Greetings From Berkshire

Hi all,

My name's Nick. I'm a serial lurker in this forum and BBBQS, and after months of begging, my wife finally took the hint and bought me a shiny new ProQ Frontier! I did originally ask for a WSM, but the prices are ludicrous. Anyway, for my birthday on Friday I was graced with the Frontier, some Barbies charcoal, and some whiskey oak chips.



I rushed off to Tesco and got a bone-in pork shoulder (Everyday value; no horse as far as I could tell! ) and got the old girl lit around 7:45. My wife also got me a chimney starter but due to the snow it arrived about 2 hours after I started it manually, using shredded paper and newspaper (emotional and not something I will be trying again in future )





I used the Kansas City Rib Rub, applied the night before smoking. I mopped after about 10 hours, every hour, with a mixture of white wine vinegar and apple juice.

We had guests around for tea, and I naively thought it would be ready by about 6pm. After all, it only weighed 2.5kg and most of the boston butt recipes are far heavier than that! About 6 hours in I got the plateau, which lasted a good 4 hours. It was finally ready at about 10pm, long after our guests had gone (we had Domino's pizza instead). Still, that meant more for my wife and I.

It took a full bag of charcoal (5kg) for 14 hours of continuous smoking, which seems fair enough to me. The charcoal is reshaped into hollow cylinders which leads me to think there is probably a lot of wasted surface area in the charcoal pan. I do wish I'd put more on than just a shoulder; next time the smoker will be brimming with all sorts





My wife usually doesn't like smoked food, and I don't think I've ever tried it. The pork was fantastic, moist and bursting with flavour. I've slow cooked pork before but there is something about the consistency of this that makes me wonder why I've never tried it before! Oh and the bark is absolutely STUNNING. What a depth of flavour! Like some sort of concentrated, smokey pork jerky. The bottom fell off the main body, and was basically a thin layer of pork with a lot of bark. I just cut this into strips instead of pulling







Just served in a bun with BBQ sauce! None of that rabbit food nonsense.

Thanks for making a fantastic alternative to the WSM. Having never tried it I can't draw comparisons, but assembly and operation, even for a pretty impractical person like myself, was really easy!

Very cool pics and i'm very impressed witht he bark of the pork. Also it looks like the smoke ring on the meat is impressive (probably due to the mop helping absorb the smoke). Have you tried injecting the meat before cooking?

KingBalders wrote:Very cool pics and i'm very impressed witht he bark of the pork. Also it looks like the smoke ring on the meat is impressive (probably due to the mop helping absorb the smoke). Have you tried injecting the meat before cooking?

Hi Balders,
I think I was already pushing my luck with the amount of kit I got for my birthday - I'm getting an injector soon and will definitely be doing that next time. The smoke ring was a lovely shade of pink; my pictures don't really do it justice.

It's odd because if I were roasting a ham or something and after that sort of bark, I'd use a sticky, probably honey-based sauce of some description. Felt a little unnatural using a very watery sauce in a spray bottle, but it seems like it did the trick!