Bread, BBQ

Yesterday we smoked some pork shoulder over hickory on the cold smoker.  After 8 hours of tending in between putting in some fenceposts (feelin real Hud-like), I had a beer and a great dinner with a couple of buddies (my buddy wife and buddy neighbor), and a nice dinner.  The pork has a fantastic smoke ring a half inch thick, and juice squirted out when I sliced into it.  Mmmmmm!

Fast forward 12 hours, and its time to eat again.  There is really no question what to do with BBQ pork the next day. Pulled/chopped pork sandwiches.  Keep ridin the cole slaw pony, so the side is taken care of, and all you need is the sauce and bread.

I tweaked the BBQ sauce recipe my mother passed down to us for pork- hers is more for chicken.  Yes it was good, so good I can't divulge the secret here.  So now turning to the buns, I felt compelled to use some buttermilk we had in the fridge.  Buttermilk bread is very tasty, and is supposed to last longer, so that would be fine.  I did a search on the internet for some ridiculously arcane search phrase, and found a blog by Malisa in Colorado.  It is worth a look, rarely will you find a person with more extremely variant tastes on display in a cooking blog!

Malisa has a recipe with a riff on a recipe from Peter Reinhart for buttermilk bread she makes in a bread machine.  Progress!  Of course a bread machine won't work for sandwich buns will it?  So, I decided to use the "Dough" setting on our trusty Oster, and improvise from there.  I had no proofing process, or baking time and temp to go on, but I forged ahead anyway.  First I re-converted Malisa's version of the recipe back to full size with the use of a calculator (thankfully she left the weights to work from like any good baker!).  Then I dumped it all in the Oster, set it on 9 and let it work. The result was right!

I decided to form 3 oz. balls and proof them for 45 minutes.  I put an empty cookie sheet on top for the first 10 minutes to make them proof out more than up.  This worked out well.  And 45 minutes was right. They baked perfectly in a 350 degree oven in 25 minutes- success!  It would be hard to find more delicate, tasty bread.

So the pork, chopped and simmered in my sauce, on the bread, with a bit of onion or cole slaw ended up being a very, very good sandwich.  Worth it?  Oh yes, well worth it.