OKAY!!
Sorry Bruce's about the delay. Back at home now and I humbly submit this official entry into the "From the Heart" TD, in the most grovelling and obsequeous manner to Bigabyte, our very own TD God!:mod:
The full thread can be seen here where we catered for 120 people last Saturday evening
And, also, here is the thread where I asked by brothers for some advice, and got some great help!
Why this entry is "from the heart" is that I wanted to bring some of the awesome things I that I have learnt from this forum, to a new audience of people.
You'll know from a lot of my posts, that Aussies just don't know about "this kind" of American Food. They consider American Food just to be McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Burger King, KFC etc... and at the high end of the market, we have TGI Fridays, and a few other themed style restaurants. It's so sad that Aussies are missing out on what "real" BBQ is all about.
So, from the heart. I tried to play a little part in rectifying that last week.
The most important part of the entire effort, was to make some pulled chucky. It would have been nice to have brisket, but I have not found a reliable source as yet. And I wanted to do a pulled pork, but we were on a budget for the cook, so the chucky was the go. Also, because we were cooking for children as well, having a pulled meat, was a lot better than having burgers. I made that mistake last year and made 150gram burgers. Too big for the kiddies, and so much food went uneaten. With a pulled chucky, everyone could have as much or as little as they wanted.
So, I put my Bullet Bill into Action (Thanks Marty)
Here's a few in sequence of the Chucky's on their 21 hour Mission with peach wood and lump. I used a lemon and pepper rub. I figured for large volume catering, you can't go past brother Donny (Pitmaster T's) advice... and frankly, I'm keeping the rest of my SM rubs to myself!
The chuckies were injected with a reduced beef broth and similar ingredients to the prep thread, although I backed off the fish sauce a bit.
Remember... that's my Retard "Celcius Only" thermopen... It's still bloody fast though!
The chucky's just fell apart... man they were so moist and juicy too!
After the chucky's came off, I smoked up the Mac and Cheese!
While that was smoking, I prepped and completed the rest of the dishes, packed the van, and we were ready to go on our 30 minute trip to the venue!
When we got there, the first thing was to reheat the chicken wings in the vertical gasser. This worked like a CHARM! (Thanks Landarc)
Yep... that's 35 pounds of Chicken Wings right there in the vertical smoker! I got them to 140F on about 35 minutes!
Here is the Potato Salad with thanks to brother mmmeat (Big Kev) for his Moms recipe. I did modify it a bit with Myron Myxons recipe as well.. The result was awesome. I had Mums coming up to me saying the potato salad was the best they've ever had.
Well, I knew it would be, because in Australia, potato salad is just potato and mayo... that's it!:wacko: No-one ever thinks to jazz it up!:tsk:
I wanted to do Guerry's coleslaw recipe also... but I did not get it ready early enough for it to partially pickle... so sorry Guerry.. the coleslaw was just dressed with my regular dressing..
Here's that Mac and Cheese! The kiddies favourite... I heard all the little kids saying how good it was... SOOOO CHEESY!:becky:
Anyway.. we pulled the chucky and added back all the juices, which I had reduced on the stove and stored in my Thermus.
And service began...
This was my dish...
But if it's OK with the TD God, I'd like to nominate this pic for my entry pic... as it was repeated so many times in the original thread..
And as it was all about the chucky... this does it for me.
To be honest... doing this for so many people, seriously stressed me out. I wanted to put up something different, and I batted it out of the park, thanks to all the help I got from my brothers here, and my help on the day. The biggest joy I got was from the little kids. When they first saw the pulled beef, they really didn't know what the hell it was... so they just has a little bit. Well, all those kids came back for seconds and thirds.... there's my victory.
Honestly, I did not have a single bad comment. My wife came back from the camp a few days later and she told me that everyone was raving about the food for the rest of the camp... and that all the other food was terrible!
That's all I wanted to hear.
Thanks for your help everyone. We managed to make a difference that night!
Cheers!
Bill