which works best?

[Karon Adams]

Ok, I was doing some comparrison, today. I made two sauces. I had, last cook, combined the drip pan with the trotters and pressure cooked it all. from this, I had three quarts plus the sauce i made then, of gelatin.

Today, I made caramel from all of the first cook drip pan and from that, made my sauce. Then, I took a quart of the gelatin from the last cook, cooked out the liquid until i had caramel of the gelatin and made sauce with that.

the fresh dripping cook is definitely better. We used more spice in the rub this time, so the spices are more pronounced. but, beyond that, the character of the caramel is different and the meaty, bark flavor of the sauce is far more pronounced. the sauce made from the pressure cooked trotters is delicious but the spice is quieter and the fruit and tomato notes come out more.

now, these are the sauces alone, not on the meat. and that will change the pereception of the whole.

so, here's what I think. first, the fuirst drip sauce has a far more pronounced meaty taste to it. the other is definitely meat based and the umami is there, but the first drip, that has the iriginal meat srippings as well as the majority of the smoke taste, is more hearty for lack of a better word.

I may just start pressure cooking the gelatin down from the trotters and hang onto that for just adding to the next pot of fresh dripping sauce, carrying the gel from cook to cook, using the gel itself to moisten leftovers as I go, as well.

take all this for what its worth. to me, it is a far better jar of sauce than I could get from just off the shelf pantry spices. it just adds so much more to the final meat product.

the next step, IMHO, is finding a way to trap the smoke, as it comes off, and holding that to add back to the sauce. Perhaps that would be a time to take a cue from our friends in the counter culture and make myself a large BBQ Bong!

[kmhfive]

So, the Solera-method for sauces is born! Take some, add some…

You can "smoke" water and then add the "liquid smoke" to your pot as you simmer down the drippings. Just put a pan in the smoker. However, then Hooka concept has merit. It would need some pre-planning, a decent plumber or welder and an electric blower…hmm.

[Karon Adams]

it really wasn't about aging, though the age of the meat drip is important in the same way BBQ day of and leftovers is important. this is because the pressure cooking of the feet means that gelatin won't be available for the same cook

[Karon Adams]

meh. hookah/bong liquid smoke can be done via just smoke pellets to my skillet and sealing it in a heat chamber with an exhaust set up the same way the Y did his blow off tube for his home brew. percolate the smoke through the water and capture some of the flavor. the problem with that version is, the water only captured tuny bits of the smoke, because only the potion of the buble in contact with the water is captured by the water.

so, the blow off would need to have the smallest hole as possible.

[kmhfive]

But, taking a page out of the homebrew book (I do it too), if you could plumb the smoke off a cook into a tube connected to a blower, you could route the discharge through a carbonation stone to create finer bubbles in the water container. Need to experiment because you don't want to clog the stone with too much tar.

[lonnie mac]

Ha! I did a brewing podcast probably 12 years ago about "finer bubbles" in beer. LOL.

[Karon Adams]

I would more likely have just a single smaller orifice rather than a stone. the stone will hole the smo
ke particles themselves instead of giving them to the water

[Karon Adams]

Something else I was thinking, if I do the Hooka discharge (and I am working on putting those pieces together) instead of routing the smoke into water, I am going to rout it to gelatin. that will slow down the smoke movement through the medium, give more body to the cooked down liquid smoke product and add body to the final sauce.

also, the force needed to push the smoke through is actually easy to acquire, I use a blower to control temp in my smoker, anyway. making it tight means a) the smoke will sit at the top of the smoker longer surrounding the meat, instead of immediately floating away b) the whole cook will have greater control overall to temp.

[Lowjiber]

Wonderful post, Karon. It certainly has me thinking longer term when it comes to my sauces.

...
The next step, IMHO, is finding a way to trap the smoke, as it comes off, and holding that to add back to the sauce. Perhaps that would be a time to take a cue from our friends in the counter culture and make myself a large BBQ Bong!

LOL. Just don't cook down bong water.

[Karon Adams]

actually, that was the intent. to make a 'bong' for the exhaust of the smoker, then cook the water trapped down to concetrate the smoke.