Beer-can Chicken

Today I made some beer-can chicken. I used the following recipe of my own adaptation.

Beer Can:

• Sleeman Original Draught
• 1/4 jar of Clubhouse Cajun wet rub

I rubbed the inside and the outside of the chicken using another 1/4 jar of Clubhouse Cajun rub.

The chicken took about 1-1/2 hours. The bird got turned once during the cooking process to even out the heat. I cooked it to an internal temperature of 170F on the lower thigh facing away from the heat. The lit burner was at about 75% for the whole duration. In better weather (it was around 6C and very windy tonight) would have used a lower setting on the burner, and kept the cooking time the roughly same.

The bird on the grill (blurry due to low light):



The whole meal, including roast potatoes with cheese and roast carrots (my standard, basted with olive oil):


I'm pretty sure this was the most tender chicken I've ever tasted. The skin turned out crispy and delicious.

Pulled Pork Pizza

A friend of mine works at a local pizza shop, and he was kind enough to make some pulled pork pizza using the pulled pork I cooked up earlier in the week.

The pizza topping were:

• BBQ sauce instead of tomato sauce
• Cheese
• Onions
• Pineapple

After running the pizza through the oven with just those toppings, we put on the pulled pork. We chose to put on the pork after cooking the pizza because we were concerned some of the sugar in the BBQ sauce in the pulled pork might burn in the direct heat of the oven.

The results were fantastic:

Kansas-style Pulled Pork

I got a 3-lb cut of pork shoulder shank to make some pulled pork. I put it in the slow cooker on low with:

• 1 diced onion on top of the meat
• 1/2 litre of white table wine
  
• Pork shoulder
• 1 diced onion in the bottom of the cooker

Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture of the pork at the start. I started the cooking process at midnight. At about noon the next day (so after 12 hours on low), I took the meat out of the cooker, discarded the juice, fat layer and the bone. After 12 hours of cooking, the bone and the fat layer are totally disconnected from the meat and just fall right off. You have to be really careful to not have the meat fall into pieces and splash down into the hot wine and juices as you remove it from the cooker, since the meat is very tender at this point.

You then pull the meat. This can be done by just running two forks through the hunk of meat, or if you let the meat cool, by using your hands.

The reason pork shoulder is so cheap (it was about $6 for 3 lbs from Sobey's, which isn't the cheapest grocery store in town), is that it is very dense with connective tissue. Normal cooking processes leave the connective tissue intact, which make it very tough and undesirable meat. However, when you cook the meat for 12 to 20 hours on very low heat (below 220F), the connective tissue has a chance to dissolve, release delicious fatty juices, and allows the meat to simply fall apart.

After pulling, and adding one more diced onion, the meat looks like this:


At this stage, I added 1 jar of Compliments Kansas City Smokey BBQ Sauce. For a discount brand BBQ sauce, I was very impressed. It was very smokey, and not overpowered with sugar like a lot of other BBQ sauces.

After adding sauce:


At this point I turned the cooker back on to low, and let the meat cook for another 8 hours to let the flavours develop even further. The final product looked like this:


On a bun with potato salad and coleslaw: