RIBFEST!!!

Living in downtown Ottawa can lead to a pretty awesome series of annual festival and event traditions. There's Jazzfest, Fringe, Canada Day, Bluesfest, and so on. But in the the past decade or so, one event has become a pretty integral part of creating a Summer worthy of remembrance in Ottawa. That event is the Ottawa Ribfest on Sparks Street. Basically, about a dozen competitive "ribbers" from Canada and the US line up the pedestrian-only street and fill Downtown with smoky meat awesome. 

In this post, I'll be giving you my account of the various porcine treats this year's event had to offer. I went a little more often than I usually do, like every day, but my girl was nearly 9 months pregnant! What was I supposed to do? So, let's go day by day.

Wednesday

The first night of the Ribfest was probably the least involved one for me. I had to work the night shift and had less than an hour to eat.

The first sampling came from the rib stand closest to home (go figure), the Blazin' Big Rig out of Chatham, Ontario. Kari got the standard "Vegetarian's Nightmare" plate of ribs, pulled pork and chicken with sides of beans and slaw. Me, I was intrigued by the Jumbo Turkey Drumstick. Luckily, the boys working the grill had an extra one that'd been left on the heat too long so I got two for the price of one! I also got the sides of beans and slaw.

Blazin' Big Rig

So, I thought it was a really tasty little bit of fowl and something unusual to kick off the Ribsfest. As I mentioned, I had two legs, one cooked "normally" and the other kind of "overcooked", but when you leave a sauce-slathered piece of meat on the heat, it creates a kind of crunchy coating of caramelized sauce that can't be beat. So, I ate the overcooked one and kept the other for later use. Verdict? Well, it was dry from being on the heat so long, but still really flavourful. The sauce was good, but not great. The beans were really tasty as well, but I would have better later on. The slaw, on the other hand, was exactly how I want slaw to be: creamy, tangy and crunchy; best of the festival by far.

Turkey Leg and sides from Blazin' Big Rig - also serves to club seals in a pinch

Thursday

If Wednesday was the tentative first step, Thursday was a full-on jump into the pool. Kari and I wandered around, unsure where to engage in our porcine goodness, but she managed to grab a twisty fried potato treat. We ran into to many of our friends, including my good friend Siobhan who, as a born-again carnivore, was enjoying her first foray into Ribfest and brought her three kids along to enjoy the ride. It was a lot of fun watching the kids' faces light up over ribs and corn on the cob and the frantic crowds. All in all, a good time was had all around.

Sticky Fingers

As for the ribs, we stopped at one of the less busy stands, Sticky Fingers. I only got a half rack, I wasn't in the mood for beans and slaw. The ribs were really well done, exactly the right texture between solid (which can sometimes mean 'tough') and fall of the bone (which too often means 'mush'). Unfortunately, there wasn't enough sauce on the ribs to get a really good idea of its flavour. I've noticed that some of the ribbers would have big bottles of sauce with a squeeze pump so you can load up your pork with as much sauce as you want. Unfortunately Sticky Fingers weren't one of them. Which is too bad, because from the little I could taste, it was a pretty decent, tomato-ey sauce. Oh well...

Half rack from Sticky Fingers

Friday

Friday was a quick trip through the festival for pulled pork as we were trying to get to Confederation Park in time to get a good spot to see Willie Nelson. Once again, we were looking for the shortest line, which we didn't really find, so we settled on Bone Daddy's for pulled pork sammiches.

Bone Daddy's

This is pulled pork the way it was meant to be: moist, greasy, smoky and loaded with sauce. It's hard to review food when it's nearly perfect since there's not much to say! I will give extra kudos on the sauce though, because all too often, the sauce used on pulled pork is "dumbed down" for public consumption and made less spicy and overly sweet. Luckily in this case, the sauce was the right mix of both. I was highly satisfied with this choice! And really, what says Summer more than an outdoor country show with BBQ on your face?

Mmmmmm, grease puddle...

Saturday

Sometimes, a weird serendipity comes along to make your whole Ribfest experience sing. In this case, the decision to meet friends at noon while it was pissing rain led to being able to access one of the rib stands that usually is impossible to get to without waiting for 2 hours in line. There are two stands that always seem to be in the most high traffic area of Ribfest between Bank and O'Connor Streets and are always packed with people: Camp 31 and Silver Bullet. I'd tried Camp 31 in the past (and it wasn't as revelatory as I'd been expecting, but that was mainly due a lack of sauce) and really wanted to give Silver Bullet a go.

Sparks St. in full porcine swing

It was the noon hour and I decided to basically skip breakfast so I could have lots of room to pig out. With that in mind, I got the ribs and pulled pork combo with sides from Silver Bullet. First, the bad news: the coleslaw was, unfortunately, prepared in the same style as that pale green slaw from KFC that I dreaded eating as a kid. Needless to say, I didn't eat all of it. Another downside was that the ribs were served with membrane still attached, a BBQ no-no if there ever was one. It's basically like eating paper.

Now the good news: The ribs, other than the annoyance of the membrane, were PERFECT! They were cooked exactly right and the sauce was one of the best I've had: sweet, peppery, smoky and rich. The pulled pork was also really tasty, but it was overcooked and stringy in parts. The beans were really good as well, nice and rich but not chalky the way beans can sometimes be. They also were chock-full of BBQ sauce flavour, which isn't always the way. Not sure why...

A Porkpocalypse from Silver Bullet

Sunday

By now, I have to admit that my arteries, and even my taste buds, were getting a bit overpowered by smoke and meat, so my review of the next feast might be a bit skewed. It was the last day and sweltering hot and we needed food for our D&D game, so I went out looking to get my pork fix fast. The only place that I hadn't tried that didn't have a ridiculous line-up was Texas Outlaws. I was impressed to see such a wide variety of foodstuffs being offered: pulled chicken, wings, brisket and many more. I decided on ribs and brisket since I have a soft spot for brisket. I wish the girl at the cash had been a bit less of a grumpy jerk, but I guess by Sunday, most of the ribbing staff must have been fed up with the masses of gluttony.

Texas Outlaws - definitely the most variety offered at one stand during Ribfest

So I got my mess of ribs, brisket, beans and slaw home and proceeded to mow down. My impressions were pretty straight forward: the ribs were good, but not great (the sauce had some mustard elements that I wasn't completely sold on), the sides were decent (slaw was kind of ho-hum, but in the way I wanted) and the beans were just a bit too ordinary (and I generally don't like beans most of the time). The brisket was really the saving grace, it was absolutely perfect; not too fatty, well smoked and very flavourful. But, because of the heat, I wasn't able to eat very much. Kind of an anti-climactic end to 5 days of pigging out on pig.

Brisket and Ribs from Texas Outlaws

And there you go; just one glutton's tales of a festival of gastronomic excess.

Enjoy!

BBQ MacGyver & Pulled Pork revised

Howdy!

It's probably something of a cliché to say that a good BBQer is part cook, part mad scientist/engineer. I'm sure you've all seen guys on TV or the Web with their home-made smoker, crazy-ass Burning Man-style flamethrower and God knows what else. And Lord knows, if I had the space and time, I'd be making my own Uber-Smoker of Doom, but unfortunately I live on a second-story downtown apartment and all I have is my simple offset smoker and my own ingenuity. So, there'll none of these in my near-future:

Baddest-ass Smoker ever!

Luckily, I usually have a fun little toy or two to help me along the way. Or I invent things that help. So, today I'm exploring couple of 'toys' that make my BBQ experience easier and might help yours!

Now, this post is inspired by a recent foray into Pulled Pork (which I've blogged about before). I will say this: the rub I used in last year's post has been updated and is very similar to the rub I used when I made Wild Boar Ribs last month, with one exception in that instead of white pepper I used mustard powder and added a tiny pinch of ground cardamom. Now, Pulled Pork is a long process, taking anywhere from 6 to 10 hours of cooking, depending on the size of your hunk of meat. As a result, it can be hard to keep the fire going at the right temperature without a little bit of help.

Here's where a simple camping accessory becomes the "low and slow" BBQers best friend.

1) Air Mattress Pump

Um, what? We inflating a bed while we wait for the pork to cook? Nope, not even close. If you're like me, you might not be Grizzly Adams and able to start a fire with a flint and tinder. For me it's pretty easy to start a nice fire using lump charcoal with my electric fire starter (as mentioned in my first post about smoking), but keeping it going after 8 hours gets tricky, especially if you've had to step out of the house for a while and the fire dies down on you.

Enter the air mattress pump. In the past I'd used a piece of boxboard to help fan flames when re-igniting a dormant fire, but I've since learned that this simple tool makes your life SO much easier!

20 bucks at any hardware store

You simply pump air with your foot on the bellows-looking part, then put the hose in as close to the fire as possible without risking melting the plastic of the nozzle.

A little air and your fire is back in action!

Now, this does kick up a lot of ash, but a little ash never killed anyone, right?

So, yeah, a little "MacGyvering" is always a sign of a good BBQer!

2) Meat Claws

Now, another pain in the (pork) butt when working with huge hunks of meat like pork shoulder is that it's really hard to move them around in the smoker when you have to rotate cuts or move them around to get less/more smoke, or when removing them from the smoker altogether once they're done. BBQ tongs aren't big or strong enough and even one's bare hands and be a little unwieldy.




Not exactly easy to manipulate! Tasty-lookin' though...


Along comes my sweetheart with Meat Claws. Meat Claws are little devices designed to help you manipulate large chunks of meat easily and shred pork or chicken once cooked.

Shiny!

And they make you look like Wolverine:




Hugh Jackman I'm not...



Turns out they were quite useful in the manipulating part, but when it comes to actually "pulling" the pork, your hands are always best.

And there we are, just a few more inventions to help you make your smoking/BBQ experience a little less annoying.

Enjoy!

Adventures in Pulled Pork

Hi everybody!

Posting today on one of my more recent forays into the world of smoking that most noble animal, the Pig!

So, after months of hemming and hawing over trying pulled pork on the smoker, I finally tried my hand at it for a Canada Day BBQ. It didn't quite go as planned (maybe I should have followed the recipe more accurately), but the end result was quite tasty.

Now, as you all know, smoking is my new favourite. But most of the cuts of meat I've done have been fairly small and easy. How would a 6 pound pork shoulder turn out? I was justifiably nervous, especially as I was making it for a party! Eep!

So, let's start from the beginning. Well, there are numerous pulled pork recipes that abound on the 'Net, so I want looking and found enough info to cobble a basic recipe in my mind and I think I had the techniques well organized. And all it took to ruin that was to watch one episode of Road Grill on Food Network... For those who don't know, Road Grill is a travelling BBQ show hosted by former CFL QB Matt Dunigan (and also features Whalesbone executive chef Charlotte Langley!). As much as Mr. Dunigan's super-jock attitude might grate on my nerves, it's actually a pretty good show.

Now, in what I thought was a moment of TV serendipity, that particular episode covered off pulled pork. Awesome! And the way Mr. Dunigan made everything look was perfectly simple. Rub pork, let sit, mop (baste) with "mop sauce" once, leave on smoker for 5-6 hours and that's that! Unfortunately, I forgot to look at the actual goddamn recipe online! If I had, I would have noticed the "mop every 30 minutes" part. DAMMIT!! As a result, the pork was well-cooked, but a little dry. The fork-tender, "pullable" quality wasn't there as I took it off the smoker. I was a bit discouraged, but I had this giant slab of pork that was tasty, albeit a bit tougher than expected, and I'd be damned if I was going let it be ruined.

That being said, it looked mostly like smoked pork shoulder should, which is this:

So jealous of the forker who got it right in this picture!

Anyhoo, with resolve and knife in hand, I began the process of carving up pieces of the cooked pork shoulder and chopping it into small pieces, giving it that pulled pork look and feel. But how to make it more tender? Well, here's where I went "out of mandate", at least out of BBQ purist mandate. See, from what I've read of "Real BBQ", it has a strong presence/following/origin in North Carolina, where the slow smoked pork is indeed fork tender and is almost always served "dry" with some sort of dipping sauce on the side. Not at all like the sauce-laden messy goodness we usually find in this end of the continent.

Well, I went with the saucy method. I turned the oven to 300 F, placed all the meat and excess fat in a roasting dish, and slathered it with the Blueberry BBQ Sauce that seems to be my new signature and popped the whole mess into the oven for about 15 minutes. The heat helped render some of the fat, which in turn moistened the meat. When I took it out of the oven, I had nearly perfect pulled pork by Canadian standards.

So, disaster averted! All our guests enjoyed the pork, and Kari got to use it to make her grand experiment of the Pulled Pork Cupcake a reality (more on that in a future post, although the recipe may have to remain a closely guarded secret). But, that being said, I learned an important lesson: don't believe everything you see on TV!

OK, now that the dramatic account of "what went wrong" has been covered, maybe I should actually show y'all how it's done, and the proper directions will be provided!

Smoker Pulled Pork

First, you'll need your meat. I suggest going with a 2.5 kg pork shoulder (aka picnic roast or Boston butt), preferably bone-in, with fat cap still attached. The great thing about pork shoulder is that you don't need to prep the meat in any way as you would with ribs or tenderloin.

Once you get your meat home, rub it with a spice rub 12-24 hours before putting it on the smoker.
The following rub is my own adaptation of the rub used on Road Grill. It was really spicy and tasty.

Rub

- 1 cup brown sugar
- 4 tbsp cayenne pepper
- 4 tbsp smoked paprika
- 1 tsp onion powder
- 1 tsp garlic powder
- 1 tsp salt
- 1 tsp black pepper
- 1 tsp coriander
- 1 tsp yellow mustard powder
- 4 green cardamom pods, ground

Mix all ingredients together until well blended and coat meat with rub. You can apply a thin layer of olive oil or prepared yellow mustard to help the rub stick to the meat. Don't worry about the mustard changing the flavour of the meat, it's dissipated by the smoke.

Wrap rubbed meat in plastic and put in fridge.

The next day, remove meat from fridge about an hour before you put it onto the smoker so it warms up to room temperature.

While the meat is warming up, start your fire. You REALLY want to stick with lump charcoal when building a fire for smoking. I find briquettes, no matter how natural they say they are, smell (and, therefore, taste) like chemicals. And you don't want that flavouring your meat! What you do want flavouring your meat on top of the natural lump charcoal (usually maple in my neck of the world) is some sort of lovely wood chips. I used mesquite with my pulled pork to impart a strong flavour that can compliment the strong flavours in the rub and the mop (more on the mop in a moment). Soak 2/3 of your wood chips in water for at least 30 minutes. Reserve 1/3 of wood chips and keep dry.

OK, now it's time to apply your mop. A good mop is a thinner version of a basic BBQ sauce that helps keep the meat moist as it smokes.

I basically used the exact same formula as on Road Grill:

BBQ Mop


1 2/3 cups ketchup
1 cup apple cider vinegar
1/2 cup fresh apple cider (I used beer instead as I had no juice)
1/2 cup lightly packed brown sugar
2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
4 teaspoons paprika
4 teaspoons dry mustard powder
1 teaspoon cayenne
1 teaspoon salt

Whisk all ingredients together in a glass or ceramic bowl.

Using a "mop brush" (see your local hardware store or BBQ dealer, if you're lucky enough to have such things where you live!) or simple basting brush, apply a generous amount of mop sauce to the pork shoulder before putting it on the smoker.

Once on the smoker, keep adding wood chips (2 handfuls wet chips to one dry) every 30-45 minutes to keep producing smoke. You want to smoke the pork at 250-260 degrees Farenheit for about 5 to 6 hours, and apply the mop sauce every half hour or so. You may need to add charcoal to the fire as you go to keep the heat up.

As the pork is smoking, you can make your BBQ sauce as you like it. I love my Blueberry BBQ Sauce so much, I'm linking it twice in the same post and it works wonders with pork.

Once the pork has finished smoking, you should be able to pull it apart with tongs and a fork in a large roasting pan. At this point, you may want to stir in your sauce to serve it "wet" or leave as is to serve "dry".

Serve on fresh buns topped with a bit of coleslaw for crunch with BBQ sauce for dipping on the side.

NOM ON THAT B*TCHES!! YEAH!