fennel garlic rub recipe comes from one of my all-time favorite barbecue cookbooks it's called cool smoke by tuffy stone and then i'm gonna make a grilled corn salad which comes from j kenji lopez alt so with that out of the way let's get right to this and by the way guys if you are like me and you make a lot of your own rubs you might want to invest in one of these little coffee grinders i'll put a link to this below this works great for making up your own rubs sometimes like today i need to grind up some seeds so these are fennel seeds man pick up that jar smell it it's got a licorice smell to it that's what's really going gonna make this special so we're starting with two teaspoons that we're gonna grind up to that i've got some crushed red pepper flakes i'm gonna do one teaspoon and i know they're already crushed but i'm gonna put them in with the fennel seeds anyways so we'll grind those two up [Music] then i don't know if we'll be able to see that yet but nice and ground up pretty much into a powder just want to pour this into a mason jar to that this is one half cup of kosher salt quarter cup of black pepper then i'm going to go with two teaspoons of garlic powder this is the best store-bought garlic powder i've ever had it's potent so let me get about two teaspoons [Music] put the lid on and i'm gonna shake it up to mix it now this actually is enough for about three of these four pound pork butts so if you want to uh cut back on the quantity that's fine or you'll have a good uh little fennel garlic rub for something else i'm sure this would be great on chicken any kind of pork all right and before i put the rub onto the pork butt i want to use a binder and what i mean by a binder is we're going to put something on the pork butt to help the rub stick i've used yellow mustard i've used sweet and spicy in a recent video and because today's mop sauce that we're going to use is worcestershire based that's what i'm going to use you don't have to use anything at all really if you don't want to if it's a little bit wet coming out of the package and you think it's going to stick then that's fine that'll work so what we're going to do is just rub it in make sure the whole thing gets coated and i think this will add some extra flavor and it's smelling good already so now that we have the binder on there we can get our rub on there so i'll just give it one last shake to make sure it's nice and combined [Music] and then i'll go ahead i'm just going to eyeball it we want to cover the whole thing [Music] what's going to happen guys is this sits overnight in the refrigerator uncovered it's going to kind of dry brine and what happens is the moisture is going to get pulled out of the pork by the salt that sounds like a bad thing at first but actually what happens once the salt is dissolved all of that moisture goes back into the meat pulling in all of the flavor so the saltiness the pepper and all the other spices it's going to get pulled down into the meat and then what's going to happen is it's going to create a nice wet sticky surface on the meats and that's going to allow the meat to collect more smoke during the smoking process [Music] okay so this is really about it for tonight [Music] i just got off of work so first thing i did is got the camera out got all this ready to go now i am ready to relax so refrigerator uncovered overnight it can be 12 hours 15 hours doesn't really matter when this comes out tomorrow it's gonna look completely different i'll show you what i mean by that little tacky texture and then we're going to throw it in the smoke and let it do its thing so we'll be back tomorrow i'll show you how this looks i can't wait all right one day later the pork is looking awesome before we take a look at that though i'm using my vertical offset smoker today i've got it set to 250 degrees fahrenheit or about 120 degrees celsius for my metric system friends uh if you're using a pellet smoker same thing 250 degrees fahrenheit use your favorite pellets for me today for the wood i'm using oak and cherry and what i love about doing this the day before all i really have to do is just throw it right in the smoker once it's up to temp but let's real quick take a look at this so this had a chance to air dry overnight in the refrigerator and what's happened is it has developed this very sticky tacky skin it's called a pellicle and there's some very strong opinions on the internet about this so take it with a grain of salt but the theory is that this sticky cold and wet texture helps the smoke stick better and stick more evenly we'll find out if that's true today some people say that you get a better bark but uh spin this around for you maybe a little bit better view here so very sticky almost like a cured salmon texture on the outside if you've ever had locks or something like that so again they call it a pellicle we'll see if we can myth-bust that or not today but i have done this several times and i like it but we'll leave that up to uh you guys to figure out for yourselves so let me get this right into the smoker pop that door open and i'm gonna go about the center rack as usual you'll notice if you've washed for any period of time i run this almost exactly like i do my vertical pellet smoker there's that bottom side which i'm going to place up for no real reason and keep them right about there close this up and then just to show you for those that are curious back here in the bottom left i've got a little water pan so just like in my vertical pellet smoker i like filling up that water tray most of the time in this smoker the back left corner is hotter than the rest so that kind of acts as a diffuser keeps that temperature nice and balanced so let's get this closed and then what we're going to do we're going to let this smoke for one hour then we're going to come out and start spritzing it about every half an hour after that so right now we have one hour to make that spritz let me show you how to do that so it's a vinegar base sauce this is apple cider vinegar and i'm gonna use half a quart which will be about half of this bottle that i've already uh had opened up tablespoon of black pepper two tablespoons of kosher salt a couple tablespoons of your favorite hot sauce couple tablespoons of your favorite worcestershire sauce half a stick of butter and because i'm outside i'm gonna go ahead and bring this up to a boil over top of my firebox but you could do this on your grill you could do this on your stovetop just get it over here [Music] so that's plenty hot to bring this up to the boil right here i just have a piece of oak preheating it's about ready to go into the firebox so let the butter melt we're going to bring it up to a simmer and then i'll keep mine in a mason jar i want something with the lid to keep the bugs out keep the leaves all that stuff out while it sits outside there's a little bit left here in the pot that i'll just use for my first mop which will be in about 30 more minutes so we'll come back in 30 minutes we'll check out that pork butt we'll put this mop on there and see how it's looking and we're coming up on the one hour mark total since it's been in we're holding steady right around 250 degrees fahrenheit let's pop this door open man that smells so good i love that oak and cherry mixed there's a look at our butt so the crust or the seasoning has uh dried out it's not coming off on my finger that's a good sign and so now i'm gonna hit it up with our mop just a little bit that was left in the pan here it's that good vinegar a little bit of hot sauce it's gonna be awesome and this is the name of the game from here folks just every 30 minutes come in and mop this thing keep it moist we're going to build up some extra flavors close this back up i'm not going to show you every 30 minutes we're going to come back when it's about time to wrap this i want to take it up to uh we'll go about 160 165 degrees fahrenheit today on the internal before we wrap it and then we'll put it back in to finish it up [Music] all right so our pork is getting close i just temped it it's about 160-ish on the internal what i'm gonna do right now is i've got three ears of corn so i'm gonna make that corn tomato salad and what i'm gonna do is let them kind of steam down here on the bottom rack it'll be a lot easier to get the uh silk out of here so we're gonna let them kind of park hook on the bottom rack and then we'll finish them off on a grill so we get some nice grill marks on the corn let's take a look at our pork it's looking good i've been mopping it every 30 minutes and i'm gonna give it one more mop because this probably got 30 minutes before i wrap it and uh going by color when it has the color that i want nice deep dark mahogany and that'll probably be around 165 degrees fahrenheit go ahead and push this back in and then we'll come back when it's time to wrap and start that corn and tomato salad [Music] okay so this has the color i'm looking for i don't really care what the temperature is but i know a lot of you are curious about that so let's see where we're at about 170 fahrenheit here's the fat cap side here's the top that was getting all the baste here's the bottom it looks really really good so what i'm going to do is wrap this up two layers of foil so i don't get any leaks i want to hold in as much juice as possible and just so you know you do not have to wrap this if you don't want to the reason most people wrap it is so it doesn't get too much smoke flavor you don't want to over smoke it but this will speed up the cooking process too help tenderize it but you absolutely don't have to wrap it if you don't want you could just leave it in smoke the whole time until it gets probed tender and that's my game plan once i wrap this i don't care what temperature it gets to i just want to make sure that temperature probe goes in and out like it's going into warm butter that usually happens somewhere around 200 degrees fahrenheit i've had them go all the way up to 215 sometimes it happens right around 200 just no two pork butts are the same so double wrap back in the uh smoker until it's done and then we're gonna start working on this corn salad so this corn has been in there maybe 45 minutes we're gonna pop it out of here and we're gonna peel back the husk it should come off real easy especially the silk so this corn is ready to eat right now if you wanted but we're gonna get a little bit of char on there for some extra flavor just get these out [Music] and then i'm going to put it right over my coal bed you can leave those husks on no big deal cut them off later [Music] and i'll do a couple minutes per side to get some char marks and then we're going to cut it up and make that salad and the corn is done we'll get to that in one second i just did about a minute per side so this is a kenji lopez alts salad recipe i love his videos i will put a link in the description if you want to see the whole thing and one of the great things about watching kenji is all the different little techniques so what he shows you is to rinse your onions this takes away that pungent flavor the same stuff that makes your eyes water and i don't know about you but i hate going to a summer picnic or something and you bite into a salad now you've got onion breath all day so we're going to take the edge off of those onions by rinsing them and depending on how many people you feed you might need to do more or less i'm just doing about half of a medium red onion okay now for the corn just gonna take it right into the bowl run my knife down the edge so just cut the corn off the cob into the bowl and then next up i've got a bunch of little cherry tomatoes you could use your favorite i like to cut them in half so go through cut all these in half all right now i'm going to rough chop some cilantro he used basil you could also use parsley just whatever you like go ahead and do that okay now we'll add the onions some salt to taste a tiny bit of coarsely ground black pepper and then some fresh lime juice freshly squeezed i'm going to start with one i'll taste it if i feel like i need more i'll add more just kind of how i roll and then i have some extra virgin olive oil just enough to coat and i'll grab my tongs and give this a good mix get everything incorporated and let me just get a quick taste test here see if it needs anything i want a little bit more lime on that but other than that it's beautiful and now that i know that tastes good in goes the feta cheese it's always better to have the whole block of fetid and break it up but when i went to the grocery store they didn't have it so just got to make do there we go so now this will be ready for later tonight and finally our pork butt is done so it was about a four pound butt with resting period it took roughly six hours i let it rest for an hour probably should let it rest for another hour but check this out it really darkened up nice and that is an awesome bark as far as i'm concerned and so i got two layers of gloves on i know this is still going to hurt so do a quick you could slice this you could shred it you could pull it i'm just gonna pick it up with my hands and take the heat like a man for a second just so i can show you this and it shreds beautifully i'd say another half hour rest uh would have been perfect just to let it cool a little bit more so just a closer look that's the smoke ring that red beautiful bark i mean it just smells amazing the texture is so soft let me find a bite i want to try i'm gonna go with this piece here with the bark here we go wow very very savory a little bit of spice a lot of pepper i'll definitely be trying this one again and then i've got the salad so we're gonna be eating good tonight let's try that that salad is so light and fresh and it's had a couple hours to let all those flavors kind of marry together i absolutely love it and you know what you're gonna love one of those two videos right there and i'll see you over there you

Channel: Weekend Warrior BBQ

Views: 5,163

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: pulled pork, pork, smoked pork, smoked pulled pork, garlic fennel pork roast, smoked pork shoulder, smoked pork butt, boston butt, weekend warrior bbq, lone star grillz, pulled pork recipe, how to make pulled pork, bbq pulled pork, pulled pork sandwich, best pulled pork, bbq, pork shoulder, how to cook pulled pork, pork butt

Id: FPdvXNg9080

Length: 20min 25sec (1225 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 06 2021