The First Ever BBQFreaks.com Taste Test…Foil vs. Non-Foiled!

How many times have you thought something was a good idea only to find out later that it probably wasn’t your best move?

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!

Once the butts reached 160 degrees I pulled them both and wrapped just one in heavy duty foil. Both pork shoulders reached this temp about 5 hours into the cook.

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

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