The Burnt Ends in Swine Version
Do you know the Brisket, the famous BBQ texan-based BBQ dish? If the answer is to be negative, my first advice is to remedy it as soon as possible. I’m sure you will fall in love with it and when it happens, my second advice will be to go to the next stage of lust, to separate the flat from the point and to cook with this latter the fabulous Burnt Ends. These are meat bites in the barbecue sauce, greedy and gilded out but that literally melt into the mouth once bitten.
A few weeks ago, surfing on the howtobbqright site, I was overwhelmed by what do represent the third stage on this special stairs: to make Burnt Ends with pork meat. I saw in this sense a Malcolm Reed recipe and I immediately thought that the idea was too good for not being reinterpreted and shared with you.
We will start it by the Pork Bacon, which we had previously used in the Mustard Pork Belly recipe. We will cook the Burnt Ends in Low & Slow, wrapped in a rich classic barbecue Rub (in our case the Sweet Rub o’Mine) and we will smoke with cherry chunks. Finally we will glaze them with a sort of Trigg method, with a sweet barbecue sauce as the Rufus Teague Honey Sweet, to resume them with a fast, few minute walk through the grid.
Ingredients (for 10 people):
1 Pork Bacon
80 gr. Kansas City Style Rub
80 gr. Brown Sugar
50 ml. Honey
80 gr. Butter
100 ml. Barbecue Sauce
Smoke: Wild Black Cherry
Realizzation:
- First of all we proceed with a proper trimming of the Bacon. Compared to the Belly Pork recipe, here we have no interest in the rind, so we then proceed to remove it from the meat. Let’s turn the bacon on the other side and remove residue of tips and flaps of overfat, straightening it almost perfectly. Finally, we cut it into cubes. You can choose the size, but my advice is not to make them too small: they will reduced on cooking and in any case the full bite contributes to the sense of libido of the dish.
- Prepare a cooking tray by spraying it generously with a non-stick cooking spray. Then put the Rub in a small container at high edges and pass over all sides of each cube then place it neatly on the tray. Let’s finally put the cooking tray in our WSM47 at 260º F with some Wild Black Cherry Chip.
- In this case, we do not rely on any temperature. Simply when the cubes reach a gorgeous and crunchy mahogany bark, we can proceed to the next stage. In our case it took 2 and a half hours.
- At this point, we remove the tray from the smoker and move the cubes into a foil pan. We sprinkle them with barbecue sauce, honey, brown sugar and butter flakes, cover with an aluminum foil, seal it to the pan and bake for about 45 minutes or in any case until all the sugar is loose.
- Let’s take the baking pan and let’s give a nice stir at the cubes in the juices inside. Finally, we move them back to the tray and put it back in the smokers for about 5-10 minutes until the sauce will have drawn around the Burnt Ends in a shiny and elegant glaze.
Conclusions
The Pork Burnt Ends are literally a delight. A friend of mine a few years ago, he described the beef ones as the bovine equivalent of a pastry bon bon. I find that the definition needs to be fully recalibrated according to this experience. I just recommend not to base a whole dinner on them because they have a very rich, almost exaggerated taste that is likely to stifle. In my opinion the best consumption is in the final stage of a barbecue meal with friends, the classic bite of the priest whom no one can give up even if they are sated and to which they will associate your cook out for a long time. Do you also feel ready for the third stage of lust?
