Big Foamy Head: Big Foamy Head
By admin, 18 years and 8 months ago

The Big Cook

I've got the pictures posted with detailed comments on the 4th of July cook. This was 4 days of prep, test cooks, and final cook to feed a crowd of 20-30 people. It was a lot of work but well worth it as the pictures show. Enjoy, and be sure to listen to the 4th of July podcast as well.

Note: Friday and Saturday are featured on Show # 2 where I cook the Beer Can Smoked Chicken and Riblets. You can listen to the mp3 here. The recipe for the Basic Rub and the Beer Can Chicken is found here in the article «Feeding the Masses».


Friday, June 1st - Prep Day

I started out by getting my prep area set up. Lots of newspaper, cleanup materials, my spices, oils, knives, cleavers and pans. When you're cooking a big meal like this one, you want to have everything close at hand. Running back and forth to your kitchen just isn't the way to go.

I mixed up a batch of Basic Rub and then proceeded to mix up more. Since I was cooking a couple of butts and 8 slabs of ribs, the two cups a batch makes wasn't going to be enough. The recipe for the rub is found here.
This is how the rub turns out. It's a nice reddish color that will carmelize well on the meat. Since I used turbinado sugar, this will take a little while and isn't as prone to burning. You can see that the coarse spices really stand out. I use a coarser blend rather than the fine in order to keep from saturating the meat with too much salt or sugar, and let the finer spices get at the meat.
I'd had my ribs thawing in the refrigerator for a day, but they we're still too frozen, plus I'd bought another slab that was rock hard. I filled a cooler up with water and dropped my ribs in. This way I didn't have to break the meat or go to lots of trouble to keep them submerged. I left the lid up rather than closed because the point is to let the ribs thaw, not keep the temperature down. After about 3 or 4 hours the meat was completely thawed.
This is a closeup of the meat while in the cooler. I wanted to show a couple of things: 1. These are loin back ribs which are smaller and more tender than spareribs. They have a nice piece of meat between each rib, and have a little less fat than spareribs. 2. Meat is a lot cheaper around holidays. These usually are $5.00 a pound, but they were on sale for $2.97, which is a great price for loin back ribs. Look at the marbeling of these ribs, they're excellent!

I'm all prepped now, and ready to go. Tomorrow is a test cook to see how my rub turned out.

Go to Saturday...

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