We started off Tuesday before the school day even officially began by taking the ribs out of the fridge and lighting up the smoker. By about 9 o’clock, the ribs were in and smoking away. To get them all to fit, we stood them up on end, curled each rack into a spiral shape, and secured it with wooden skewers. Using this technique, we were able to fit 6 large racks of baby back ribs in a fairly small smoker.
While the ribs cooked, we began to work on preparing our buttermilk biscuits for Thursday’s feast. We mixed our flour, baking soda, baking powder, sugar, and salt by weight. Then we grated in frozen butter, working outside to keep everything cold, tossing the tiny bits of frozen butter in the flour mixture as we went. This is a great technique for anyone wants to make perfect biscuits but is scared of the traditional “cutting in” step using hands, knives, forks, etc. The mixture went back into the freezer and tomorrow we’ll mix in the buttermilk, roll out, and cut the biscuits before freezing them again. That way there’s less to do at the last minute before Thursday’s feast (and frozen raw biscuits don’t taste any different than freshly made ones).
After biscuit prep, we began to prep our collard greens. We learned a valuable cutting technique to remove the stems and the most efficient way to cut the remaining parts of the leaves into strips. Mr. Sussman may have overdone it, because we ended up with almost six pounds of collard greens, and it barely fit into the fridge.
Later, we started to prepare our pork butts for our feast on Thursday. We started by watching videos on the proper trimming and tying techniques, so we had an idea of what we were supposed to do. Afterwards, we cut off the fat caps and any bone/sinew on the pork, marinated with mustard, and added a BBQ spice rub (same as the ribs). We then tied them up with kitchen twine (boneless pork butts don’t hold their shape well) and put them in the fridge.
This whole time, Mr. Sussman was wrestling with low temperatures on the smoker, and we were a little worried our ribs wouldn’t cook. With some of our help, he removed the top of the smoker, added more coals, stirred things up, and eventually rigged the side access door to stay open for increased airflow. Finally, after lunch, our ribs were ready to eat. We took them off the grill and added our homemade BBQ sauce on all of the racks. We then put them back on the smoker for 10 minutes to let them cook with the BBQ sauce. They were tender and delicious. After eating, we cleaned up the smoker and area for tomorrow’s work.