Squeezing The Butts

A moment of humor in an otherwise typical day--and a lesson on how to cook better BBQ to boot!

—Courtesy ChatGPT

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While Secretary Kennedy is a gift that keeps on giving, today we are going to look past his nonsense of suspending vaccine development and focus on a lighter topic:

Let’s go squeeze some butts.

If you follow the blog, you know that I write occasionally about my side-gig of cooking BBQ on my traditional, old fashioned, firebox smoker we call Li’l Pig (see here).

Li’l Pig is now over 20 years old with rusted-out holes in the bottom of the barrel and hinges that creak when the doors to the firebox are opened. No matter: Li’l Pig slow cooks some genuinely delicious stuff.

For whatever reason I have rediscovered the pleasure and fun of slow cooking something every couple of weeks, for no reason other than I want to.

There is something about slow cooking BBQ where your biggest concerns are the amount of wood in the firebox and the temperature in the barrel cooker that can be both physically demanding and enjoyable at the same time. It gives me an opportunity to focus on a task of low-level importance that has an end reward of some delicious pulled pork, brisket, sausage or chicken when all is done hours later. And the best part of the experience is that our friends have never turned down an invitation to come over to the house and help us enjoy the products of our labors.

This past Sunday I was surfing TV to find a program that I might want to watch. All news all the time does not make Dr. Len a happy guy.

I stumbled across a BBQ show I had not seen before, one of those 30-minute reality programs that was actually enjoyable.

It was very simple, where they took some cameras and interviewed different BBQ guys (yup: most are guys) while they shared insights into how they cooked various meats. (One thing I have learned on my BBQ journey—which I started from a very “scratch” place many years ago—is that you can always learn something more about how to improve your BBQ cooking skills.)

One of the programs featured a multi-generation, world-class Texas BBQ restaurant owner where they cooked beef ribs.

Not ordinary “bought at the supermarket” beef ribs.

Nope: These were BEEF RIBS.

You know: the giant fat-glistening types of meaty ribs that make your mouth water just watching the screen. The kind of ribs you want to reach through the glass and pull out for your own immediate gustatory gratification. The kind of rib no sane person could consume in a single sitting. The kind of rib where you want to go outside and offer a primal scream while you thump your chest like a caveman warning off the lion.

Fire, meat, lust: all there in one glorious television moment.

Yes, those kinds of ribs. Dino-ribs. Technically, 123A ribs as a I discovered watching the show.

Now that my appetite had been whetted, I had to see if I could find some of those giant delights to smoke one day soon to come. Not exactly the stuff of your supermarket meat case.

While they are readily available online—at a high price, shipping not included—I was looking for a more local source to satisfy my craving.

There happens to be a butcher shop in Blairsville GA, about 25 miles from where I am spending my summer. The shop does their own slaughtering and butchering—even for Waygu beef, which they haul from North Dakota to their butcher shop for killing and processing.

Off I go, and yes they know about the ribs. They patiently explain to me that dino ribs are in fact a long, short rib. Yup, “long short”. Turns out dino ribs are short ribs which start out as long ribs but are not cut into the typical smaller portions. In butcher talk, a “123A” beef rib.

My friendly butcher folks offer to order them for me. Hopefully they will get to the store soon.

I walked over to the meat case to pick up a pork butt while I was in the store. Sadly, no pork butts were to be found in the case.

The lady who was helping me asked me if there was something else she could do. I shared my disappointment that no butts were in the case. She responded she could go to the back part of the store and see if they had any available.

Now things get interesting, when the filter from my brain to my mouth disappeared.

“Sure,” I said. “However, I need to squeeze the butts.”

Squeeze the butts?

You could see a look on her face that was somewhere between fearful and quizzical.

Maybe she was thinking of the time past when a famous person made an off-color, on-camera comment about squeezing another part of women’s anatomy and getting away with it because he was famous. (That person is still famous but I don’t think he is squeezing much these days. Too many cameras watching him too much of the time. He has other things on his mind these days.)

Sensing her trepidation, I quickly intervened with a much simpler, more understandable explanation.

Turns out I learned a while ago that when you choose a pork butt at the grocery store you can feel a difference in firmness between the butts in the packages: some are soft, others are firmer. And when you cook a pork butt you want it to start out soft: We have found it makes a difference in the tenderness of the finished product when you pull it off the bone after it reaches the magical 203 degrees (not 202, not 204: 203).

As a result, Sandra and I routinely squeeze the pork butt packages to find the softest one available. And if Sandra goes to the grocery store by herself to make the purchase, I always ask when she returns home if she squeezed the meat before she bought it. (OK: I know what you are thinking. Dirty mind!!!!)

Innocent enough, but it can certainly sound a bit quirky in the wrong environment.

Once I the butcher lady realized I wasn’t a pervert, she came back with a soft butt—and I was a happy guy. Tomorrow I will cook that butt along with a brisket. Still waiting to hear if they got the long-short ribs.

Why this story?

Our days are filled with so much difficult stuff, paying bills, holding on to a job, the politics of fear, conspiracies of the day, whatever. We need to remember that sometimes it is good to laugh at ourselves.

A little humor and a little laugh is good medicine—a moment of levity in what is too frequently a difficult day. Even at my expense. And if the wisdom of the soft butt seems a bit ridiculous, that’s OK with me.

For me, I know the butt I look forward to cooking is soft, and my bet is it will be good.

Squeezing the butt should be the worst thing any of us ever do.