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By Nick Kindelsperger The smoke billowed out the side of...

The smoke billowed out the side of the grill, casting a haze over the small deck of my sister's house.  It smelled of sweet wood, pork fat, and vinegary sauce.  I listened patiently to Hank Williams, drank cheap beer, and thought about starting my life over.  Why am I wasting my life doing anything other than this?  I could sit around and smoke meat for the rest of my life.  Honestly, I'd never felt happiness like this before.  I hinted at this with the bacon post, but there is real pleasure in smoking meat.  And that pleasure is multiplied the longer the operation goes on.  It only gets better. 

Now this feeling of ultimate satisfaction occurred before I ever even tasted the meat.  This just proves the what a crazy business barbecue actually is.  I think other people have caught this bug.  From the number of barbecue places popping up in the Midwest, I'd say that nearly everyone who has eaten good barbecue has dreamed about the slow life of cooking it for a living. 

But cooking great barbecue is not simple and it is not easy.  That's what I've learned while flipping through Mike Mill's Peace, Love, and Barbecue.  I've tried a few simple recipes from the book, but without proper smoking equipment I couldn't really delve in.  But with the grill already smoking with some of my American bacon, I decided to go all out and make real pulled pork. 

My last attempt at making pulled pork sandwiches was high in enthusiasm but abysmally low in finesse.  All I had was a little hibachi grill that I fueled with some self-starting charcoal.  The charcoal would spend its fuel after about an hour, so I'd have to remove the meat, dump the used charcoal, light some more, wait 20 minutes until it had ashed over, and then set the meat back on and start again.  I had no idea what the temperature was, or what the meat should look like.  Despite all these inadequacies, the meat tasted real good, and was a hit for a backyard grill out.

But I didn't want something that tasted good, I wanted ethereal barbecue, the likes of which I have only tasted on very rare occasions.  Instead of the North Carolina style of my last version, this is from Apple City Barbecue in Southern Illinois.  It has a balanced sauce, that is slightly sweet, tangy, and loaded with...well, apple. 

This version was not executed perfectly.  I'm not sure that can be done on a gas grill, but it is such a vast improvement over my last attempt that I felt like documenting every second. 

This recipe is obviously not quick, and it can seem overwhelming.  It has 22 individual ingredients, takes two days of down time, and 5 hours of constant watching on the grill.  There is a rub, a mop sauce, AND a barbecue sauce.  If you're like me, you'll want cole-slaw on it, too. 

But, like I've mentioned before, there isn't really anything as comforting as watching smoke pour out the side of a grill, especially when that period of time lasts over 5 hours and I have my two favorite dogs in the world to keep me company.  Oh, and in the end of this process you'll have some of the greatest pulled pork sandwiches you've ever sunk your teeth into.  Sound like a good day to you?

A pure expression of the pig: nothing extraneous, nothing wasted.  Pork, salt, and a little bit of time: that's all you need to make rillettes.  It was a beautiful idea which had led me to the kitchen, where I had 25 pounds of pork (a ball of lard, huge hunks of shoulder, and a bag of spare ribs larger than a medium-sized dog) and where I realized I was in over my head.

Confiture de cochon--"pig jam"--is what the French affectionately call rillettes, and I was making it so I could serve it as one of the hors d'ouvres at my wedding. I wanted people to eat something personal, something I had been involved in, a way of sharing in the huge production of feeding all the friends and loved ones. I couldn't help but think of our wedding as the biggest dinner party we'd ever hosted, and though we happily hired an amazing caterer, this was a way I could extend my role as host a little further.

The "pig jam" would be on little toasts, topped with briney cornichon pickles to cut the richness. Other than that, it was just meat, fat, and a little salt to carry all the flavors to the tongue.  Rillettes are simple, delicious, made from cheap cuts.  They're pretty easy to make and hard to mess up, while also quite impressive.

When I began to search for recipes, I found lots of them. Awhile back I made duck rillettes and posted about it, and I absolutely adored the result. Duck rillettes were easy: just make duck confit and shred the meat with a little of the poaching duck fat. For that project I'd bought duck fat and duck legs separately, so it was little more than combining them along with spices to make it final.

This time my one rule was make the rillettes from absolute scratch: no buying pre-rendered lard. But I couldn't figure out which recipe to use that I knew I could trust. I was about to spend over a hundred dollars on ingredients and serve it to lots and lots of people who would proceed to think more or less of me, depending on how it turned out. So there was no way this could be messed up.

As I was digging into making my own British bangers for my Full English Breakfast challenge, I kept stumbling onto the same sad story which may or may not be complete bullshit: During the early 20th century thanks to two World Wars, meat was scarce in England and pork sausages were padded with some grains and extra liquid to help stretch the meat reserves. When cooked, these padded sausages had the tendency to burst out of their casings and the "banger" was born.

Exploding sausages! How cool is that?

Though this tale may be made up, it oddly shines a light on one aspect of the banger--besides the exploding part--which turned out to be absolutely essential: filler. There are stories about percentages, discussion on what kind of cereal to use, and cautionary posts about other nefarious ingredients that are included, but the case remains the same: Bangers must have filler or they simply aren't bangers. 

Even famed British chef Heston Blumenthal seems to agree. In his book and TV show, In Search of Perfection (check out the episode on Youtube) he sets out to create his perfect banger. At first he figures that the sausages should have no filler at all, just meat and seasonings. But the results seem to sever the tie with the sausages of his youth--his 8 year old self that cooked sausages over a campfire. The filler-less sausage may taste great, but it doesn't taste right. Heston eventually embraces the filler to a uniquely obsessive level (let's just say that toasted bread water is involved).

So for my bangers, I knew I needed some filler of some kind, and I figured that breadcrumbs would be the logical choice. But what was most fascinating was that the many recipes I found called not for breadcrumbs, but for rusk. And thus a new question was born: What the hell is rusk?

In my opinion, the best chicken is chicken sous-vide. Each bite is tender and succulent in a way I never thought chicken could possibly be. It's kind of changed everything for me. Even the appearance of the meat is different, instead of stringy and tough, a fork can simply cut through the meat. It's enough to make anyone convert.

So for the past few weeks I've been proselytizing about the powers of sous-vide, a process where you vacuum-seal food (that's where it gets its name, as sous-vide French for "under vacuum") in a plastic bag and cook it at a very specific temperature in water. The temperature should idealy be the exact temperature you want the food to be when it is done. The result is a piece of meat that has retained the maximum amount of its juices, while still being done. It's an astonishing technique, but all my rambling has done miraculously little to convince anyone. Trying to explain what sous-vide is and can do to someone who has never tasted the results is a losing proposition. Either it elicits complete incomprehension and glazed eyes ("food cooked in a plastic bag?") or straight contempt hidden as back-to-basics food evangalism ("I actually prefer cooking the old fashioned way, thank you very much."), even if he or she has never tasted the results. Well, let me try again....

I first sampled this chicken a few weeks ago. SousVide Supreme was having an event in Chicago where world famous chef Heston Blumenthal cooked an array of proteins and vegetables using the new product. Vacuum-sealing food is easy, but finding an accurate way of cooking it in water is not. Expensive restaurants use thermal immersion circulators that can cost well over a thousand dollars, and also look more like something a Mad Sciencetist would use to cook dinner.  

As advertised, the SousVide Supreme is the first machine built specifically for home use. It certainly looks better. It is sleek and gray and about the size of a bread maker. It's also relatively more affordable, (introductory price of $399). Though it's much smaller than a restaurant unit, Heston claimed it was just as accurate as the more expenisve machines. He seemed smitten. He talked empahtically about how this machine would change home cooking, and that it was the most important kitchen innovation in the last thirty years. 

To say the food that came out of the machine tasted good, is something of an understatement. I ate flawless scrambled eggs that had the texture of a fine custard, a steak that was perfectly medium-rare from edge to edge, and a few bites of the tenderest, juiciest, most perfectly cooked chicken I'd ever witnessed.

I dreamt of that chicken for weeks. See, I've done a lot of crazy experiments with chicken over the years on this site. To date, I've roasted a chicken using roughly 10 different methods, all in the search of that elusive perfect bird. That's included all kinds of combinations of low heat, medium heat, extreme heat, and even one where I cooked it in a crockpot for six hours. All of these experiments were done in the hope of creating a bird that was moist and delicious with gloriously browned skin. But here was my answer. Or at least I thought.

As the event went on I sat back and smiled, happy from the food, and pleased to listen to one of the most acclaimed chefs on the planet talk about this new gadget. My only question was whether it was the man or the machine. Obviously the machine had a hand in what happened, but I had also just tasted food served by Heston Blumenthal. Of course it would be delicious.

After the event I requested a demo unit of the SousVide Supreme to see if I could replicate the results at home.