I Transformed This ANCIENT German Street Food into a Modern BBQ Recipe

Germany has some amazing recipes and I'm going to take one of their oldest recipes and turn it into barbecue. I hope you know what this is. If you've ever been to Germany and especially around the time when they have Oktoberfest you already know what I'm talking about. Also known as Eisbein is actually a ham hock or a knee of the pig. And in Germany they put it on these big skewers, walls filled with them. But that's not what we are going to do. We're going to take this, say thank you Germany and turn it into our own style of barbecue food. This is beautiful red meat. It's working meat with loads and loads of flavor. But we also have the skin. Traditionally in Germany they would crispen this up but we are not going to worry about that. We're going to focus on getting flavor in the meat. I'm going to make the pitmaster's classic barbecue rub. This is the most popular barbecue rub on our website. And it's perfect for any barbecue recipe. And I'm going to turn it into a brine. Just by taking a liter or four cups of water and adding the rub to it. Mix it up until all of the particles are dissolved. And that's how easy it is to make your own brine. All of the pitmaster X rubs are designed in a way that you can easily turn them into a brine. So it's almost like a multifunctional recipe. Rub, brine, that easy. And of course you can take a brine and put the meat inside the brine. And then wait for a long long time until your meat is brined. If it's a chicken breast it's going to be a matter of two hours. But if it is a thick pork like this it's going to be more like days. And that's why we use a good old syringe. Oh this thing is tight man. So you're just going to go in. Watch the whole thing grow. And you're just going to keep on going with that brine until the meat says enough is enough. I'm fully stuffed. I'm not absorbing any more fluids. And what happens if it's too full? The meat will let you know don't wear your best clothes. Yeah that's maybe the best tip for injecting. And by injecting the pork the way we just did you can start cooking right away. There's no waiting time. It's just time to fire up your barbecue. I'll be smoking on the Borne X smoker. This is an absolute beast of a smoker. And the key feature is that it's super easy to control and super stable in temperature. So you will never ever be able to fail your cook until you mess it up yourself. The cool thing about this barbecue is that it has a huge capacity. Which means we got plenty of room for the smoke to go around. And the touch are delicious. But we need a kind of a new name for it. We can't use the German name of haxe or the swine haxe. We need a barbecue name. So it's probably going to be something like ham hock. Pulled ham hock. One of the first things that I'm going to do is slide in a tray. To make sure that I catch all the drippings. Then in goes my smoking tray. And assign the place in the ham hocks. Make sure that they have plenty of room. And then insert a thermometer to keep the eye on the core temperature of the meat. Close the lid and set the temperature to a whopping 150 degrees Celsius. That's right. I'll be smoking at a high temperature. And the reason that I want to do that is not just to save time. But the knees have so much intramuscular fat. They have so much silver skin and tight things. That we really need to cook them through and through. So we'll be smoking at a high temperature. Now we got to add some smoke chips. Let's turn it on. As you can see at the bottom of this device an auger is turning. It's driven by an electric motor. And it's transporting these tiny wood chips to the heat coil. And the cool thing about using the Borniak is that with a switch of a button. You're able to control the amount of smoke you put in your food. This is the tray that catches the burned down embers from the smokewood. I'm going to put in a little bit of water. So when the smokewood goes in we're not getting fire. Look at the beautiful smoke that we get from this barbecue. The temperature is going up. It's time to close the lid and let the pork ham hock smoke. I want to show you the beautiful smoke that comes out of this smokestack. It's just absolutely perfect. Precision laser barbecue cooking. This is very a light clean smoke. You almost can't see the smoke but it's still there. I'm getting a lot of heat. A little bit of moisture. And a little bit of smoke. That's what they call thin blue smoke. Not the stuff that comes from burning fat. But smoke that comes from burning tiny particles of smokewood. And the next phase of turning our ancient German recipe into a modern barbecue dish is making a barbecue sauce. And today it's going to be Carolina Gold. Are you ready? It starts with a cup of apple cider vinegar. To that I'm going to add a quarter cup of dark brown sugar. A quarter cup of ketchup. A quarter cup of mustard. Yes and this is my favorite mustard. The local mustard. And a fresh batch of Worcestershire sauce. A teaspoon of salt. And let's finish it off with two teaspoons of chili flakes. Then it's time to turn on the burner. Bring the whole thing up to a boil. Stir it and wait until you have that syrupy bubble that we love so much. I just got the notification from my meter thermometer that it's time to take the ham hocks out. Now they are at the core temperature of 96 degrees Celsius. So let's take a look. I put some gloves on to make sure that I don't burn my hands. Oh yo. Look at that. Let's get that thermometer out. Oh this smells so smoky. So nice. That is one good looking bark. Nice and fatty. Crispened up a little bit at the edges. Got a beautiful smoke color on it. And it feels super super tender. I'm almost afraid to touch it too much because I think it's going to fall apart on me. First I'm going to take my knife and cut away the skin. And as you can see parts of it turn crispy. Let's give this a try. Wow. You can definitely eat the skin. Of course some parts of it still might be tough. But the reason why I kept it on is because it's a natural barrier that protects the meat from drying out. Let's shred this off. Take off that jacket. Just shake it off. Fall off the bone tender. Absolutely fantastic. Carolina Gold going on. Oh look at that. That's going to make this pulled ham hock freaking delicious. All I need to do now is just mix it up. Make sure every little bit gets a piece of that sauce. And that's how you turn an ancient German dish into new style barbecue. Wow. That Carolina Gold on pork. It is freaking delicious. Top notch.