I learned a ton of great barbecue techniques from both George and Josh and they are great guys.

I really want to thank them for letting me come hang out and be a part of their BBQ team for the weekend.

One of the things we discussed were different techniques used for cooking barbecue.

I mean as you can imagine they had their way of doing things and I have mine.

One of their techniques I found very interesting was how they cooked their pork shoulder.

Now I have really gotten away from injecting my butts and wrapping them in foil so I might be a little biased here so I’ll tread lightly.

I also will be careful and not divulge any proprietary secrets…I mean after all, we all know about injecting and marinading barbecue.

You see, not only did they inject their pork butt but they also poured a marinade over top the butt before wrapping it with foil and returning it to the smoker to finish cooking.

Now let me tell you, this turned out a very tasty and juicy butt, however, it made for a soft and mushy bark.

I just don’t see anyway around this outside of putting the butt back on the cooker ( uncovered) to firm the bark up a bit.

So here’s my question to you– Do you inject your pork butt? Do you use a marinade on your butt? Do you wrap your butt in foil after pouring a marinade over it?

If so, how do you combat a mushy and soft bark?

I’d love to hear your suggestions!

Now go smoke something, Bill Parlaman

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I tend to have these moments more than the average bear.

I’m pretty sure I have what you might call a “Clark W. Griswold” complex.

Come on–You know who Clark Griswold is, don’t you?

Yeah I thought so–but for those of you who may not be familiar with Clark Griswold let me fill you in…

Clark W. Griswold–”You serious Clark?”

Clark Griswold plays the lovable but overly ambitious father and husband in those National Lampoon Vacation Movies. He loves his family and attempts to show his love by planning over zealous and grandiose vacations which always backfire and end up causing more problems then lasting memories for him and his family.

So this weekend was another Clark Griswold moment for me because I took on way too many projects once again.

You see I’m a single dad with two beautiful little girls, Gabrielle and Alexa. Gabrielle is 9 and Alexa is 6.

My girlfriend Michelle also has a beautiful little daughter and her name is Kirsten, ( We call her KK for short) and she’s 8.

So between Michelle and I we have 3 beautiful little ladies who are wild and crazy about their barbecue!

Here’s my girls from left to right–Alexa (6), Kirsten (8) and Gabrielle (9)

Now if you have kids this age you are painfully aware of what I’m about to say…and if you don’t, consider this free birth control! ( just kidding, I love my kids to death!)

You see, when you have kids your weekends no longer exist–that’s right, your weekend is now replaced by chauffeuring them around to softball games, birthday parties or riding lessons!

And this weekend was no different. Except this weekend I got the bright idea to hold a yard sale while also conducting a barbecue experiment on whether or not people would prefer pulled pork that had been wrapped or not wrapped in foil.

Here’s Alexa eating all the samples! Save some for our customers!

Ah, what a brilliant idea I thought…

Wrong!

So it rained on Saturday which forced us to change our plans and hold the yard sale on Sunday.

Our signs got soaking wet and fell down so our advertising was a little lacking to say the least!

I retained the services of my 3 little girls to assist me with the yard sale and the 1st official BBQFreaks.com Foil vs No Foil Taste test.

Here’s the little BBQ Freaks again!

So here’s what we did. I prepared two Boston Butts the night before with a 50-50 mixture of Billy Bones Original Rub and his new Triple Cherry.

Both Pork butts were put on the smoker around 8 PM at around 275-285 degrees for about 4 hours until I let the temp drop to between 230-245 degrees during the rest of the night.

I cooked on my Weber Smokey Mountain Cooker with a full water pan over Humphrey’s lump charcoal and a good size hunk of
Cherry-wood.

KK voting for the non-foiled pulled pork! Guess she’s a traditionalist!

The butt that was wrapped finished cooking at 195 degrees in about 10 hrs.

The butt that was not wrapped took about 11 1/2 hours.

I pulled each Boston Butt off the smoker once the internal temp reached 195 and then I let the foiled butt rest for about 2 hours and the unfoiled but around 1 hour give or take.

The thing I noticed with cooking your pork butt in the foil was the bottom of the pork shoulder gets soggy and a weird brown color from it sitting in its own juices.

I didn’t like the way it looked when I unwrapped the shoulder to break it apart but once I pulled the butt apart the meat had a nice reddish brown color to it. It looked very moist as I pulled the meat apart.

Picture of Foiled Pulled Pork

The butt I did not wrap had a dark and dry crispy bark but it didn’t seem to have that dark rich color inside when I broke it open. In fact, outside of the smoke ring the meat was white in color. The meat from the unfoiled butt was not quite as moist as the wrapped butt– but it wasn’t dry either.

Here, take a look for yourself! Looks pretty good right?

Here’s the pulled pork which was not foiled

So here’s the problem…we held our yard sale on a Sunday which was our 1st mistake. We didn’t get the number of people we had hoped but we did make a cool $90.00. We would have liked to have had more of a consensus of people trying the various styles of pulled pork.

( My girls actually went door to door in our neighborhood and recruited some of our neighbors!)

The other thing was not many people wanted barbecue first thing in the morning

Yes I know…”What is wrong with these people?”

I guess that’s what you get when you live in the north!

Some folks who took the BBQ Freaks Taste Test

We also had two vegetarians who would not take part…Can you believe this? What are the chances?

Our final numbers were a whopping total of 11 people who took our taste test and the final results were…drum roll please…

Six people preferred the the pork shoulder that was not wrapped and by using some simple math… 5 people enjoyed the butt that WAS wrapped in the Foil.

So there you have it, our 1st ever official BBQ Freaks.com taste
test.

Much like the Griswolds family vactations, it didnt go exactly the way we hoped.

I think I had visions of hundreds of people partaking in our little taste test and then feeling so good about the food they would spend their cash on the junk we were trying to get rid of.

Gabrielle is a real BBQ Freak! She can actually eat more ribs than me! You go girl…make your Daddy proud!

On a more positive note the girls and I had a great time! We’ll do it again for sure. They really got into it and were excellent little helpers.

So I hope our little experiment will inspire you to conduct your own taste test sometime soon–or in the alternative save yourself the headaches and hold out until we run another one!

Barbecue is all about testing and tweaking and finding out what works and what doesn’t. Get rid of the stuff that doesn’t work and do more of the stuff that does!

Its also about hanging out with your family and making them a part of the whole experience. I know I’m raising a whole new generation of Que lovers and I couldn’t be more proud.

So until next time….

Now go smoke something, Bill Parlaman

If you’ve enjoyed this, please pass it along to a few of your friends, and if you have any comments please leave them right here on my blog.

And never before has this been more evident then the ongoing battle between the forces of good and evil–or as I like to call them, the “Foilers” vs. the “Non-Foilers.”

The epic struggle between the “Foilers” and the “Non-Foilers” has waged for years in this deep dark underworld of the Barbecue Freaks ( I’m going for a “Lord of The Rings” thing here if you hadn’t noticed).

Two groups of Barbecue Pit Masters diametrically opposed to the other.

On one hand you have the “Non-foilers.” This group, usually from the “Old School” group of barbecue freaks will argue that adding foil to your barbecue will speed the process up by “steaming” your meat and is not considered real barbecue.

The “Foilers” are easily identified. You’ll want to pay close attention for a person who starts a discussion about barbecue with ” Back in my day” or “In the good ole’ days.” They like to brag about how they used to dig a hole, throw some rocks around the hole, and throw a metal grate on top along with their meat…and we had barbecue…and we liked it!

On the other side you have the “Foilers.” I find this group to be more of the “New School” Barbecue Pit Master. These folks contend anything you can do to improve the taste, texture and tenderness of your meat isn’t cheating and it’s the end product what really matters.

You can tell this group by the amount of electronic gadgets hooked up to their cooker. You’ll see them intently watching their computer screen as they control the temperature of with one or two strokes of their key board.

So with that said, I plan on conducting an experiment this weekend.

So here’s here’s the deal boys and girls.

I’m going to barbecue two Boston butts this weekend. I’ll cook one with with foil and the other without–then I’ll have a taste test.

Now mind you, this will all be a very scientific and above board test — yeah right!

I’ll even take video and post it on BBQFreaks.com for you to see the results for yourself.

And look, feel free to conduct your own experiment and send in YOUR results!

Heck, I’d love it if you took your own video and sent them in.

So lets get cooking this weekend and let me know how your experiment turns out.

Oh and one more thing, it might be nice to provide your notes on your cook. You’ll want to share your cooker temps, your meat temps and the the time of day the notes were taken.

So until then, this is Bill Parlaman saying…

Now go smoke something!

If you’ve enjoyed this, please pass it along to a few of your friends, and if you have any comments please leave them right here on my blog.