LSG Adjustable Grill Vertical Smoker Mode: Ms Tootsie's Pork Steaks

I've just finished dry aging a pork shoulder so we can answer the question, how does the Lone Star Grill's Adjustable Charcoal Grill perform as a vertical smoker? It's difficult to put this grill in a definition or any traditional definition in part because it is so versatile. I've already done tests exploring its direct cooker capabilities as well as offset smokers where I've done some chicken halves along with brisket, ribs, and sausage and been blown away by the results. And today I hope that holds true and the trend continues for Miss Tootsie's pork steaks that we'll be doing a little bit later on. And last but not least on my list that came up in comments, by the way, let me know if there's anything else you want to see down in the comments below and I will add that to future videos, which is James, how does the charcoal basket work for set it and forget it fire management as this promises up to 12 hours of burn time. So stay tuned for a future video. Now about that pork shoulder that I've dry aged for today's pork steaks. I haven't seen anybody attempt a dry aged pork steak before, and maybe that's because they all know something that we are about to find out, but this makes a ton of sense. I did an experiment with my dry aged cabinet versus some dry aged bags and I was blown away with the quality difference that you get with a dry aged cabinet. So by no means is this as economical as the affordable dry aged bags, but from a flavor perspective, you can almost talk yourself into the utility of adding one of these to your arsenal. It was night and day. And this comes down in part to how the dry aging process actually occurs. So the too long didn't read version here is if you use a dry aged bag in your refrigerator, most refrigerators are between 30 and 50% relative humidity, which is like reducing a sauce on high heat and boiling it dry aging. You want to do this in a very controlled safe manner, which is what led me to my pro smoker reserve 50 dry ager. As I have a very temperature controlled humidity controlled as well as the backdrop safety of UV light to pull off some amazing dry aged results. And immediately after tasting how well my New York strip dry age process went out, I put a word out on Instagram as well as on this channel asking what you like to see dry aged next and pork steaks rose to the top. And I am really excited to find out if this has been worth the past 21 days of waiting to dry age my full bone in pork shoulder to turn out what I hope will be some amazing barbecue pork steaks. If you live in my neighborhood, you already know what's up, you're greeted with the glorious smell of post oak and smoke, but I'm going to come back to why I've already got a live fire burning down some post oak into some cooking embers in my Lone Star Grills adjustable 48 inch charcoal grill. That is an important step, but one we'll pick up after we've got our pork shoulder converted into pork steak. So let's go over to the kitchen and we're going to break this down as well as season it up. And when we come back over here, I'll fill you in on the important step as why the first order of business today was getting a fire going with some real post oak splits. On a fresh pork shoulder, we can normally get about three steaks before we run into the bone. You can see here as part of the dry aging process, things do shrink a little bit. So we'll see how far we get before the bone becomes a bit of a problem. I'm going to start by tracing out roughly about two inches for our steaks. That's looking good. Let's keep working here. So we did run into a problem a little bit earlier than expected with the dry aging process shrinking our pork shoulder. I was only able to remove one steak before coming into contact with the bones. I continued to trace out the steaks and while unfortunately I don't have a bandsaw to solve this issue, I did grow up in the Tim the Toolman era and mama didn't raise no quitter. Okay, I've taken these inside and washed and rinsed them to make sure that there is no bone dust or any residue like that left on our pork steaks. So I was able to get three full two inch steaks and two smaller ones. So I've set the smaller ones aside. I'm going to save those for another day and just cook these three incredible looking pork steaks. I'm going to keep seasoning incredibly simple. So let's come nice and close and we'll get some fresh cracked pepper ground up. The game plan here, I'm not going to go for the full overnight dry brine. I was blown away when I did this with steak. So my hope here is the same with pork steaks is that we're going to get a lot of flavor from the aging process itself and don't need to rely on leaving these in the refrigerator overnight. But I am going to give them an hour or an hour and a half or so while our fire burns down to coals that we can cook with, which will give plenty of time for our rub to adhere. Okay, our pork steaks are in the refrigerator. They're going to hang out there, as I mentioned, for about an hour. I already added a couple more wood splits so we get a good size live fire post oak coal bed to cook with. But I just took a quick peek and we still need to wait a little bit longer for those flames to die down so that we aren't getting too much direct heat. That's one of the things I've fallen in love with my Lone Star Grills adjustable charcoal grill. I mentioned you didn't see the intro video. It's sort of three things combined into one. I've already done a few videos trying it as an offset smoker since it has two independent fire boxes. You, of course, can do some direct heat cooking using the adjustable charcoal grate to raise or lower your fire, which is perfect for searing and or doing things like chicken thighs. And today I'm going to go for something I haven't tried yet, which is using that upper rack as a vertical smoker. There's a couple different styles you can do a pork steaks. There's no wrong answers, but I'm definitely going to pick one methodology for today's cook. Someone like my friend Steve Gao from Smoke Trails Barbecue, who I joined his competition barbecue team at Memphis in May. On his video, he cooks pork steaks a lot like you would cook a steak into about 135, 140 degrees Fahrenheit. My friend Cooper from Bar A Barbecue, he uses his M&M rotisserie like an offset and is smoking these up to about 185 degrees Fahrenheit. But I'm going to go for my personal favorite, which I think is absolutely awesome on any pork steak that I've had, which is the hill country approach of cooking directly over the coals. Bradley from Chud's Barbecue, he mentioned that he designed his Chud box in order to gain sort of 16 to 18 inches clearance from the grate to the coal bed. And when I measured this in my Lone Star Grills adjustable charcoal grill, I can go all the way up to about 22 and a half if I put the grid in the low position and use the upper rack. So I think this is going to allow me to cook directly over the coals using a post oak that we have burned down into a coal bed and get some amazing results. I'm also going to stick pretty true to Miss Tootsie's method from Snow's Barbecue, which is only turning our pork steaks once. We're going to cook them also into about 185, 190 degrees internal doneness to make sure that they're done. And we're also going to use exactly no modifications here, Miss Tootsie's mop recipe. So now that you're all caught up on the plan, let's take a look at our fire. I think it should be just about perfect where we want it. We can install a meter probe just so that we keep track of our fire if we need to add any extra wood splits. And then I'll take you back over to the kitchen and we'll get working on prepping Miss Tootsie's mop sauce because after about an hour or so, that's when we want to start applying our mop. Okay, let's make Miss Tootsie's mop sauce. I'm going to get started. I do a little bit differently than what she outlines in Texas Monthly by melting the butter and the onion along with the mustard powder first before adding the water, bringing that up to the boil and adding everything else. So let's get started first with a little heat for our butter. Next, we can break down one white onion. I've again modified this recipe to be something that'll be plenty for our three pork steaks versus starting with a gallon of water, which is what's in Miss Tootsie's recipe, but we're just going to do a coarse chop on our onion. Add in our mustard powder while the onions are simmering in the butter. A quarter cup of wash-our-sister sauce as they call it in Texas. Recipes for white vinegar, but I realized this morning I'm out so I'm using apple cider vinegar as the substitute. Half cup. And now I can add in our six cups of water and bring that to a boil for 10 minutes. Okay, the meter has us cruising along about 167 on one and 173 degrees on the other, but now is the time I want to start applying our mop. I've not yet flipped these. They are looking awesome. Let's get our mop sauce. We can leave our sauce there to stay warm. Let those keep cooking. So what did you miss? Well, I continued to mop our pork steaks with Miss Tootsie's mop sauce about every 30 minutes, and the total cook here once I started mopping was an additional three hours until we reached around 185-ish degrees. I'll put the picture of the Chef's Temp X10 up on screen, what I captured right before I pulled these off for a rest. I'll get you back to the action in just a minute, but first a big thanks to Chef Temp for sponsoring today's video. I love grilling and smoking, but sometimes I'd actually rather be spending my time with friends, family, and or enjoying those tailgate festivities versus tending to the needs of my smoker, which is why earlier this year, a much colder James showed you how I upgraded something like my Weber Smoky Mountain to go from analog to completely hands-free and digital and saved hundreds in the process. The ProTemp S1 is the heart of the Chef's Temp smart grill system. It isn't just a large digital display for your analog smoker. If you want to, when paired with the optional Breezo fan and the wireless information being sent from up to four independent probes, it can completely take over fire management responsibilities, allowing you to upgrade almost any analog grill or smoker into a fully integrated smart barbecue system. I became a Chef's Temp customer a few years ago when I was testing instant read thermometers and discovered the X10 that you regularly see me use in videos, and I fell in love with its performance, quality, and most importantly, value. Speaking of value, in addition to the X10, all the products that I showed you today, including the ProTemp S1, are eligible for my save up to 25% discount code. All the details are down in the description for you to check out after today's video. Thanks again to Chef's Temp for sponsoring today's video. Now back to the action. For my rest, I'm going to go for a hybrid approach using what Cooper from Bari BBQ does, where he douses his pork steaks with a lot of butter. Instead, I'm just going to use a little bit of clarified butter. Costco sells these marketed as ghee, clarified butter. This serves a great purpose. Best practice, if you're resting beef, you could use some beef tallow, which is why I like to make my own and just drizzle a little bit of that over a brisket before I rest it. And clarified ghee is the same magic for pork. It just makes an incredible flavor, juicy result, and some of that absorbs back in to whatever it is that we smoked. So I put that inside of my drip easy blanket and just let that hang out on the counter for about 90 minutes is my game plan before we're ready for dinner. I can hold this anywhere from two to three hours and still be above a food safe temperature, but 90 minutes is when dinner is and when I'll rejoin you over in the kitchen for the taste test. But before we jump into the taste test, let me share some thoughts of how cooking in a vertical configuration has gone. We've done charcoal grilling and we've done offset smoking. So going for a vertical smoking with the hill country style of cooking directly over the coals today is the first. And while it went really well, naturally, there are a couple of things that I like to improve, which is how do we maintain our coal bed for our entire cook? Now, this is something that I've experienced on smaller cookers, including a Kamado style grills where I cook with a live fire. The same challenges of lack of real estate when you shrink down to just one of our fire boxes and we're cooking directly above that, you run into some of the same challenges, which is the coals that we started with by burning down our post oak splits. Those don't last the three hours that we need to maintain heat. So instead I was feeding some small splits, but small splits again, increase the flame. So I was just trying to manage that. I thought about maybe using an external charcoal chimney or one of the other fire boxes, but I'm going to do some tinkering just again, how to keep feeding real wood coals. It'd be easy if we were to switch to charcoal, but keeping the real wood fire going without getting the flames too high, that it starts to impact the bottom of whatever we're cooking. I think we avoided all crises issues. Something we'll find out in a few minutes time when we get into the taste test, by the way, let me know if there's anything else you'd like to see cooked on the Lone Star Grills adjustable charcoal grill. I picked up from my offset smoke video. A starting with a wood fire and then transitioning to charcoal and let it go overnight. So that is next on the list. But if there's anything else that you'd like to see, by all means, let me know. I do check out the comments and if I can fit it in to an upcoming video, I'll be absolutely sure to do that. So I've got nothing to do for the next 90 minutes. I'll rejoin you when it's time to slice into our pork steaks and see how our dry aged Miss Tootsie mopped direct heat cooked. That's a mouthful. Pork steaks turned out. See you soon. Okay, our rest is complete. I ended up pushing actually just beyond the two hour mark. A little nervous about that seeing as well, according to my X10, we're sitting around 68 degrees outside. A little bit cool as the sun is starting to dip. So hopefully we are still above 140 degrees Fahrenheit or there about internal temperature. Let's open these up. Take a look. I certainly look good. Just below 138, 140. We are right on the line. I don't want to go any further than that. Definitely would maybe add this into the tub like I've done for taking food to a competition or a friend's house. We are right on the line. So two hours is as far as I would go with the holding blanket. But let's get these out and ready to slice up. Okay, here we have our pork steak. I took the other two inside. The family is starting to slice those up. As I mentioned, we did end up running a little bit long for the plan for dinner, but let's get a couple slices here. Good smoke, plenty of juice, rendered fat, squishy right there. You just see that's a ton of juice. That's looking good. Let's keep slicing this up. All right, dry aged pork steaks cooked directly over the coals. There's a lot going on. Let's dive in. See how we did. Cheers. Wow. I can already tell there's so much going on here without the having a control as part of this experiment. I'm not going to be able to give you a lot of how it compares since I realized halfway through today's test, maybe a control pork steak would have been a good idea to appreciate the dry age. So we'll have to save that for another day. But I can absolutely tell you the flavor of cooking directly over the coals is coming through in spades. I'm going in for another bite. No sauce, nothing. This is just magic. Wow. That is incredible. The fat inside completely rendered like butter. And like the dry aged steaks where I did have two side by side to do a comparison, the porkiness, if that's a word, of these dry aged steaks is unlike anything I've ever had before. So definitely let me know if you do want to see a proper head to head. But for now, I'm going to go ahead and call this two thumbs up. That's it for today. I'm James from Smoked Dead Barbecue signing off. Remember, don't be afraid to fire it up. Wow.