use real butter

Tomorrow’s the fourth of July and that means barbecue installment #4: pork ribs. These are the meaty St. Louis style cut of ribs. I know everyone is all agog about baby back ribs, but honestly, it’s a sack of bones with not so much meat. I don’t relish the idea of cooking something for 10+ hours that has such a low yield of consumable material.

**Jump for more butter**

For Ro, I’ll post about my bbq beef brisket in the crock pot experiment. Typically bbq beef brisket is slow cooked/smoked over coals for 10-12 hours. I have no interest in keeping an eye on something that could burn my house and my neighborhood down for that long, so I had the choice between the oven and the crock pot. Oven is out of the question with the latest heat wave, and the winner is: crock pot.

I picked up a 2.5 pound beef brisket, which ended up being about a half pound of fat. Clever little butchers wrap the meat up so you can’t see the fat… You’ll want to remove as much fat as possible, which is a tedious, but sort of fun task. At least I take a sort of OCD pleasure in doing so with my very very sharp knife. Once the brisket is ready, pop it into the crock pot. You can cut it up if the shape results in appendages protruding unceremoniously above the liquid. What liquid? I’m getting to that.

I found a recipe that calls for a cup of water, 1/4 cup Worcestershire, a tbsp of vinegar, 1/2 tsp chili powder, 1/4 tsp ground cayenne, 1 tbsp brown (or any) mustard, 2 minced cloves of garlic, 1 cube of beef bouillon (I use a bouillon paste). Mix all of that together and toss it into the crock pot. Add more water to cover the brisket. I set it on high for 5 hours. At 5 hours, it was still pretty cohesive, so I set it for 6 more hours on low. By morning, it was at easy pull apart, although I suspect if I let it go another 3 hours, I could have had it falling apart – dunno.

Ro’s question was how to serve brisket. When I’ve had the Best Beef Brisket Ever, we always sliced it up and ate it with bbq sauce and all of the other delicious sides from Hogly Wogly’s.

Pork is king when it comes to barbecue, but barbecue is not just pork. I love a good beef brisket or a plate of barbecue chicken. I am quite particular about my barbecue chicken despite never really getting into making it before today. I cannot abide by the use of boneless, skinless chicken breasts for barbecue – ewwwww. I’ve had leathery and rubbery chicken slathered in barbecue sauce and it’s really depressing. No, what is needed is fat (skin) and juicy tenderness (bone in).

Where to start with barbecue chicken? Unfortunately, my go to book for grilling meat does not cover poultry. Chicken is always the fuzzy designate… Are you vegetarian? Well, I eat chicken and fish. I don’t eat meat. Oh that’s okay, we have chicken! It’s somewhere in the netherworld between vegetables and meat, but never really either one. I consider chicken to be meat. If it writhes when you bite into it live, it’s meat. Nevermind the flexitarians. I referenced my Dinosaur Bar-B-Que book (since their famous Que was good enough for catering Carrie’s wedding) and found a good basic recipe.

I used whole chicken legs – the thigh and drum – with bone-in and skin-on. I had a lot of leftover spice rub from my pulled pork experiment earlier in the week, so I used that on six whole organic chicken legs. Why organic? Well, I prefer organic when I can afford it and organic chicken yields a clearer and less solid fat when I make broth with it as opposed to the bright yellow solid disks of fat from conventional chicken. I think that says a lot about the health and quality of the chicken. But the other reason was that no other f#$%@%^ store in Boulder HAD whole chicken legs except for Whole Paycheck Foods.