Barbeque season and a JKM

blue lander

blue lander

Joined
Aug 16, 2011
Messages
1,386
View attachment 445428

So I did my first barbeque of season this Saturday, a 9 pound pork butt. Smoked it for a good 11 hours and it came out pretty good. A little dry though.

Anyways I usually remove the skin from the pork butt, clean most of the fat off, apply some dry rub and then put the skin back on since it adds a little insulation from the fire. I used my little HI JKM for skinning since it's a small super sharp blade with a fat belly and no pointy tip. It did the job much faster than the Old Hickory skinner I usually use. Partially because it's so sharp but also because it's so compact and well balanced which made it very maneuverable. The fat tiny handle made the grip very comfortable too.

After the meat was done cooking we decided to slice it up rather than shred it. Rather than whipping out a carving knife I decided to stick with JKM even though it's waaaaaay too short for the job. But since the tip ofthe knife is basically a flat edge, I was able to stick the blade in tip first and saw/slice through the meat like butter.

Overall I'm very impressed with this tiny little knife. At first I didn't like it because I thought it was too heavy for a small knife and too short for a heavy duty knife. But it's heft and thickness and fat belly make it much more useable than a thin pointy mora of the same length.

One last impressive feature: after carving the pork butt I forgot to clean it when I was done. The fat and meat dried and stuck to the blade and I had to scrub it off with a scotch pad. When I was done the body of the blade was covered with swirly scratch marks but the edge was still as shiny as a mirror. I take that to mean the edge was harder steel than the body. I can't believe they bothered to put a differential temper on this little thing, but I guess they did!
 
I'm ashamed I had to go look and see what a JKM was, I'd forgotten. Nice looking little knife. Looks like a few showed up on DOD and then got forgotten.

You just added another to my someday want list. I think you planned it. It's a conspiracy, your plotting on me.

Some fine looking pig there.

I did some ribs over the weekend. Smoked em for a few hour and then barbecued. I happened to still be wearing my KLVUK that I'd been hacking with all day slung over my shoulder. Used it to cut up the ribs handily and with ease and push things around some on the barby. Worked very well.
 
I won't lie, me and auntie are part of a global conspiracy to convert all your cash into spring steel.

Whoops, I should have posted a pic of the JKM



The bone handle got super dark from the pig fat, I should probably seal it somehow.

I've yet to tackle ribs because I can't find a good recipe for them.

Also going to take this opportunity to post a pic of my Big Green Egg
View attachment 445447

1 inch thick ceramic so well insulated that I can smoke meat 36 hours over low heat or sear meat at 1500+ degrees
 
Last edited:
That's exactly the picture I found when I looked for a JKM. Beautiful knife. You might try a little oven cleaner or degreaser on the handle to lighten it back up if that's what you seek. Then seal it up good so the grease etc can get in again.

What powers the Green Egg, has to be electric huh? Must be a heavy beast at 1" thick ceramic.
 
Nope, charcoal charcoal and more charcoal. It weighs a ton. When I bought it they delivered it to my house and "installed" it.

View attachment 445467

This is the best stuff, Wicked Good charcoal. Most charcoal is made from South American trees and leftover pieces of decks and crown molding and whatnot. This stuff is made from hardwood forests in Maine, no scrap wood. It's twice as heavy as an equivalent sized bag of cheap charcoal and it burns twice as long. It's really hard to light up since it's so dense.
 
You can smoke meat for 36 hours on one load of charcoal or do you have to replenish and can you do that with the racks and stuff inside?

Been years since I used real charcoal. I used to be quite liberal with the lighter fluid, only thing I've ever been liberal at that I recall. Had a few real blowups. That was with the old fluid, the new stuff hardly burns anymore let alone flame up big time.
 
One load if you do it right. You have to build the charcoal up very carefully. Dump out the entire bag on the floor and separate it into 3 stacks: big pieces, medium pieces and small pieces. Put the big pieces at the bottom, medium in the middle, and small at the top. Be careful to not get any charcoal dust in there, it'll clog the air holes and kill the fire.

That's the hardest part about cooking 24+ hours: you're asleep for half of it. I usually set an alarm and wake up every 4 hours to check on it
 
Your a better man than I and apparently tenacious as Red Flower when it comes to vittles. The world could end while I sleep and I ain't getting up to check on nothing.
Maybe I could get the wife to do it, she likes to get up at o dark thirty and mess with stuff.
 
That's the holy grail of charcoal bbq, a fire that tends itself without someone fussing over it. I've never accomplished that by a long shot. And when you're doing bbq you need to keep the temp between 200 and 230. There's several complicated chemical processes that have to take place in a port butt or shoulder or beef brisket that won't happen if you drift too far off that temperature range.
 
Thats a cool smoker egg Blue! Looks like Pugs got ahold of it at sometime or another with his fancy distressing tool! My charcoal is free for the pickin around my house. I just walk out the door and pick some up:D Hardwood too! Show us a pic of the inside of that egg if ya get a chance please. Ive never heard of such a thing and I thought Texans have seen it all when it comes to BBQ:confused:
 
Detective here just saw the picture and said he's used both the Green Egg and the Wicked Good Charcoal. Said it worked super good. He mentioned there are different sizes to fit you needs too although I figure a BBQ is like a garage or a motorcycle, never big enough, so probably best to get the biggest I can afford sometime down the road.

He said the one he used also had some kind of deal so you could cook a pizza. I guess that's the latest thing is to cook pizza outside. I'm not a big pizza fan so don't matter to me.
 
Oh yeah, I've cooked a pizza mine. If you want to do a "real" pizza you need to get the temperature to around 900 degrees and cook it for about 45 seconds. You've got use a special kind of caputo flour for the crust if you want to go that route, though. It's a little hard to source at a supermarket but you can buy it online easily. If you want to do any toppings on the pizza you better cook them before hand, because you won't be leaving that pizza on the egg long enough to cook them.

If you go that route, buy a PROPER thick pizza stone. Don't get a thin one for use in a oven. The temperatures you reach in a Big Green Egg will crack one of those thin stones after the first or second time you use it. Also get a nice wooden pizza peel and make sure you spead corn meal on it before you put a raw pizza on it to keep it from sticking. Wash the raw corn meal off it before you use it to pull the cooked pizza off the Egg.
View attachment 445523

Here's a diagram of the innards of a Big Green Egg. I would recommend buying a large sized one. The Extra Large one just requires too much charcoal to heat up even for little piddly stuff like hamburgers. Smaller ones are too small to be worth the effort.

BGE-Grill-Cut-Away-Components.jpg
 
Man that thing is cool! I gotta look into it more. I used to cook pizza in a brick oven and I know what you mean about burning them! I put them on several screens sometimes and still when you drop them sometimes the semolina would flash around it making a really nice fire ring. looked cool!
 
The major disadvantage versus a front loading pizza oven is that you have to lift the lid to put the pizza in. That lets the hot air escape so the top of the pizza doesn't cook as quickly as it would with a proper oven. It still gets the job done though.
 
Thats a cool oven! I just did some reading on their website. Its like a giant tajine! Love it! I have a few tajines and they are great to cook chicken, lamb and taters and such but they are not anything near that big tho. You might try to put your pizza on a cold stone and by the time everything comes to temp on the bottom the top would begin to brown. I can see how you would have to balance the crust browning with the top ingredients browning. Pizza screens work great over the stone as well because they keep the crust from direct contact of the stone without burning the bottom before the top gets done. I even put two or three screens under if the fire is really hot.
 
Thanks for the pizza tips Ndoghouse. Another big problem with using the egg versus a proper pizza oven is that the dome "roof" of the grill is too high to reflect heat back down on the pizza like it would in a brick oven. It does work well if you stick with a basic margherita thin crust style pizza.

bbq science-- been too long since I cooked up some pigs
Click to expand...

Yeah, it really is a science. Pork is pretty forgiving compared to beef brisket. I've done brisket probably 10 times now and it only came out satisfactorily twice. The other times I either let the temperature drift too much over night or I pulled the meat off too early because it was taking longer to cook than I expected.

Oh, more praise for the JKM: When I was bringing it up from the basement to skin the pork, I dropped it tip first on the cement floor. It hit the floor pretty hard since it's such a heavy little thing, and the edge bent a little at the very tip. I didn't have any of my sharpening stones handy so I had to make due with what was around. I straightened the edge out with a kitchen steel and sharpened it a bit against the bottom of a coffee mug. After a couple minutes the edge was almost back to "brand new" condition. If you ran your fingernail along the edge you could feel a tiny nick or two, but I'm sure I can work those out with Arkansas stones when I have time.
 
Well look at the Gold Mountain, or the what the heck is it? Oh silver lining of the humus clouds.
It didn't hit your foot! And that my friend is a very very good thing. That would have been a super big ouchy. Probably fully worthy of full grown man tears.
Especially if your like our missing link Ndog and run around barefoot.

It was a good day.
 
Yep! I dropped my first HI knife on top my foot and went all the way through my foot. Luckily or unluckily it missed any bone! Sure was a bloody mess tho! Wife thought i cut my foot off or something. I have a few Kumar Kardas and they would hurt too being about the same size as JKM.
 
I don't recall if I was wearing shoes but I probably wasn't. Fortunately the JKM doesn't have much of a tip, but it's so weighty it might not have mattered. I bet it wouldn't go through a leather shoe, it just doesn't have enough of a point to it. If it did hit my bare foot though it probably would have left an inch wide hole. Ouch!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top