Barbecue pork shoulder (when you don’t own a barbecue)

I had some pork shoulder steaks sitting around, which I originally intended to slice up and fry in some hot sauce. It’s not creative or healthy in any way, but it’s spicy fried pork, so it’s not that bad. (Okay, it’s kind of bad.)

Grilling it seemed to be the internet’s recommended cooking method, but I don’t have a barbecue (or indeed any outdoor space to put one) or one of those cool griddle pans, so I resorted to what I do have—a second-hand Lean Mean, Fat Reducing Grilling Machine.

What I gone and made

• Four pork shoulder steaks
• Sweet, sticky barbecue sauce/marinade
• Coarse sea salt
• Ground peppercorn

Seasoning both sides of the steaks with a liberal quantity of salt and pepper and letting them sit for a while, I instead focused my attention on the side dish (skin-on mashed potatoes, I’ll probably blog about those soon too).

My methods diverged slightly for each pair of steaks.

The first two steaks got slapped onto the grilling machine and left to cook until fat had stopped visibly running off. I then reopened the grill, squirted one side of both steaks in barbecue marinade and left it to cook for a few minutes longer, letting the sauce basically burn into the steak, before flipping them both and doing the same to the other side.

For the second pair of steaks I didn’t wait for the fat to finish running off and when marinading I did both sides simultaneously. (I also ended up dropping one of them into the fat collection tray. Whoops.)

All steaks were cooked until parts of them had started turning a dark brown. The second pair were additionally given the benefit of being able to sit on the grill after I’d turned it off.

Verdict

All of the steaks tasted nice enough. In all cases the pepper was a bit more prevalent than the barbecue, so I should probably ease up on that a little.

The first pair of steaks were quite dry in the middle and a little harder to cut through than I anticipated. Cooking them until the fat had entirely ran off before quickly marinading probably contributed to this.

The second pair seemed to have fared much better from the longer (slower?) cook and returned a much more tender, juicier meat, which was frickin’ delicious. A+ would buy from again. A definite step up from my usual “pork strips and hot sauce” special.