snack

snackmade: my 12-hour pork butt

One of my favorite winter dishes is my 12-hour pork butt. It is an attempt to make an acceptable facsimile of the Hawaiian dish Kahlua Pig, a childhood staple. In the authentic island version a whole pig is roasted for 24-hours in an underground pit called an Imu. Being an urban apartment dweller this is quite impractical. My solution is one of the easiest, fool-proof recipes in my repertoire.

Take one piece pork butt (which is actually the shoulder) and lay it on a large sheet of tin foil. I wouldn't use anything smaller than a two-pound piece, I usually get one that's about three-four pounds. In this recipe fat is good, so don't let the butcher trim it off - and don't you either. If you're looking for fat-free, you're on the wrong blog.

Poke it all over with a fork. Pour natural liquid smoke over it, using about 1-tablespoon per pound of meat. Sprinkle with Hawaiian salt (or other flavorful coarse salt), again using about 1-tablespoon per pound of meat. Wrap it up in foil, being sure to fold over the edges and seal it well. Wrap in a second piece of foil if you're not sure. Put the foil wrapped butt onto a baking sheet and place in a 200-degree oven. Let cook 12-hours.

I usually start it at night before bed, so when I get up in the morning it is finished. I just turn off the oven and let it cool to room temperature. It is almost impossible to overcook, so don't worry if the time goes long because you've really slept in after a late night at the Spotted Pig.

Open up the foil and using your hands, start to work through the butt, gently and systematically pulling off the fat and discarding it, and pulling off the meat and puting it into a pot. Add the cooking liquid pooled in the bottom of the foil to the meat.

At this point you can put it into the fridge to keep until you're ready to eat. To serve, heat it slowly on the stove, adjust the salt and it's done. To eat it Local-style you'd make a big pile of white rice and sauteed cabbage topped with the pig. But the soft smoky shredded meat is not a bad pulled pork substitute either. You could easily opt for adding BBQ sauce and throwing it onto a bun with some cole slaw. And before the BBQ fanatics go loco on me - I did say substitute not authentic.

UPDATE 3.24.08: A new variation. Sauté the pork with a chiffonade of Swiss chard and a little barbecue sauce and serve over Falls Mill stone ground white corn grits.

snackmade: recipe chain gang

Remember chain letters? The adolescent postal pastime that was ultimately ruined by aging and those ponzi-scheme chain letters by scam artists? I recently got a chain-email, where you send a recipe to ten people, then get 36 in return. So I did it. Am curious to see what comes back.

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If you want to start your own, I cut-n-pasted the letter after the jump, along with my recipe. I actually just made for New Year's. Turns out a 9x13 pan is the perfect size á deux.

snackmade: wolfgang’s smokin’ salt

No, not Puck or Mozart; this is about Wolfgang VonWieser, of the Bellagio in Vegas. I ran a story on his homemade flavored salts in last Wednesday’s Sun, but only had room for one recipe. Now that there’s snackmade, the brand new all recipe category on Snack, his second recipe for smoked salt has found a home.

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Recipe after the jump.

snackmade: ambrosia

Quite some time ago, I promised a new snack category for recipes, snackmade. Enfin! Le début.

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I recently went to an urban barbecue and brought my summer-time pot-luck standard, ambrosia. It’s not fancy and it’s not gourmet, but people love it, even if they are fancy and gourmet. Ambrosia’s one of those fluid recipes, with a million variations. It’s more of a concept, combining canned fruit and marshmallows and letting it meld together in puffy sweetness. Below is my crowd-pleasing recipe. Some would argue that ambrosia requires fruit cocktail or nuts or whipped cream. Some say that it’s technically a "salad", while some call it dessert. Indeed, there are no wrong answers. I like to try to keep a one-to-one ratio of fruit to marshmallow, and use equal volumes of each fruit.

Recipe after the jump.