The Meats
People often ask us about how we cook our bbq, so here is a brief description of how we prepare each meat each day.
Chicken
First thing we smoke is the chickens. Because the chickens have been soaking in brine over night they have absorbed a lot of water, which gets cooked out during the smoking instead of the meat drying up. Since the smoker has rotisserie shelving and all that brine would splatter on other meats, we let the chickens have their own special time.
Baby Backs + Spare Ribs
Once the chickens are done we load the smoker with baby backs and spare ribs that were rubbed the previous night and a couple fresh pieces of hickory wood. After the first two hours we spray the ribs every half hour with juice to keep them nice and moist. The ribs are done when the meat starts pulling back from the bone and they start cracking in the middle when picked up from the thick end.
Pork Shoulders + Brisket
By the time the ribs come out it is usually time to start loading the smoker with pork shoulders for the next day. Pork shoulders are extremely dense and cold coming out of the refrigerator, so we load with more hickory and crank up the smoker. Temp can vary day to day, because we have to judge how much time we have until we load the briskets and then the smoker has to get turned way down. The pork shoulders typically have four hours on their own in the smoker, and then we open the doors and let the heat drop, at which point we load it with rubbed briskets and more hickory wood. The doors to the smoker stay closed until 10am the next day when we start temping the brisket and pork to see if they are done.