How to Make the Best Pork Belly Burnt Ends with Matt Pittman | Traeger Kitchen Live

30 seconds out smile corey got him hey guys it's matt pitman of meat church and welcome to another episode of traeger kitchen live you might be asking yourself why am i wearing such an amazing party shirt well because this is the 20th episode of traeger kitchen live and my fifth so needless to say it's a big party here in texas today in the sweltering heat but i'm excited today because we are going to teach you one of my most favorite recipes which is pork belly burnt ends honestly i can't believe it took us until the 20th episode to do this recipe this is super popular amongst traeger nation but it's a recipe that i developed years ago gained a lot of popularity and honestly i'm just like really really really excited to share with you guys if you don't know who i am i'm the founder pit master head janitor at meat church barbecue we're about a six-year-old barbecue lifestyle brand i'm one of traeger's barbecue ambassadors i spend a lot of my time teaching traeger nation and sharing kind of what i do we sell you know about 18 barbecue products and probably about 100 different shirts hats stuff like that trying to be a lifestyle brand like i said but what i'm most passionate about is teaching you guys and sharing my barbecue knowledge for those of you in your backyards this is my backyard it might not look like it but this is my outdoor kitchen it's closed off on two walls and it's open on this end like my pool's right here so even though it doesn't look like it i can assure you we are outside in the near 100 degree heat here today but uh pretty excited to be here with my buddy corey aka robinson barbecue he's going to be fielding your questions so this is an interactive event i commit to answering as many questions as i can today there's actually going to be some prizes so you got to pay attention stay engaged and we're going to be giving away some stuff throughout this and then we're going to have like a a grand prize at the end any questions that i don't answer during the live like i think we'll get most of them answered i'll go back into the facebook post and the youtube video and i'll be sure to interact with you guys and answer anything that i can so let's talk about what we're doing today um so you know the flies in my backyard are smart they know what goes on so you'll just have to excuse them but luckily we're not a restaurant this is just for me tonight so it doesn't really matter you're staring at a gorgeous snake river farms eight and a half pound pork belly it's a skinless belly and as you can see it's got extra rib meat on it which sometimes that's kind of hard to find but i can tell you is some of the best tasting pork belly you're ever going to have so no doubt this is going to be amazing you know pork belly in my opinion is typical you know when i got exposed to pork belly it was folks cooking it at like a lot of asian restaurants things like that so we're going to put an asian twist on it today just the way and we serve it at the end we're going to serve it on a on a bow bun with a with an apple slaw but other than that if you don't go that route what we're going to teach you really is just a tried and true hardcore barbecue recipe um i'm gonna tell you why i love this recipe and then we're just gonna we're gonna get into it so this cut of pork belly is not that expensive right i told you this came from snake river farms you could order this off of their website but locally wherever you're at you know where can you get pork belly fortunately for us we can get it at our local grocery store if you don't see it in the grocery store i would just ask for it to see if they have it costco is really usually a great option to get pork belly it's pretty inexpensive a belly this size is normally around 30 bucks i like cooking this because for 30 bucks i can feed a ton of people so it's pretty inexpensive to be honest with you and honestly it's difficult to screw up so you know if you're just starting out barbecue you've never done this this is something that you wouldn't be too intimidated to try what i'm going to show you is my typical what i call straightforward way to make amazing barbecue minimal ingredients we're not going to do a lot to it and it's gonna be incredible so so let's talk about where this recipe came from as far as um how i approach it and what i do with it so buddy of mine travis heim he's known as the guy the godfather of what he calls bacon burn ends that's going to be a little bit different but still you know very similar in ways and so we saw what travis did and we put our own spin on it and you know we've been doing this for i don't know probably five years or so but pork belly this is uh this is a skinless again uncured pork belly so if i took this piece of meat and if i put it in like a dry cure for a week that would magically turn into bacon i would take that meat then i would rinse it off pat it dry i would put it on the traeger at 165 degrees super low or sorry i would i would put it on super low like 170 180 degrees and i would cook it until it's 165 degrees and you would have bacon you could slice that into bacon we're not doing that today um we're going to cook this thing you know from raw as is and if you tuned in probably about a month ago eduardo garcia cooked pork belly his was his was a lot different but you know made me super hungry watching his episode this is going to take on a kind of sweeter flavor profile so i grew up in the deep south so tennessee alabama georgia and i grew up on pulled pork so for me the flavor profile we're going to go with comes from kind of a southern barbecue flavor profile so you've got pork you've got barbecue sauce we're in texas where barbecue sauce really isn't a thing we say that good barbecue doesn't need sauce so we're a beef state and there's never sauce served with it but with pork you generally always serve sauce with it and we're definitely going to do that today but it's going to be quite simple so when i started cooking this i figured out you could cook it a couple different ways to get to what we're going to call pork belly burnings but let's talk about burnt ends first before we get into this what is it burnt in so in kansas city a restaurant called arthur bryant's they came up with brisket burnings years ago so they would have a picture this is a cooked brisket and when they were at service they would take their knife and they would cut off the edges or things that they didn't want to serve and honestly they'd hand them out as samples to their customers and they became wildly popular and at a point they decided you know what we need to sell this and we need to monetize it and that's what they've done so you take brisket you serve the the edges off of it and you know call it burn-ins um you know and they saw some of the things that i'm going to show you today but that's a true burn in and if you know me and you know my past you know that i've been pretty vocal on the internet with uh my buddy dr barbecue he disagreed with a lot of people that these should be called pork belly burnings because there's only one true burn in that's fine you know i have no issue with that but if you're gonna cook this piece of meat like a brisket burned in then i don't know why you can't call it a pork belly burn in so you call it whatever the hell you want i call it delicious today we're calling it pork belly burnings so i mentioned there's two ways to cook it the way that i'm not going to cook it is to cook it whole we're actually going to cut this into cubes raw we'll go with that in a second but what i want to do before we get started well first off i need to hydrate the coldest beer in ellis county but if you wanted to cook this hole you could do that and what i'm going to do so today i've got two blocks here this is my rosewood block and this is a rosewood block topper so i'm going to prep on this and i'm going to get rid of it and then we're going to do we're going to have our cooked meat on the block later so we've got a raw meat up here now if i wanted to cook this hole i would cook it over to where i can show you the fat side you basically would treat this like a brisket but what i would do first is i would take your knife and i used messermeister chef knives and i would score this fat there's a lot of fat back here i always get asked that what do you do with the fat we don't need to trim it off you also don't need to be scared of it i mean the first time my wife saw this much fat she's like there's no way i'm going to eat that but when you do what we're going to do today is going to be amazing but if you wanted to cook it whole what i would do is take my knife and i would just make an incision diagonally across it i'm only going in like a quarter inch and i would do that like every inch or so in a in a grid pattern and the reason you're doing that is when you when you you know smoke meat with a high heat or heat this fat is going to shrink up and what would happen is this pork belly would do like this so if you ever cook something that's flat and as you cook it it curls up that's because the fat is squeezing together so i'm just going to make some score marks on it i'm going to turn it and do the exact opposite way and i'm barely i'm barely cutting in this and again we're not going to cook it this way i'm just showing you a quick way in case you want to do this because some people prefer to cook it this way the prep is easier i think the method i'm going to teach you yields a superior result but i'm big on saying my way's not the right way it's just what i do so if you want to try this try this so what we're left with are a bunch of diamonds on the back of this pork belly now if i cook this when the fat cinches up this this pork belly um this pork belly will not do this the pork belly will lay flat so again if you wanted to cook it flat you could season this you could put it in your traeger and you could cook it till it was about 195 degrees internal temperature you could cube it up you could season it sauce it put it back in the pit in a pan for 30 minutes to an hour and have pork belly burnings but today we're actually going to go a different way which is cubing it raw in advance and i'll i'll get to that in just a second so let me talk about why i love this recipe so once we figured out the way that we like to cook it what i'm about to show you we go to a very popular barbecue festival in texas it's called the red dirt barbecued music festival it's in tyler texas it's got texas red dirt music and 20-ish barbecue joints and some of the top bbq joints in the state we don't own a restaurant by choice yet we're lucky enough to have with this recipe one of the longest lines so the first time we rolled this out there i'll never forget the promoter chase coulson walked up to me and he said dude your line's longer than the beer line and so i was pretty proud of that and that was off this recipe so if you're ever in texas normally this is in may was postponed this year come hang out with us at red dirt it's one of the uh you know it's amazing music great barbecue and we always have some flavor of our burnt ends so we'll do that here no we're not doing that okay all right so we're going to get started and we're going to again we're going to cube this in advance and we're going to get rolling and kind of show you my method and this will be this will be fairly straightforward all right we're going to glove up it's because it's hot but i'll tell you now i'm at home i'm not we always get these comments i'm at home i'm in my backyard i'm not a restaurant so my hands are clean being safe i'm not serving this to anybody so it's funny whether i glove or don't glove there's people that comment both ways like you should have gloves on why do you have gloves on you going into surgery so anyway but if you're feeding a bunch of people wash your hands hey you should be washing your hands anyway tonight all right so we're gonna get questions while i'm doing this what is the drink for the night the yeti rambler mug contains like i said the coldest beer in ellis county which as you know is hand cramping cold miller light and it's mighty good where can i get that shirt oh where can you get the shirt so we have fans of the ron swanson shirt this shirt is amazing i don't know i got it on the internet and it feels good right here like i feel you look this good you're gonna cook good so just fyi okay i'm gonna start cutting you can you guys ask questions jump in um i should be pretty thorough with this but fire away so the belly what i'm going to do is my goal here is to cut it into about one inch cubes and this is up to you you can go a little bigger a little smaller i don't like them to be much bigger i like them at about one inch and i'll show you why i'll have raw and i'll show you what they look like after we cook them you'll see what we're left with you certainly could go smaller if you want if you want to be like a little more crispy or something but i'll show you why i do what i do here in just a second so let's get started okay there's not a lot of trim to do but if something's hanging off i'm gonna i'm gonna trim that so i'm gonna do like i said about a first i'm gonna i am gonna trim up the edge because it's just not even in order to get even um inch pieces i'm going to just cut it into a nice square and then we're going to cut our one inch piece or one inch strips to start where can you buy belly locally where can i buy belly locally um here in dallas fort worth costco is a great option um to get it you can also go to snackriverfarms.com and they're going to have it as well we're just going to cut a few strips here you want a really sharp knife and a really cold belly anytime you're trimming any meat brisket whatever trim it straight out of the fridge so that it's nice nice and firm and easier to cut and this one's got so i'll tell you i mentioned this one has extra rib meat on it the first time i ever saw a belly like this i was teaching barbecue in sweden and that extra rib meat is awesome so after we cube this they won't look as pretty because that meat's sticking up but who cares i mean i care about what it tastes like all right now that i've got these one inch strips i'm going to cut these you know just into one inch squares we got questions while i'm doing this what kind of knife is that i use messer meister knives so this uh german steel this is the olivia elite series i love these knives just love the handle and honestly the way it the way it fits in my hand i've used a lot of other knives i like how this one holds an edge but this one just the balance in my hand this is the perfect feeling chef knife that's why i use it how much does that belly weigh how much does this belly weigh this belly was eight and a half pounds by the way i tried to put uh uh you know having done this this our fifth time if you go to meet church instagram so just at meat church if you go to our story we try to put some tips in there we've covered this cook up until the point of the belly going in the traeger and then we stopped it so that you know you would come watch this i'll post the rest of it later but one of the points of doing that is so that i can list all the tools that we use so in case you forget you can go over to instagram and you guys can check that out plus if you're a traeger customer and you're not following me church you're in the minority can you brine the belly first can you brine the belly first uh sure you could i don't think there's a reason to there's so much fat in this that i don't think there's any reason but you certainly can with any barbecue meat you know i say it's like a like a road map where you're going to take it what are you going to do with it and the first question is do i want to brine marinate or inject it to impart moisture maybe a little bit of flavor maybe a lot of flavor if you're marinating um you know but on pork belly i do not brine it personally how much fat do you trim off the top well how much fat do i trim off the top i actually didn't trim any i just trimmed off a random piece of meat that was flailing off but all this fat back here even though it looks like a lot like you guys know what bacon looks like a slice of bacon there's a lot of fat you don't have to trim it off i'm going to keep i'm going to cut a little bit more of this knife sharpener recommendations i'll give you a few so i have a work sharp i have couple work sharps just home unit that i use i have a local knife sharpener that i use and then you know over the summer with covet i've been using knife aid a company that you can find on instagram where you pay a fee and they ship you a package you put your knives in it uh and they ship them back to you which is actually pretty dang handy we were traveling back and forth between here and our other house and so it's kind of cool from one house to like send in your knives and by the time you got back they were they were there again you like that okay more questions i'm just going to since there's questions i'm going to i'm going to keep cutting have you ever would you ever inject the pork belly have i ever injected or would i inject a pork belly that's the same thing as the brining marinating question i just don't think it needs it you certainly could i mean we sell injections too but i don't ever push them on people i used to say that injecting was against my religion but that depends if you've got a lower grade cut of meat if you've got a cut of meat than have a lot of fat or something like that then that's certainly somewhere where i would inject brine marinade but i i'm telling you i just wouldn't overthink this me personally again even though i say my way's not the right way and all that jazz i just don't think it's necessarily needed in this particular meet so try it let me know what you think but i i don't think you mean look okay so look at this piece of meat and you see all the fat in there you can't get rid of those three layers of fat you can only get rid of the bottom i just don't see why you would inject it unless you're trying to change the flavor you know if you're really wanting to impart a different flavor profile then maybe you inject it but i don't think it's needed what could you do with the extra meat what could i well there isn't going to be any extra meat so this is all going to get cubed up so the question is what can i do with extra meat the only thing i had was this little strip normally i don't have any extra meat i cut this all up um so i don't i don't think you're going to need it to be to be honest with you i'm just not cubing this entire thing while we're talking but there shouldn't be any extra meat other than like a little piece you trim could you use honey hog pot on this so there's a question about the seasoning i'm going to save that question uh for when we season here in just a second which i'm going to start doing that now can you over cook the pork belly question about overcooking i'm also going to save that for when we talk about cooking it let's get into seasoning it today we're going to use our og honey hog rub this is one of the two rubs i took on the tv show barbecue pit masters in 2014. tuffy stone said he loved the flavor profile and took some home so i think this is the best rub on the planet on pork and so i love it it's our all-purpose rub and it has a little bit of honey powder added to it for a little more sweetness so it pairs perfect with pork it's also known to have an amazing color on pork my true story my son my eight-year-old son runs around with a bottle of this in the door of my truck in the meat church shop in our kitchen that he pours straight in his hand and just eats it straight every day honey hogs in his veins puts on his popcorn your kids will love this rub and i'm going to start seasoning while i'm talking this is going to take a lot of seasoning which let me take this point let me take this moment to talk about why i cube this up in advance so i talked earlier about you could have could cook the belly whole if i would have cooked this belly hole i would have seasoned the top the bottom and the edges and i would have cooked it until it was tender and went to cube it up when you do that you're gonna have you know four sides inside each piece of meat that didn't have any seasoning on them brisket burnings are cooked that way so it's okay but what i found with pork belly i like to season them thoroughly now like this that way you get caramelization color on all sides you get more seasoning i think it turns out better and i'll show you the final product clearly here in a little bit so that's why i cube this in advance i think it yields a better product but again you could go either way again i'm gonna start seasoning this seasoning is fine it comes out fast that's okay you're not going to hurt it this is going to be a lot we're going to season what i'm going to consider liberally and i would like to let this sit in it here for like 15 minutes when this gets wet when it looks wet that's just the seasoning pulling the moisture out of the meat and then at that point it's nice and adhered this is something you certainly could do the day before if you're going to cook this on the weekend you could do this step right here friday night you could put it in a steam pan and you can put it in your fridge no problem won't hurt it it's also okay to do it right before you cook it but i'm gonna i'm just gonna toss this by hand this isn't gonna be perfect that's okay get messy with it no biggie and we're just going to keep on seasoning while we're talking keep tossing it get dirty with it no big deal fire away your questions before we get into cooking what do we have that's not pork belly cooking related anything on the prep we're just about done with the prep it's going to keep tossing and seasoning what do you look for in a pork belly what do i look for in a pork belly it's a really good question so this is unlike a brisket to me most pork belly buy is going to be a commodity belly you don't have to go get a heritage breed hog like a berkshire or something like that when i say commodity i mean you go to the grocery store and you buy ribs or pork butt or belly you're not normally looking at a grade right like with beef you're looking at choice prime wagyu it's usually just commodity it just usually is what it is and that's okay it i mean i i enjoy nice pork so if i'm making like a pork chop i'd love a berkshire pork chop and and don't get me wrong if somebody's raising berkshire hogs and you can get that for a belly go do it i mean you know this this stuff is amazing but don't feel like you have to find this like ultimate grade honestly whatever you can find in your town will be fine for this for this recipe there's just a lot of latitude with it um you know obviously the better the hog raising the better it's gonna turn out but i can just tell you that people don't usually run around going man i gotta have that like super expensive heritage breed hog to make really good pork belly we're going to do a lot to this i usually say i want the meat to speak for itself this is going to have a lot of seasoning and a fair amount of sauce so we're we're turning this into candy and i'm not running from it is what it is if you don't like that you think this isn't healthy for you look you don't make friends eating salad that's not what we're here for it's meat church we're here to make this stuff taste good how long does this entire process take this process or the cook process okay how long does this process take all in you're gonna be looking at like three hours maybe i mean we and we'll go through that step by step but the first step uh in the cook is gonna end up being about about two hours so it's not you know not not too long all in i'm just checking over to see if there's anything that i missed out on i mean i think that's pretty thorough i think that's fairly thorough and we're just going to let this sit if i had all the time in the world like i said i'd love 15 20 minutes when i'm not gonna make you wait 15 or 20 minutes and so i'm gonna end up putting this on a rack in just a second but for that let's get a question can you season or would you recommend this can you season the night before 100 won't hurt it cube this up in the evening on a friday um you know like i said throw it in a in a steam pan you probably need a full pan for a whole belly um cover it with full you can do the seasoning let it adhere cover it put it in your fridge absolutely in fact what we cooked today i prepped a little bit in advance of putting it on and it won't hurt it anytime i can do my prep in advance instead of doing it like when i'm due to put it on i'd rather get it out of the way i'm big on preparation what other church season what other meat church seasonings would work for this is a great question the gospel uh holy gospel if you want a little more pepper in it uh deez nuts honey pecan honey hog hot any of our more sweeter flavor profile rubs would work uh on this so we got a lot of options the holy voodoo would be good got a little pop to it so i like i'm going for a sweet profile with this one so any any of those options would work have you ever used chili infused honey have i ever used chili infused honey i've used lots of hot honeys absolutely and we're not doing it today but i love hot honeys like mike's hot honey you know we we actually usually take local burleson's honey from right here in waxache texas and then we will put pepper jellies in it to make it hot uh very very very common so i don't always buy a hot honey but i usually basically make my own hot honey by taking honey and adding a pepper jelly to it so this is a baking or cooling grid and i know you're going to ask i get them on amazon i already put this in my instagram store i get asked this all the time i don't know the brand it doesn't matter just search baking cooling grid whatever why do i use this i'm going to put all this pork belly on it because once it's on here i can put it in the traeger in one swoop otherwise you got to open your trigger and put in 50 pieces so this just makes life easier keeps it all together you can you can put a drip pan underneath it to catch everything that comes off of it if you want do i use a binder that's another great question so if you know me my my methods are usually i want to give you the most simplistic way to make amazing barbecue what's a binder okay a binder is a way for your seasoning to adhere to the meat quicker well look at this this meat is now soaking wet and i didn't use a binder so i don't think i needed it but if you want to use it totally fine what binder would work i'd slather it in yellow mustard if you wanted to but it's hot out here i mean it's 90 something degrees and if you look at these pieces of meat i mean look they're all completely adhered and you know there's no seasoning coming off these at this point so i'm always about the less things the better but look i grew up in the south where we put yellow mustard on pork i put it on pork ribs i put on a pork butt it's okay but in any barbecue i only do it if i need it so like a brisket i never do it on a brisket i don't say never i mean not that much but i've got friends that put yellow mustard on their briskets i've got friends that put worcestershire you know just some vehicle for the stuff to adhere so that's that's kind of up to you you don't ever taste that stuff so you know people like i don't like mustard that's okay you're not gonna if i cover this in mustard or if i covered a brisket and mustard and put salt and pepper on it you wouldn't taste it so that's not a big deal so i'm just setting these on here i'm setting them on here fat up that's my preference but that's also not a big deal so look i'm a texas purist like i cook my briskets fat up i'm not i'm not trying to be like a competition guy who's meat up so that's why i started doing this pork belly fat up but i think this fat as it renders and with the seasoning on just kind of glistens and i like that better but look i'll show you if you wanted to do one you know fat down it does make a nice little stand for it sit on some people think that works out better so i don't think this really matters but i'm just sticking with my fat up my fat up texas roots so that's why i do this but i'm not hell bent on saying you got to do it one way or another i'm just putting them on this wire rack and kind of pressing them down as best i can and my dog is hungry she doesn't understand quiet on set just yet what's your recommendation on spacing between the cubes recommendation on spacing just make sure they're not touching but not a big deal like i'm trying to use my not use my clean hand here i'll wipe it off but you just need to you know keep them apart here just a little bit they're gonna shrink up as they cook so it's okay if they come close to touching because it's not you know it's gonna um they're like i said they're gonna fat's gonna render out the meat's gonna shrink up and we'll be good to go all right i'm almost done here put these in the traeger okay couple more we're going to call it good okay and then you know what i'm gonna i'm gonna do a little more seasoning across the top for the kids and that fly once a little bit okay all right those are good they're ready to go in you know i would have used this too but for time's sake i'm just gonna i'm just gonna move on let's talk about how we're going to um how we're going to cook these all right so my timberline is set up at 250 degrees you could go 225 250 275 anywhere in there we're going 250 today and we're running cherry pellets i'm gonna put some more in so here in texas we cook with oak we cook with post oak i grew up on hickory those are heavier smoky woods and with pork i want to go a little lighter smoke i love cherry with pork for two reasons think about the pairing of a fruit wood with pork cherry actually gives a nice red color to pork so i'm a big fan of that so we're running straight cherry other options you could run pecan you could go as high as like a hickory you could go with other fruit woods i'm very particular on my woods and my pellets so i would hickory pecan cherry i personally that's where i'm gonna stay so that's where i'm going with this first step it's a two-step cook first step uh we're gonna put these in at 250 on this wire rack i'm gonna put some i'm gonna put some heat gloves on real quick grill model what grill model today we're using a traeger timberline 1300 i'm a huge fan of the timberline series ever since they first came out i can't say enough good things about them and so i cook with them often so this is my this is my daily driver i've got every model but i love the timberline this will work on any anything you got this is just what i cook on usually and i've done every traeger kitchen live on on this one could i use our chicken fried breading on these and fry them great question we actually do a chicken fried brisket burn in absolutely we cook these to where they're done first and then we fry them after so don't fry them from raw all right i've got two things going here i've got uh some that are ready to come off i'll get to that in a second i'm gonna pull them off oh by the way i just put on a cotton glove and pulled my nitrile gloves over it so that way i can feel what i'm doing all right i'm going to put these in doesn't matter where you put them i'm going on the top right because that's where i've got room [Music] so one thing about putting this on the top rack anytime i can keep my grill clean i usually will so normally i'll throw a pan underneath here i don't have one within reach that way is all that fat renders and you're gonna render a ton of fat out of pork belly it can drop in that pan instead of dropping in my grill which is okay to drop in the grill but for me the easier the cleanup the better all right i'm going to get rid of this now where can they find those cotton gloves where can you find these cotton gloves i get these at a small tool company here called harbor freight uh i used to but we sell them at our store in store not online uh it's the only good item they sell at harbor freight everything else falls apart i'm sure you can find them on amazon they're not they're nothing special it's just a cotton glove with the nitrile gloves pulled over the top okay let's go on to stage two okay this is what you're going to be looking for this pork belly cubed right here has been cooking for right at two hours at 200 i timed it just just a few minutes over two hours 250 degrees so i told you i went fat up i just like this little fat pillow here with the seasoning on top i think it looks really pretty uh and that's what i'm looking for but so you want your visual cues first and any barbecue you do you want to look at it and this is where your heart and everything comes into what you're doing you look at this and say man that's achieving amazing color that honey hog color has come through to where you've got the beautiful mahogany color it smells awesome you see these are obviously these pieces are much smaller than what we started and that's exactly what you're looking for so for me it's like all right those are starting to look good and i'm going to tempt them along the way you can use the leave-in thermometer in the traeger if you want which i have right here i don't always put it in pork belly because they're kind of small pieces but you certainly can put this in we're looking for you're looking for these i'm trying to this is very important i'm looking for these i'm cooking them to their tender that's the key lesson so when are they tender they're usually tender around 195 degrees so with my insulin read thermometer and i was probing these just before we started so i know they're where we need to be so i go down right in the middle into the meat and bam this one is 192 degrees this one and that's a big one so if i go on a smaller one 197 but what you're looking for is the feel you want to be able to take one of these cubes and you want to put it in and basically have no resistance i don't want to fall apart but i want it to be just like super tender and that's where we're at on these i'm looking for them to be tender so this lesson on tenderness applies whatever you're cooking if you're making a brisket and you're like man that brisket tasted awesome but it was tough well that's because you didn't cook it to a high enough temperature or the desired doneness we want to get you to so cook it to tender now pork is done a lot earlier i know people that cook these are like 165. you can do that but this bite is going to have a ton of chew to it so what i want is i want it i'm this one of the secrets of my recipe i'm cooking this to tenderness i want my grandma to be able to gnaw these with no dentures like like gum them so i want these suckers tender so that's where we're at so now let's go on to step two of the cook so get yourself just a disposable steam pan this is a half pan because this is about half or three quarters of a belly uh you saw we cut about three quarters of that one and it yielded one paint or one tray so that was a similar amount for here and then you're just going to take these and just put them in the tray do you ever spray the rack with non-stick spray before do i spray the rack with non-stick spray i did not and you're saying these are come off you can no problem these are just coming right off it does make a messy rack when you're done like this is going to have to go you know in the dishwasher because that's going to be a pain in the butt to clean can you freeze pork belly and cook layer absolutely i'll take that raw belly i'll freeze it i'll cook it later there we go okay so here's our belly now we need to go to step two which is sauce the belly so today we're going to use traeger's apricot sauce i like it again we're going for a sweet flavor profile i like fruit so we're going apricot if they don't have a wire rack what would you recommend cooking on if you don't have a wire rack what would i recommend you can stick them directly in the on the grate and i think that's what a lot of people do but i just go on amazon and order that wire rack just because it makes life easier you see that i opened that traeger i got in put the tray in got back out closed it and didn't lose much heat that's it's a big deal on a lot of cookers you want the recovery time to be as short as possible and like i mean the good news with a traeger is they're so efficient they recover really quickly anyway but to the extent i cannot lose heat great so i want to be in and out i mean i don't want to be in there putting in 50 pieces but you can if you don't have that rack feel free to just put it right on the rack and and on you go here's what we're going to do what i'm looking for is the equivalent of this cube to be covered in sauce not not like i don't want an inch of sauce in the pan so when this runs off i just am trying to glaze it so what i'm going to do is i'm going to pour a light coating of this in here you can always add more you can't take away so go easy and then i'm going usually about three to one to honey i like to use honey with my barbecue to kind of cut it or to thin it i shouldn't say cut i've been told cutting things is a drug term so we're gonna i'm just gonna use this one hand here because i can bring a lot of gloves up here and i'm just gonna toss these cubes around because again i'm just trying to coat each of these cubes so again i don't want a half inch sauce in a pan i just want every cube covered all the way in sauce that's all i'm looking for i actually did all right with my uh my first try i think i'm gonna add just a little more because the sauce is obviously gonna cook down so i'm gonna put just a little bit more in here does the rack position matter top or bottom rack does the rack position matter no it doesn't but anytime on a traeger i can stay away from the bottom middle where the firepot is i will but it doesn't mean you have to uh but no i i mean i like to cook on the middle rack especially i'm shooting these videos so you can see it better but usually i i cook on the middle rack and i fill it up first and then i use the bottom rack then i use the top rack that's just my preference okay these are pretty good and covered here which uh i know we got a top view as well but let me hold these up and show you and that's you know pretty good pretty good in coverage so now we're going to go to step two which is place this pan back in the traeger uncovered you don't want to cover this with foil because if you cover it with foil you'll steam the meat and all that sauce will run off of it we're trying to caramelize or lock in this sauce basically so we're going to take this we're going to put it back in the traeger you got to go at least 30 minutes some people go as far as an hour i don't want to really cook all the sauce off so i normally go 30-ish 40 minutes or so we're gonna go right back in so you know do what you feel like here [Music] you're gonna have to grab those bowels out of the camera the bowels the bowel buns okay while that we're waiting on our um our uh we've got some other pork belly in there that's in the sauce we're gonna let it continue to render we're gonna make a slaw real quick you sit right there so this is a this is a different i mean we're calling it a slaw but it's really different uh this is where we're gonna go with a little bit of an asian flare so we're gonna make a granny smith apple slaw which is really honestly really simple um the the recipes on trager's site it's uh two granny smith apples half an onion um some some brown mustard a little bit of cider vinegar and uh my favorite rub veggie rub because anybody called meat church loves a veggie rub this makes my mom happy this is how i get my veggies so we're gonna just dump all this and actually we'll just use this bowl here that that the apples are in so we've got some super thinly sliced granny smith apples and some thinly sliced red onion i'm going a little less in the recipe just because i'm not feeding that many people today i'm feeding myself mix that up you could use any slaw you want i mean this is optional it's just like we like to pair things and uh make things a little bit different so um we're gonna serve these on a bowel bun we've steamed and thought why not put it with a little apple slaw so i'm gonna put my brown mustard in a little bit of cider vinegar and go on the veggie rub i mean you could you know you could substitute whatever rub you want but this rub is actually like quite tasty mix it up here but you could use like a southern coleslaw if you want you know like a mayonnaise-based coleslaw if you want to go go that route some people don't like coleslaw but again growing up in the south you eat slaw with pork so if i make a pulled pork sandwich i'm putting coleslaw on it that's just what i like to do make this your own you can eat this eat this pork belly just like it is a lot of people just eat it as is and that's fine we like to french it up here on the traeger kitchen live that way i can take my super uncomfortable bite for you guys okay that looks good what questions where can you find those buns where can i find buns so um i got well actually i got those local japanese restaurant friends of mine sourced them for me but you just go to an asian market it's the local asian market asian grocery store central market here in dallas sells them can you add pineapple could you add pineapple to slaw absolutely this is uh i'm gonna go ahead and show you guys kind of the the final final product i'm gonna put my heat glove back on and pull these out i'm gonna try to let them start to cool off a little bit i'm all right i'll make it work what's your favorite traeger rub and sauce what's my favorite traeger rubbing sauce that's a good question i was going to say you could use the traeger pork and poultry rub with with this seasoning and with this seasoning with this recipe you know if you guys want which is really good i'm going to one-hand this i'm going to make a i'm going to toss these up just a little bit but you can see um that you know the sauce is still wet which is what i'm looking personally what i want i want them to be a little saucy some people like to cook it down to where there's not a lot like when i cook ribs i don't want the sauce to run off your run off your face but with this recipe i'm down to get basically a little bit messy i guess is the best way i can put it so this might be a little more sauce than something we normally do so clearly you can make that your own you guys can less more sauce whatever you want to do that's the cool thing about this just kind of do whatever you want those look good okay before i build these why don't we get into a giveaway question for those of you that have been paying attention and i think we're going to give multiple winners for this question but you had to be paying attention all right you ready all right what seasoning did i use on the pork belly and what pellet so two part question what seasoning and what pellet answer in the comments and quite a few of you are going to win actually the seasoning that we used on this and the pellets how about that so remember at the end there's like a grand prize uh which is going to be really cool so don't go anywhere oh coach clark is finally tuning in hey coach clark oh i need to give a shout out to uh triple six grill uh he told me my beard and my hair looked amazing today and that kid up in canada he lives in a town of like 12 people um i'm not sure the name of the town but pretty excited to to hear from old josh a big traeger fan okay i'm gonna move into building um while we're i don't know while we're talking so we've got our buns that we've steamed here that are hot as heck man they are hot it's quite all right okay i'm gonna start putting a little uh you know what i guess i should put the slaw in first what other questions we got while i build these so we're just going to stuff a little slaw in here and then you know i told you in the beginning pork belly's got you know asian roots as far as i'm concerned from a cuisine perspective so you know why not bam man i made that one a little bit messy it's okay uh if you were to not get a skinless belly what's the easiest way to remove the skin if you were to not get a skinless belly what's the easiest way to remove the skin that's a great question too i would remove the skin definitely you can use the skin for you know cracklings or something if you want but you got to trim it off it's kind of a pain to be honest with you usually in grocery stores you're not going to find a whole lot of that so that's that's the good news but uh you know you could have a buddy that's raising hogs and says hey i'm gonna give you a pork belly and it's probably gonna come with skin on it and you might get like the errant nipple on the skin which is always an adventure but it's kind of fun to cook it like that and try to feed it to your buddy well i am let me tell you i'm making a mess today that's all right i told you get messy with it brother questions pretty caught up how tasty was robinson barbecue smoked pineapple how tasty was robinson's barbecue smoked pineapple well most of you know i don't eat robinson barbecue you know my insurance expired recently and uh i just can't afford the doctor visit who's asking that i have no idea it's a legitimate question you never know when robinson barbecue is going to just throw in some errant questions that weren't really asked we go follow him on instagram so he's happy he's uh he's trying to break 200 followers today okay okay all right well here we go oh where you going all right man well we got messy with it that's okay oh we got one more one more errant okay well i made some some messy slaw today that's all right wet towel okay this one it's all right okay here we go well it's probably time to eat or drink or both so all right before i eat that i'm letting it cool just a little bit let's recap this cook it was really simple right we took the we took the belly hole we cut it into one inch cubes we seasoned it very liberally uh with our honey hog we put those on a wire grid we put them in the timberline 1300 with cherry pellets 250 degrees and they took you know just a hair over two hours to reach an internal temperature of 195 degrees we pulled them off on that rack we put them in a half steam pan and we covered them with traeger's apricot sauce and we put a little bit of honey in it i don't think i covered that the honey i mentioned that it kind of thin sauce out a little bit but it adds some sweetness as well so that move has nothing to do with the sauce that i use that's just something i do with sauce in my barbecue frequently we tossed it in that we put it on the 1300 and it rocked for i don't know probably we put it on right before we got here so it's probably 45 minutes or so pulled it out let it cool off and they were ready to eat i mentioned to you earlier you know you can just eat them just like this right like um you don't have to put them on anything most people just eat them just like this so put our little moon flags on here we're all about the marketing at the meat church so bam there you go you can just eat them just like that uh but we made our little apple slaw here uh and we're gonna get at it so um traeger really appreciates the awkward bites that i take and cory always seems to capture these moments for us so here we go that's good man so pork belly is really tender honestly it's not overly sweet it's sweet but not like candy so i actually love it in this bun because the bun cuts some of the sweetness so does the slaw so it actually balances out pretty well as opposed to if i was just to eat it straight like this which is usually how i do it that piece right there i could just gummed it totally tender no effort man that's like super good i love that sauce really really good final giveaway question yep time for the grand prize so what do you win okay the final the grand prize you are going to win you are going to win a seat in traeger's um private table class so this is a virtual class which you actually have to buy tickets to get in amazing classes great lineup you're going to get a seat absolutely for free if you can get this question right which is i'd like to eat with my mouth full what festival did we make these pork belly burnings at that our line was longer than the beer line where do we roll out this recipe in tyler texas where is it so popular answer that question in the comments and traeger will tell us who the winner is all right got some questions got some questions and i'm hungry also do you recommend or do you mind if people use your rubs in competition great question how did i get into the rub business it's a great story or i love telling a story i competed in barbecue fairly casually 12 times a year with my brother underneath meat church we were doing decent we submitted a tryout to be on the tv show barbecue pit masters and we got picked we had three weeks notice from getting called to actually going on the show and um we made two rubs by hand what's now known as holy cow and honey hog and so i was at a place here in dallas fort worth buying honey powder which is an ingredient in this rub and while the owner was in the back getting my honey powder i looked down at a book and recognized labels and said you make these rubs he said yeah i'm their co-packer i said what's co-packer he said you give me your recipe i make your rub um you know i'll sign an nda i make you rub and so i called my brother and told him he said we'll do it so i called the guy back and said make my beef rub and call it meat church holy cow i'll call you tomorrow with a name for that rub three weeks later we were on the show um i already kind of told that story the the show aired we used our two rubs and uh hence the accidental beginning of meat church now we've got nine barbecue rubs four gourmet rubs three injections one brine one chicken fried breading and like 100 different pieces of merch and focus on teaching so it's been a pretty cool ride i've left my corporate job of 20 years january last year to do this full-time and honestly i think we're the most popular seasoning in the backyard especially amongst traeger folks but i don't know just the feeling what's your favorite type of yeti mug what's my favorite type of yeti mug all of them i really like the stackable pints because they squeeze down the bottom and they fit in the cup holders of my truck but i love this mug i'm not gonna lie when is meat church going to make a barbecue sauce when is meat church going to make a barbecue sauce it's a good question it would have already been out if it weren't for covid so it's coming it's just not there yet had i had some big shifts this year i'm sure you guys are aware because you're all doing this but the cook from home rage this year has been crazy i mean volumes just went insane for all of us and so we all had to readjust what we were doing focus on trying to meet current demand and slow down new product development and our new store growth and things like that so if you go into retailers like academy sports and outdoors people that were low on stock it's just because the demand is like you know six times normal or something like that due to everyone cooking at home do you use the super smoke function often do i use a super smoke function absolutely so anytime i'm at a temperature low enough to use super smoke i hit it uh because i you know i grew up smoking on a stick burner and you can't get too much smoke for that so if i'm under 225 degrees i'm hitting super smoke on literally everything i do i like smoke i try to impart smoke in every single thing i do from cocktails to dessert so the more smoke the better for me if i'm buying a traeger on a budget which would which one would you recommend if you're buying a traeger on a budget what i what i tell people is just try to buy the newer models the d2 models so you know you can get into the pro series for 7.99 the technology that comes in it is is amazing the ability to control uh your trigger from your phone and monitor it and being able to monitor your stuff remotely is like you won't believe how helpful that is but there are no issues with the d2 grills like i said i have every model and i've literally never had one issue and so i can't say enough good things about the ones that came out in 2019 so you know try to get into uh you know at least a pro 575 which is 799 bucks all right let's do the last question and then announce giveaway last question how did you come up with the name meat church last question before we were going to announce the winner of our giveaway how'd i come up with the name meat church a friend of mine is a really funny food writer in dallas and on a sunday morning she was at a barbecue joint here that's called slow bone true story and she took a picture of her barbecue she tweeted it like 11 30 sunday morning she basically said i'm about to have my hashtag meat church and i thought it was clever saved it i didn't run with it right away and down the road i was trying to rebrand our our barbecue team name and i thought you know what we barbecue to bring people together to have a good time fill my backyard with people go to cowboys game you know hang out the fellowship aspect of it i just thought it worked the name was a little edgy so i thought i'd go with it but it's been a huge part of our success you won't forget the name usually so that's the short of it all right you ready to announce the grand prize winner so we're going to announce the grand prize winner i'm going to go ahead and tell you so that you don't run off right when this is over uh 15 minutes after this is over go to instagram live go to traeger's account and chad ward and i will have about a 15-minute bs session where we have cocktail and talk about what we did answer more questions we'll interact with you guys directly on there so hop over to instagram uh when you get off here if you don't have instagram stop being old open an instagram account winner the grand prize winner is a seat at a private table class olson nick olsen i don't know nick this is not rigged so congratulations to nick olson i guess he was the first one to say that uh this recipe debuted at red dirt barbecue music festival in tyler texas our good buddy chase colston that's it bam well look at that perfect timing sorry i'll take some more bites so thank you guys for sticking around spending uh spending an hour with me um thank you to traeger girls for doing this nobody does it like traeger does it they called me months ago and said hey we want we've got this concept uh to teach these virtual classes do you want to do it and i'm like heck yeah if you know me i actually teach right here in this outdoor kitchen but it's all on hold due to the crazy pandemic so this is my opportunity to you know share my passion with you guys share my fashion sense with you guys so excited to be here i'll no doubt be back sometime in september to do it again so reach out to me and tell me what you'd like to see because they're going to come back and ask me what do you want to teach so let me know what you want to see and i'll try to get it dialed up for september so thank you guys very much for watching and see you guys over on instagram here in a few minutes you

Channel: Traeger Grills

Views: 81,075

Rating: 4.8946214 out of 5

Keywords: pork, pork belly, burnt ends, bbq, barbecue, pellet grills, cooking class, cooking show, grilling

Id: n_Gt9JsJr8E

Length: 60min 55sec (3655 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 20 2020