Houston, we have ignition! With a rocket launch, there comes a point where the fuel has ignited, you are basically sitting on a bomb, and there is no turning back.

The Lar-B-Q is at that point.

25 pounds of pork shoulder are in the smoker. The chicken is in the brine. 10 pounds of beef brisket is getting its final spicy rub-down. 15 pounds of spare ribs are on deck. The dough to make about 100 buns (for pulled pork and sausages) is already rising.  Potato salad and cole slaw are next.

I know the forecast is still saying there’s a chance of rain tomorrow, but it’s not going to stop us, and I hope it doesn’t stop you from coming out!

If you haven’t yet cleared your calendar for Saturday–WHAT ARE YOU THINKING OF! (Unless of course the weather doesn’t cooperate, in which case it will be postponed until the following Saturday. As of this morning, the National Weather Service was predicting a 40% chance of thunderstorms this Saturday, so let’s hear some praying out there!)

For you poor, benighted souls who have never heard of, let alone attended the Lar-B-Q (formerly known as Larbo’s Annual Backyard Barbecue Pigout), here’s the backstory. Since I discovered “slow and low” barbecue and true Southern hospitality on trips down to Coahoma County, in the Mississippi delta, to work for Habitat for Humanity, I like to return the favor each year and host a backyard barbecue blowout that raises money for these work trips organized by New Covenant Fellowship here in town.

Here’s the deal: the suggested donation is $20 for an individual or $40 for a family, for all you can eat. All money raised goes towards buying materials for the houses we help build in Mississippi. The Lar-B-Q starts at 2 in the afternoon on Saturday and winds down sometime in the wee hours on Sunday, prompting Saying #5 of Larbo: “Come for lunch, stay for dinner, and hang around to see the sun come up!” –We’re glad to put up out-of-town guests! Festivities are at our house and environs, 405 North Garfield Avenue, Champaign, IL, USA, on the Big Blue Marble.

Now, to get to the meat of the matter, here’s the menu for this year:

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My apologies for the dearth of posts last week. In addition to what’s supposed to be my full-time job, I had a whole hog to barbecue this weekend.

Although barbecuing a whole hog takes quite a bit of time and attention, the recipe for success is really quite simple: start with a good pig and don’t screw it up.

A good pig means a kind specifically bred for their eating qualities (as opposed to simply putting on weight quickly), raised by a caring producer. This beauty on the left was a small (120 pounds dressed out), organic hog, that was mostly Berkshire, 1/4 Chester, with probably a trace of Tamworth. According to my 1922 edition of Swine in America, Berkshire is an old English breed esteemed for making “the best quality of pork,” which was first brought to the U.S. in 1823, while “the Chester White breed had its beginning about 1820…in Chester County, Pennsylvania,” and is noted for its gentle disposition and excellent mothering. All the pork I work with comes from Stan Schutte of Triple S Farms, and I swear you can taste how happy his pigs are by the sweetness of his pork. When I drove out to pick the pig up from the slaughterhouse, I swung by Stan’s farm to take a look at his pigs, and I’ll be posting more about them later this week.

A pig this good doesn’t need a whole lot of spicing up. I followed Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s suggestion in The River Cottage Meat Book (which contains the best description of how to roast a whole animal): slashing a criss-cross pattern into the outer fat lightly with a box cutter and then rubbing the whole animal, inside and out, with just a mixture of salt and pepper.

One of the things I find so endearing about Hugh is that, like me, he’s willing to plunge in and learn from his mistakes. As he recollects, it can take about half a dozen animals to discover most of the ways to screw up and to begin to figure out how to do it right, so it’s very helpful to have patient family and friends. Here’s what I’ve learned from the many burnt offerings I’ve offered up to the gods.

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No, I’m not talking about shooting up with steroids, but about injecting a little smoky, barbecued, porky goodness into your life.

I’ve rhapsodized before about all the things one can do with the delicious fat and juices given off by a pork shoulder as it slowly barbecues. Since I barbecue a couple shoulders each month, I keep thinking up new uses and I’ve decided to keep a list of all the great things improved by a dash of these deep, dark, secret ingredients.  I want to see how long it takes me to come up with 1001 uses.

This kind of cooking, where you take leftover or even throwaway ingredients and make something great with them, is real, imaginative cooking.  Not flying in truffles from Alba (at $5 a gram) and grating them tableside over pasta. It’s good, old fashioned thrift, like the Italian tradition of cooking meat in a sauce and then using the sauce to coat the pasta and fill everyone up before you dish out smaller portions of the meat itself.

I. Juicing up a Sauce. Sauce is to meat what clothes are to the man. Good meat may need no sauce, but it’s never going to suffer for being dressed in a sauce that drapes and flatters it like an Armani suit.  Concentrated meat broth is a traditional base for sauces, and that’s exactly what you have with barbecued pork shoulder juices, with the addition of smoke and spice. A tablespoon can add depth to a traditional sauce, while more can serve as the base for a really robust sauce.  Freeze it in an ice cube tray and then toss the cubes into a freezer bag, and you can easily add some at a moment’s notice.

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After our recent trip to London to introduce my son to some of English relatives, I’ve been rethinking some of the English recipes I grew up with. Before I travelled to the Mediterranean, discovered Italian food, and realized that it was possible to live in the sun instead on the dank, I had grown up on generous lashings of shepherd’s pie, steak and kidney pie, toad in the hole, fried liver and onions… I had never cooked any of those dishes myself until this past week, when I found myself staring at the better part of a leg of lamb leftover from Easter. “How about shepherd’s pie,” I thought.

So I loosely followed Hugh-Fearnley Whittingstall’s recipe in The River Cottage Meat Book (without adding the ketchup and Worcestershire Sauce to the meat juices), and discovered that he’s quite right: “when you make a good one, it’s one of the most delicious things on the planet.”

Having had some success, of course, I immediately started thinking how I could play with this dish, translate it, Americanize it.

Every month I barbecue two whole pork shoulders for the frenzied masses of central Illinois, and so the idea came to me (inspiration? sacrilege? madness?), why not a pulled pork pie? So, here’s what we’re having for lunch today at my buddy Matt’s, after a good 20-30-mile bike ride:

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These are broilers from the Joy of Illinois farm, where they are raised in large pens on natural grass. I brine them for 24 hours to introduce a little salt and cure and to make sure they stay moist while slow cooking. Then they’re smoked over cherry wood, basting them with the same bourbon glaze I used on the bacon.

These have so much rich chicken flavor that they hold their own with the smoke, pepper, and sweet bourbon glaze. Perfect for a picnic (hard to imagine weather warm enough now, but wait a few days), they could also be sliced up to make a chicken sandwich or served with a green salad. Great for chicken enchiladas or tacos. If you like the deep flavors of barbecue, but are looking for something lean, this is it. Try with a mexican beer and a wedge of lime, a smoky German rauchbier, or a crisp fumé blanc.

If you read my previous post on bacon explosion, you saw what a cheesy recipe this is. Layers of bacon, sausage, and bacon, all topped with barbecue rub, rolled up together, hot smoked, and slathered with barbecue sauce. Weighing in at 5000 calories and 500 grams of fat, it’s gross, an obscene monument to excess. In other words, it’s a great barbecue original, a classic piece of Americana.

The woven bacon wrap on the exterior of this is beautiful enough to deserve making it, but the recipe could stand some improving to say the least. First yuck, their bacon and Italian sausage comes off the rack at the supermarket. Second yuck, the point of bacon wrapped around the outside is to baste a leaner forcemeat in the middle, whereas they have fatty bacon basting fatty sausage, all wrapped around more fatty bacon. Hey guys, how about going for some flavor here, instead of just wallowing in the grease? For my version, I decided to feature the versatility of pork and combine four very different layers, each one adding different flavors.

If the original bacon explosion is pure, cheesy food porn, this is still totally over the top, but it has a lot more meat to sink your teeth into–more like Robert de Niro and less like Ben Stiller.

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Now we’re talking! Finally, someone has come through and provided the perfect drink to have with TLP’s pulled pork. Not surprisingly, it’s Cuban-inspired and features rum, a fair amount of lime juice, and a good amount of ginger beer, which stand up to all the smoke & spice in the barbecue and slice right through the fat of the pork shoulder.

This cocktail was created by Dale DeGroff, a master mixologist and author of a number of fine cocktail books. Here’s the recipe.

1 ½ oz Añejo rum
½ oz orange curaçao
½ oz lime juice
2 dashes Angostura bitters
2 oz ginger beer
lime wheel for garnish
orange slice for garnish

Añejo means “aged,” and the rum for this drink is specially aged for years in charred oak barrels, which gives it a smokiness that makes it pair wonderfully with barbecue. The lime juice, of course, must be fresh squeezed. I like my ginger beer strong, but then it tends to drown out the other flavors. If you go with a strong ginger beer, bump up the other ingredients (except for the lime) by 50%.

1 Piggy Point to Matt for supplying this recipe! It looks like we now have the official cocktail for this year’s Lar-b-que!

Apparently I’m way behind the curve on this one.

Two pounds of Italian sausage.  Two pounds of bacon.  Take half the bacon and weave into a wrap.  Take the sausage and spread it on top.  Crisp up the rest of the bacon and sprinkle it on the sausage.  Sprinkle layers with bbq rub.  Hot smoke for two hours and coat with bbq sauce.  How could 5000 calories and 500 grams of fat taste any better?

If you read the NYT, you’ll have seen this featured in today’s dining section.  The authors/perpertrators of the bacon explosion posted this recipe on their blog just before Christmas.  According to the Times article, they have had 400,000 hits since then.  By the time I post this, I’ll probably be the twenty-thousandth website to link to their recipe.  Obviously, someone knows a lot more about marketing than I do.

This certainly exemplifies the saying of Larbo that “Nothing exceeds like excess.”

Trying to come up with a name for your barbecue team and wondering if it’s already taken?  Then this is the website for you: http://www.bbqteamnames.com/Default.htm

I browsed through the 3000+ names that have been registered, and here are some of my favorites, proving that folk poetry, wit, and wisdom are alive and well:

Any Pork in a Storm
Armed & Hammered
Bone Appetit
Charcology
Fa-Que BBQ
Feast O’ Beast BBQ
Girth Wind & Fire
Grand Masters of Cooking Disasters
Griller Warfare
Hall of Flame BBQ
Hogasm
Hoosier Crawdaddy
Limp Brisket (Plainfield, IL)
Mighty Swiners
Pig’n And Swig’n
Pork, Sweat, & Beers
Ring of Fire BBQ
Skews Me Barbecue
Squeal of Approval
Sultans of Swine
Swinal Tap
Taming of the Que
The Bastey Boys
The Bobby Choo Brothers
The Grate Pretenders BBQ
The Hoggy Bottom Boys
Three Brisketeers
Thrilla from the Grilla
Two Fat Basters
Will Eat No Swine Before It’s Time