(Secret) Homemade BBQ Sauce

My husband always complains that I don't give him credit for his creations on this blog, but I always do. If he made it or helped, I mention him. He also complains that I don't post about all the goodies he makes around the house, but every time I ask him for the recipe so that I can post it, he refuses to tell me! I just can't win, can I? Well, hopefully this post will shut him up for a while :)

My husband has been wanting to break out the smoker one last time before the end of the year, so when pork butt went on sale, he bought two huge honking ones to make pulled pork sandwiches. Then he figured, if he's going to go through all the trouble of smoking the suckers for 14 hours, he might as well maximize his efforts. Since he can fit 4 pork butts on the smoker, he asked me to pick up 2 more. We ended up with 25 pounds of pork. No, I'm not kidding.

I went to bed at a normal person hour while my husband napped all afternoon. He woke up about an hour before I went to bed, and stayed up all night to smoke the pork. I kept waking up in the middle of night, smelling smoke, onions, garlic, and other tasty aromas that aren't exactly what you want to be smelling while you're trying to sleep, while he toiled away smoking the pork and making this awesome homemade BBQ sauce. It's nice and rich and full of flavor. It's the perfect consistency, isn't too sweet, has a bit of smokiness to it, has the perfect amount of acidity, and packs a lot of heat, just the way I like it.

And here is where I would usually share with you the recipe for this BBQ sauce... BUT HE WON'T SHARE IT WITH ME! In fact, he's joked (at least I hope he's joking) about splitting the recipe in two so that if someone ever finds it (ie me), they'll only have half of it.

So I apologize for posting this teaser of a post, but I had to do it so that he'll stop accusing me of taking credit for his work and for not posting the stuff he makes. If you want to try this magic BBQ sauce, maybe I can convince him to sell you a jar? Or maybe, if I do enough snooping, I can find both halves of recipe and expose it to the world!

Ingredients:
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Directions:
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Grilled Tri-tip

Even though it's technically fall, the weather here has been hot and that means more grilling! My husband loves to grill up tri-tip. Every time it's on sale, he buys it, slaps on a tasty homemade rub and grills it up to perfection.

I've never posted his tri-tip before because he's never shared with me the secrets of how to make this beautifully cooked hunk o' meat, so I have nothing to share with you today. The only thing I can say is that there's a suspicious amount of brown sugar, paprika, cumin, cayenne, salt and pepper missing from my spice rack, and that the meat thermometer is dirty. But other than that, I'm at a loss ;)

I'm hoping that if I butter him up a bit by posting this tasty picture and singing his praises, he might just cave and teach me, or make more. I'll be happy with either outcome. But on second thought, since he does it so well, there's really no need for me to learn. I should really just sit back, kick up my feet, and enjoy it while I can!

Smokey Pulled Pork Sandwiches

Since the hubz was waking up at 4am to smoke brisket anyway, we thought we should toss a few more things onto the smoker to maximize his efforts. After debating between a second brisket and a few other meaty goodies, we decided on pulled pork sandwiches.

The hubz took 2 honkin' pieces of pork butt and covered them in the same rub that he used for the brisket and let them sit in the fridge overnight. That's a lotta meat!


At 4am, he put them on the top rack of the smoker so that the juices would drip down onto the brisket and baste it while keeping it moist.

After hours of slow cooking in the smoker, a beautiful bark developed and it was ready for pulling!

When I went to go "pull" the pork, it was so tender that it literally fell apart! You can also see how deep the smoke penetrated the meat. Yum!

And just like last time, I'll let this website give you directions on how to pull off the meat for this amazing sandwich. We added my husband's homemade bbq sauce like we did for the brisket and some homemade cole slaw that I'll blog about next.

Smoked Brisket

Ok, I think it's about time I posted a new food post, don't you think?

So the hubz and I got a Weber Smokey Mountain Smoker as a wedding gift but never got around to using it because honestly, it seemed like such a hassle. Every time he considered using it (he's the grill master in this house), he opted to use our gas grill instead because it was just so much easier. In addition to our indoor grill, we've got 3 outdoor ones. Yes, probably a little overboard, but we like it :)

Well, he finally broke out the smoker over the 4th of July weekend. We were having 30+ people over for a bbq and didn't want to do burgers and dogs. It was the perfect opportunity to test out the smoker. And you know what? Smoking isn't nearly as difficult or scary as it seems. Sure, it's more work than using the gas grill or your oven or even a normal charcoal grill, but it's definitely worth it for some things, such as smoked brisket. In fact, 2 weeks later, we took out again to smoke a few racks of ribs. And while we both thought the ribs were way too smokey and probably best cooked using other methods, but I'll get around to blogging about that some other time, we both felt that the brisket and the pulled pork were well worth the effort.

I'm not going to post a how-to here because this website is all you need and does a way better job than I ever could. It's a fantastic resource that goes in-depth into everything there is to know about smoking a fabulous hunk o' meat. I will share a couple highlights though...

The hubz bought a big ol' brisket, trimmed the fat cap, and put a homemade rub on overnight. Unfortunately, I don't have a recipe for you because the hubz doesn't really follow recipes, but it always turns out fantastic! He's just talented that way :) What I do know is that it consisted of lots of brown sugar, cayenne, paprika, cumin, salt and freshly ground black pepper and probably some garlic powder and onion powder too.


For the cooking method, he opted to go for the Smoked & Oven Finished method. This yields great smokey flavor and tender juicy meat. But in order to get it done in time, the poor boy had to wake up at 4am to get things started - that's dedication!

Look it's still dark out! It's also a lotta smoke!

The result was fantastic in my opinion. Look at that perfect smoke ring.

And the gorgeous, flavorful bark.
A few tips that he says he's going to use next time is to trim off more of the fat cap as the smoke doesn't penetrate through that thick layer of fat very well. He also put 2 fatty pork butts on the rack above it so that the drippings would "baste" the brisket and keep it from drying out. If you don't want to do that, you can cover it in a layer of bacon instead.

The hubz also highly recommends making your own bbq sauce. It's so much better than anything store bought and you can tailor it to your personal preferences (we like it spicy). For our bbq, he made 2 sauces for a little variety, a sweet bourbon bbq sauce, and a tangy spicy bbq sauce. The base of both were canned tomatoes, fresh onions, brown sugar, vinegar, maple syrup, a touch of ketchup, all cooked down for several hours and then blended smooth. The sweet bourbon sauce had a very healthy dose of jim beam and extra brown sugar while the spicy one had a boatload of cayenne and chili powder for a nice kick and additional vinegar for tang and brightness.

Here it is all cut up and ready to enjoy!