The FIERY FURNACE Breathes Again!!!! --PORK PRON

2 hours and 45 minutes in an the pork is 1/2 gone!

SmittyJonz said:

Well did yall sell ALL that Pork?

Click to expand...

Well, I'd hoped to update before now, but things have been insane since Friday night.

Here's the summary:

13 of the 20 butts sold on Friday. I pulled the last 7 and put them into 3 full pans with AJ.

20 more butts went on at 6:30 yesterday morning at the church.
Food service started at noon yesterday, so I reheated the pans in the smoker and had them at the food tent for service. The 2nd group of butts cooked quicker as input them on the hotter part of the Fiery Furnace. They all got wrapped at 11:00, or 4.5 hours in. The first few came off at about 1:00 and the remainder finished up around 1:30. The cooler was reloaded and went over to the food tent, where my oldest son was in charge of pulling and serving for the day.

The chicken was in the walk in fridge sometime on Friday. I was told that all 9 cases (40lbs each) were put in a fridge offsite to thaw on Monday, but after the butts came off and I went to get the chicken to start preseasoning the quarters, to my surprise, they were all still frozen solid! Apparently, they just stacked all 9 cases on a cart together when thy out them in the fridge, so they didn't thaw.

My wife and I started thawing the chicken in twos large, deep sinks with cold running water, them I seasoned after they started thawing. The Fiery Furnace was loaded to the gills at about 3:40 (dinner service was to start at 5:00), with some help of 3 additional racks that I had made last week. I got about 250 pieces on at once.

Even though some of he quarters were done in only 30 minutes, the time it took to open the smoker and handle all the pieces, really stretched out cook time. We were pretty much out of chicken on the service line by 5:25 and I was in the weeds for the rest of the night. People had to wait a lot, but the word on the street was that the chicken was killer, so everyone was very patient.

I finally pulled the last quarters and wings off at around 9:00, and for the 4-5 hours in between I was either moving chicken around, pulling it off and TEMPING EVERY SINGLE PIECE, loading more or just waiting for it all to cook.

The chicken was a huge hit though, so I'm glad of that.



My 13 yo son worked the pulled pork station alone for the entire time, from noon until 9ish when the lines finally died down. At the end of the night, all but 6 butts were gone, and I pulled the rest and it was out into half pans for staff members to have or sell by the pound.

SO proud of my boy. He insisted on helping the whole time and worked his butt off!

I'm sore as hell.
Have multiple burn on each forearm, my back and shoulders feel like I've been beat up by a gang of thugs. My eyes, lungs and throat are scorched from standing in and breathing all that smoke last night. BATTLE WOUNDS!

All in all, the Fiery Furnace cooked about 350 lbs of pork butts, 500 lbs of white and dark chicken quarters, and 30 lbs of wings. It's all GONE!



More pics to follow, bit I'm my son's football game right now.

What a weekend!