Yesterday was the BBQ I hosted to celebrate my 30th birthday. I’ve really gotten into making barbecue (which s *not* grilling) in the last few months, and seeing as it’s a hands-off method of cooking that feeds a lot of people and almost everyone likes, it was a no-brainer.

It all started on Thursday, when I did a little little grocery shopping and made a “practice pie.” I’ve recently started reading the book Ratio by Michael Ruhlman and there’s a ratio in there for pie dough that I hadn’t tried, so I figured a dry run was in order. Besides, having 24 hours to finish an entire pie isn’t exactly the worst problem you can have. Although I was making a strawberry rhubarb pie for the party (which I have never even tried but was delicious), I decided to just go with peach for the practice pie.

I also got the two Butts and one of the chickens soaking in Mojo marinade (like brine, but with flavor) and made the BBQ rub.

Originally I planned to smoke the meat on my Weber kettle grill, as I always have. I was a little worried about fitting all of the meat on the kettle. After all, I bought 2 Boston Butts (totaling over 10 pounds), 2 chickens and was making a Bacon Explosion as well. Luckily, when I got home from work on Friday, my amazing wife surprised me with a 22″ Weber Smokey Mountain Cooker fully assembled and ready for action on the back porch.

This thing is like a sex toy for your porch. It holds enough fuel (aka charcoal) to burn for at least 12 hours, has a water bowl that holds by my estimation at least 2 gallons of water (if not 3) and helps keep your meat moist (it really does) and and has two 22.5 inch cooking grates that will hold 8 butts, or 10 chickens, or two turkeys, or, as it were, all the meat I had bought, with room to spare.

On Friday night I was reading up on this new smoker over at the Virtual Weber Bullet and it came to my atention that, well, I had better get started. On the kettle grill, the heat is a little higher and the meat cooks faster, so I thought I would be ok to start everything on Saturday morning. After reading though, I decided I needed to get started Friday night, and since the Bullet will run unattended overnight, I fired it up around 11:30 pm.

I got 40 charcoal brickettes going in the chimney starter and put the rest of a 20lb bag of Kingsford into the bottom of the Bullet, along with several chunks of hickory. When the coals were hot I added them to the top of the unlit coals (known as the Minion method) and put the smoker back together.

Luckily I had already rubbed the Butts, with the intention of letting them take in the rub overnight. Once I had decided to start them early, I pulled them out of the fridge to come down to temperature a bit.

And then added them to the smoker.

Once I got the tempertaure stable aound 225 degrees (which took me till abotu 1:30am) I went to bed. After I got the visions of brown sugar plum basting sauces to stop dancing in my head I fell asleep. At 4:00 I woke up to make sure the temperature was still stable (it was a little high, so I closed the vents down a bit) and went back to sleep. At 6:00 I woke up, mostly due to a “Christmas Morning” feeling, but I sat in bed till about 7:00 getting rested up for what was sure to be a busy day.

After getting a look at the butts and waking up, it was time to assemble the Bacon Explosion; starting with the outer basket-weave of bacon.

After this, a layer of sausage went on.

And lastly, an inner layer of fried bacon and BBQ sauce went inside.

The sausage portion is then rolled up into a loaf, and the bacon-basket-weave is rolled around that. After it came off the smoker, it looked like this:

Once the Bacon Explosion was assembled I moved on to the strawberry rhubarb pie. I had made a second batch of pie dough the night before, so I rolled it out into the pie pan, filled it with the filling (strawberries, rhubarb, sugar and corn starch) and topped it with a latice crust to allow the very large amount of moisture that rhubarb puts off to properly vent.

The pie turned out very well, and tasted great. The moisture from the filling was so much that it sort of overtook the topping and crust, thus producing a pie that wasn’t the pretties ever made, but those who tried it thought it was delicious, and I would have to agree.

Once the pie was in the oven I put the chickens and the halved chickens and Bacon Explosion on the smoker and sat down. Earlier I had basted the butts and took them off the smoker, because they were for the most part finished. I wrapped them in foil and put them in a thick styrofoam cooler (courtesy of Omaha Steaks). An hour before meal time I put them back on to heat up (by this time the smoker was down to about 200 degrees) and then 30 minutes later I took them off of the smoker for their final rest, and took the Bacon Explosion off as well to rest before I sliced it.

Finally, I sliced the bacon explosion, pulled the pork, and cut the ckickens into quarters (cut is a bit of an exaggeration, they fell apart) and put it all on a platter. The final plate-o-meat looked like this:

Justin seemed happy

And Linnea decided to go live with somebody who didn’t consider pork fat to be the 4th food group.

I had a really great time, and really apprecate everyone coming and hanging out. I hope to cook for all of you again way before I am 31.

More (and larger) photos here