The Barbecue Diary – part 6
Ricky Ginsburg (former head cook of The Boca Boys)
I always cook two Boston Butts. They come two in a package so I always cook them both figuring that if one doesn’t turn out good I can always use the other. In all the barbecue contests I have ever cooked, I have never turned in the second butt. I don’t even unwrap it to see what it looks like. I just pick one, pull it, and turn it in. The other one goes home to be eaten a week later by my favorite judges, the ones that always give me 10’s.
Both butts are resting in the cooler having hit the required 195 degrees; carefully wrapped in foil and beach towels to retain moisture. I grab the top one and transfer it to our work table. You can feel the heat coming through my gloves. I bought these red vinyl gloves at Home Depot several years ago to handle hot foods. Well… they work for about 30 seconds and then you’ve got to dunk your hands in cold water or risk second degree burns. I carefully remove the foil from the butt and I’m rewarded with a rush of steam from deep inside. We’ve got good bark all the way around. The bone pulls out cleanly and we’re ready to disassemble this hunk of meat.
First job is to save some choice pieces with bark, the judges love bark! The first piece, which happens to look like the best piece, however, is mine. No sense giving something to the judges if it doesn’t taste good, right? I collect the pieces in an aluminum tray where my assistant brushes each piece lightly with our famous Boca Boys barbecue sauce. (Well it’s famous in Boca anyhow.) I plunge my hands into the remaining pork and start to pull it apart, shredding as I go and occasionally tasting a piece or two as a spot check and owing to the fact that I’m hungry. Pork is one of those categories where you need to really fill the box and be creative. I dump a handful of pulled pork into a clean pan and my assistant adds the sauce. Tossing the pork like you would a salad with dressing, we get nice even coverage and that perfect marriage of sauce and meat that the judges are looking for. The sauced pork goes into the turn in box as a nice even layer on the bottom of the box. I figure the box must weigh about 2 pounds by now. It will be at least 3 pounds before we are finished. I strategically place the bark pieces into two rows across the top edge of the container and two across the bottom. My partner does a careful wipe off of the excess sauce and I send him on his way to the turn-in table.
From our food storage cooler I retrieve a couple of Kaiser rolls, a jar of mayo, a package of lettuce and sliced tomato. It’s time for one of the most delicious sammiches you can eat, the PLT – Pork, Lettuce, and Tomato. Let the judges scoop up meat and sauce with their fingers, we’ve got buns and cold beer and almost an hour until that useless piece of cow comes out of the foil.
Three categories done, one to go.
… to be continued.
Next installment