Look, you dumb pricks.  I’m bout to step up on my BreadBox and teach you mofos how to eat.  I’m giving you the eternal gift of cooking.  Something you can share with your children one day – if you haven’t already gone sterile from the Chipotle and iPhone6+.

In America, our eating habits are fucked.  They’re so fucked that we have to resort to impractical diets that shed hope for an ultimate cure to our Dorito-and-M&M-filled-Crunchwrap cravings.  I tried the Paleo diet.  I ate a lot of steak and avocado.  It was pretty schving.  Then I had a fry, and went back on with my life.

What I’m offering you here is a way out.  A way out of the MacDime’s drive-thru (before midnight), a way out of the overrated Chipotle guac cup.  A way out of the Prego jar. I’m offering you the gift of cooking with your hands.

People are afraid to cook with their hands for many reasons.  What if I cut myself?  What if my food tastes like shit?  You will, and it will.  Ultimately, you have to decide if you wanna be a coward, or if you wanna be Hatori Hanzo.  I can only show you the Duck Fat, you have render it.

COOKING WITH THE CULTISH (AND YOUR HANDS) RECIPE #1: PORK BUTT

what you need

1 five to eight pound Pork Butt (hopefully purchased at a Mexican meat market)

1 Knife (this is the part where your virgin hands bleed, and we hang the bloody napkin)

Assorted spices (does not matter. don’t believe these inbred fucks who swear by their rub recipes.)

1 Weber Kettle (any charcoal BBQ is cool)

1 big bag of Charcoal (Kingsford is cool – no match light tho)

A couple handfulls of Hickory wood chips (soak em for about an hour. yes, put them in water.)

2 hands

method

I’m trying to get the point through to you that none of this shit matters.  Make it up as you go.  Also I want it to be known that I’ll be including pictures from the first pork butt I ever cooked.  Ever.  This is to show you how fucking easy it is, and how it’s really no big deal to just mix fire and dead pig.  Let’s start with the rub.

rub

Generally the rub consists of salt, pepper, sugar, and aromatic spices.  Aight, aromatics are spices that have strong SMELLS.  (I.e. Cumin, Paprika, Garlic powder, anything that makes you sneeze.)  So it’s that easy.

Look in your parents’ spice cabinet. Grab salt, pep, brown sugar, and whatever else you think smells good.  Mix it all together.  If all you taste is salt, add more sugar and aromatics.  No tablespoons or teaspoons necessary.  Unless your rub contains Heroin or Cocaine, feel free to just dump shit in there liberally until you have a tasty seasoning.

prep

This is where you bleed.

Your pork butt should have a beautiful cap of thick, white fat covering one side.  Now, if you don’t score that bitch, that fat will just burn instead of render.  You will not only be cheating the dead pig you are working with as well as the folks who are waiting six hours to eat the dead pig you are preparing, but you will be cheating, worst of all, yourself. Your ugly, greedy, hedonistic self.

Take the biggest knife your parents own, and place it in your most dominant hand.  Feel the immediate rush of strength in realizing you have the power to chop, cut, slice, and kill.  With your less dominant hand, grab a hold of that pig’s ass – with the cap of fat facing up.

Now. Slice into that bitch.  Slice that fucking fat.  Slice deeply enough to go through the fat, but do your best to not cut into the flesh.  Right when you start hitting pink, lay down your sword. (Insert Erectile Dysfunction joke here FOR ME because I don’t have time to come up with something as trite as the word trite.)

Your scored pig should look like mine – sort of a checkerboard pattern.  Like life, it’s not gonna be perfect.  So quit crying about it, and do your best.

smoke

I mean this in more ways than one.  Yes, we’re going to smoke this pork butt in a Weber kettle for anywhere from 4 to 7 hours.  In that 4 to 7 hours, we’ll also most likely smoke a lotta weed and about 10 cigarettes.  It’s like working on a Nicki Minaj music video – lotta downtime, lotta smoke.

Now, I’m not here to tell you how to get your charcoal going.  People experience problems with this.  If you use lighter fluid- let that shit soak in for about 5 minutes before putting the flame to it. Thats a free tip.

IMPORTANT: once you get the coals going (a good amount, enough to cover half of the weber) push all those lit coals to one side of the weber.  This is BBQing, not grilling.  Big fuckin’ difference, homes.

Once you’ve pushed those lit coals to the side, place your pig on the side OPPOSITE the coals.  Indirect heat, homie.  This is how we do.

Add a handful of pre-soaked wood chips to the fire, close the lid, and don’t even look at that bitch for like two hours (at which time, you’ll need to remove the pig from the BBQ temporarily while you add more coals, smoke).

Now.  They make these hi-tech gadgets that you can stick on top of your Weber that will tell you the BBQ’s temperature.  I do not have one, but I am told they are effective.  You can use one if you choose.  You want that BBQ’s temperature between like 220 and 250 degrees.  They say the money zone for Pork shoulder is an internal temperature of about 180 – 220, which, if your BBQ is at 220, takes a long fucking time.  The bigger the shoulder, the longer the time.  The lower the flame, the longer the time.  The bigger the shoulder and the lower the flame, the more fucking delicious this pig is going to taste.  The way I tell temperature without a thermometer is I put my hand up to the BBQ’s vents.  If it feels really fuckin’ hot, that’s not good.  Too much heat.  You can dial this back by adjusting the vents on the bottom of the BBQ.  If you feel the BBQ’s vents and it feels warm, but you can leave your hand there without feeling pain, you’re probably close to where you wanna be.

After a few hours, it’ll look like Predator’s face.  This is a good start, but it still needs time.

After a few more hours it’ll look like this – very schving.

Now check what it did when I pulled it apart.

eat

But Mike! How do I know when my pork is done??? (But Slim, what if you win? Won’t it be weird?)

That’s easy.  Your pork is done when you say it is.  Imagine me 3 years ago when I cooked my first pork butt.  I put it on the BBQ at maybe 5:30 and started inviting friends over.  The friends showed up and sat around getting fucked up for the next several hours, occasionally coming into the backyard and asking when it was going to be done.  My answer?  When I say it is.

For me, the pig was done when I jostled the bone in the middle and it started to come loose.  That’s when I knew all that connective tissue had broken down and the meat probably tasted pretty fucking good.  So that’s when I pulled it off.  Some time around 10, 1030pm.  And then we did this.

It was good ya’ll. Very good. Better yet, it took a lot of time.  I got a little effed up and had time to myself, all centering around a healthy activity.  I encourage you to try this in your own lives rather than eat more corn syrup.

People got so full on my pork, I was even able to get my roommate laid.  He didn’t even have to take off his Jordans.  If that’s not a job well done, I don’t know what is.

–Mccruthers