Be Excellent To Each Other

Unnecessary dilution of pig. There is only one acceptable type of melon, and it isn't a fruit.

I never thought it would happen, but I just had a pork belly I couldn't finish! It was massive!

Your pig-fu is weak, old man.

This accursed diet has shrunk my stomach!!!

It has a BBQ.

It has a grill. I need a kettle barbecue.

If only we had a first world problems thread.

Real men make do.

There's no making do that can turn a grill into a barbecue. Well, I guess you could make it a lid for it, assuming someone is going to bring sheet steel and a set of metalworking tools. That seems unlikely however.

Putting the kettle lid on it would do the trick, wouldn't it?

Nah. Needs to be properly sealed to keep the heat down.

Need to maintain 110 deg C for 8-10 hours. Tough without well-fitting lid, top and bottom adjustable vents, and the charcoal suspended on a mesh(so the ash falls through and doesn't smother the fire).

Then Craster will have to bring his sous vide.

Gonna struggle to feed 20+ people with the amount of pig you can fit in there.

Gorgeous steak n ale pie atThe Swan With Two Nicks today. Apparently they slow cook the steak before pie-ing it. Suggested we should make huge batches of steak, pork and lamb for portion-freezing.

I reckon you could do it on a Weber kettle though, with a Smokenator.

Made the tomato butter sauce for some beef tonight, but left it on the hob while I knobbed around in the other room, and it split. Hard. Too hard to rescue with water, so it was time for more drastic measures - an egg yolk. So it wasn't quite tomato butter sauce, but on the plus side I just invented tomato hollandaise.

Crasteraise.

Going to the butcher's at lunchtime to get stuff for meatballs, probably 75/25 beef/pork (veal would be an option but I doubt he has any). Going to get a couple of plain pork sausages and mix them in with a steak, which I'm going to ask him to grind for me; any thoughts on what cut of steak it should be? Chuck is the common suggestion, for the fat content; I'm also considering if rump or even sirloin might not give a better flavour/texture (perhaps with a little extra beef fat added to compensate for the leaner meat).

Hah! From great belmitude (how did you manage to split the simplest sauce in existence so badly?!) comes great discovery.

Is there a reason you're going for sausages rather than just pork? I'd go for rump minced up with a nice fatty chunk of pork shoulder.

You should mix chuck and rump 66/33.

Make the last 1 sirloin.

Uhh, none at all. That was a silly thought.

Bear in mind I'm only looking for less than a kilo of meat in total (feed two of us, plus some leftovers). Even if I double that and make some mix to freeze, I'm still not working in quantities big enough to have multiple steaks.

"OH DEAR, we seem to have leftover STEAKS. We should EAT THEM."

Sounds fucking horrific.

The butcher is grinding the meat for me (I don't have a grinder... yet), so it'll be leftover meatball mix. Which is fine -- I'll freeze it -- but I have very little room in my freezer at the moment so I can't go completely nuts.

Best to keep your nut to meat ratio as low as possible, IMO.

WPOTW

Sorry, I should have put something derogatory about mental illness in there. Must try harder.

Pssht. Buy 1 500g rum steak. Buy 1 1Kg pork shoulder. Cut the pork shoulder in half and wrap one half. Mince the other half with the steak. Take it all home.

I reckon you can find something to do with half a pork shoulder.

The butcher has no mincer! Bah.

Are you sure he's not a baker? A candlestick maker, perhaps?

How can a butcher have no mincer?

I'm sure there's an Eastenders joke in there somewhere.

As they've expanded over the last couple of years, I think they've dedicated most of the back area of their new double-sized shop to hot food prep. (They do a range of roast meat rolls, homemade pasties, cottage pie, chicken curry, jacket potatoes and the like in one shop, with the actual butchery in the other.) But they also moved some of the larger scale actual butchery processes to a premises in a nearby industrial estate, which is also where they run their online shop and wholesale businesses from. So the industrial-grade mincer is over there, not on the premises I go to. Apparently their other, older shop still has one, but this recently refurbished one doesn't.

In the end, I picked up a 2 lb box of minced beef (not steak; 20% fat content, says the butcher) and he hand-diced some pork shoulder to go into it (at an impressive fine level of dice).

I need to buy a mincer.

Zardoz could probably offer you his services heavily-discounted.

I'm here all week (unfortunately).

You should start a protest and stand outside with a sign. They'll cave and get a mincer in the refurbished shop, I guarantee it.

"What have you got against mincers?"

I'd rather buy my own

Spoilsport.

Also, if they did add one, that might compromise the delicious hot food that I have for lunch 2-3 times a week. And that won't do.

I have one big issue with the pulled pork recipe.

"Cut the fat off the meat joint and discard"

Surely this should say

"Cut the fat off the meat joint and use it to make pork scratchings"

How easy is that to do? I assume all I'd need to do is cut it up and, cook it on low, then fry it on high?

I'd usually grill the fat, rather than fry it. I wouldn't cut it up either - snap it up afterwards.

edit: That being said, I have no idea what cut of pork you're talking about.

Yeah, it should say that. When I made pulled pork once, the mrs was cleaning up after me, and she threw away the pork fat/skin. I didn't talk to her for about three days.

Scratchings, you want to cover liberally in salt and chill probably overnight, pat dry then cut into strips with a fucking sharp knife. medium oven then deep-fry, ideally.

Crackling, cover liberally in salt and chill overnight. Pat dry, score a lot with a fucking sharp knife. Get more salt into the scores. Roast on high.

Hmmm. Not sure that would work, as the fat would be saturated with the sauce you've cooked it in. You could cook it off, but it'd still taste barbecue-ish. Which might or might not work.

Worth pointing out that barbecued pulled pork calls for almost all fat to be cut off the outside of the meat, as otherwise a) you can't flavour the meat with a rub and b) you don't form the delectable outer layer of heavily seasoned, smoked crust ("bark", in the parlance). I'm going to attempt a barbecued pulled pork one of these days.

My recipe takes the outer fat off before cooking it.

Ta, no deep fryer, which is annoying. Mrs T would be livid if I brought home another gadget
I could shallow-ish fry in a saucepan though.

Ah! I thought you were all on about doing it afterwards. Now I'm right with you. (Except I'm fairly meh about cracking.)

Well, now I'm fairly meh about you.

I'd be more concerned about a butcher using Grindr, personally.

It's just... I dunno. I always feel very faintly queasy about eating lumping great big pieces of animal fat. Something about the texture, I think. Often it tastes good enough to overcome that (bone marrow, sometimes when eating steak, belly pork, some crackling I've had, etc) but sometimes it doesn't, not quite, and I find that offputting.