Apple City Barbecue Pulled Pork Sandwiches
Day 1
Prick the pork butt all over with a fork.
Magic Dust: AKA the Rub
It's been a bit quiet around here--so here's what we've been up to the last couple weeks.
First, the big, important news: Nick got hitched! On Saturday, July 26th, he married his lovely fiancée Abby in Columbus, Indiana; I was the best man. At the reception we ate Nick's own gravlax , which was delicious and, I imagine, extremely laborious to slice for over 200 people. Nick is curre...
If you haven't signed up yet , there may be a few spots left: tomorrow, at the Whole Foods on Bowery at 7pm, I'll be teaching a class about salt preservation and the basics of dry-curing meat. We'll be starting gravlax, bacon, and duck prosciutto projects. The class is an incredible deal, and you'll walk away with two pounds of meat to finish curing in your apartment.
The Daily News d...
It was the most fantastic feeling in the world--especially for someone who has no idea how to grow food, like me. A bunch of seeds Elin and I planted months ago in a nearby community garden--tomatoes, kale, peppers, cucumbers, snap peas, beets, radishes, onions, lettuce, and corn--had been growing into large green bushy things that we hoped weren't weeds. Were they healthy and sated with water...
It's been nearly a week since I packed up all those boxes in Ohio and made my way up north, but it sure doesn't feel like it. Nestled in my Bucktown apartment by Western and Fullerton, I've been spending the last week trying to sort through cardboard, and finalize plans for my upcoming wedding (less than three weeks away!). It's been a hectic past week, which I've mostly spent in m...
First, I needed to find some pork belly with its skin still firmly on. My previous attempt removed it , along with a lot of precious fat directly underneath. My bacon didn't have nearly enough fat on it to fry up, so instead cooking up beautifully in a pan, it burned . My local butcher wouldn't sell me a piece with the skin on unless I bought 10 pounds, a fact I still find ridicu...
For the fourth time in as many years, I'm going to spend the last weekend of June packing up boxes, carrying heavy couches down stairwells, and figuring out whether the odd Ikea piece of furniture is really worth the effort of moving. I already cooked my last meal on the well worn stove (had to be the shrimp etouffee ), and will now be living on bagels and sandwiches. This time next wee...
The weekend before last Elin and her mom and I set off to see four states in four days. Our goal was to do it just before the tourists and summer heat took over. In the highly organized itinerary, which would be promptly deviated from, we had plans for upstate New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. The loose organizing principle to the whole affair was to stay in Bed and Breakfasts...
This one has a happy ending. Unlike my previous attempt where I failed once and then crashed and burned in such an epic fashion that I never wanted make yogurt again, this one has a neat little recipe at the end. I'm happy. When I started this crazy business I had expected to knock off a bunch of yogurt and be done with it. To be honest, I’d never really thought much about...
My most ambitious meat curing project yet recently emerged from an unplugged fridge in my living room. It was a pig cheek from a heritage-breed pig, also known as the jowl, which was salted and seasoned with sugar, black pepper, and thyme leaves, then left in the bottom of my real fridge for a week to release moisture. After that, I hung it to dry in the unplugged fridge for three more...
Blake and Nick live in Chicago and have written for The Paupered Chef and other publications since 2006.
