Pork Chops and Apple Wood---The Savage Way

I love the barbie and I don't mean those stainless things that cost big bucks and look all shiny on the back porch. Ya, they are controllable and use fossil fuel, which is all well and good because that stuff needs to be used up before someone else gets it. 

What I like is cooking over a fire in the backyard just like my relatives did in the caves of Europe, you know, the Neanderthals, maybe the Cro-Magnons---Homo Erectus----not Piltdown Man. Now, it is not that they had a choice because the Fleet-Farm multi-burner, nuc powered items were not on the market yet, not even the Webers were out. They just rounded up a nice piece of meat from something they killed or found and plopped it on the fire and hoped for the best---not a whole lot different than what I do. For those hairy dudes, it was probably best to cook it in order to kill off the feasting bacteria and wiggling maggots that were also plying their trade on the nice side of mammoth. I don't do mammoth and I do watch out for blown meat.

But the truth is, the cooking did make the meat easier to digest, did part of the digesting actually, and it probably did taste better but still not completely like today's fairly sterile, brick-lined, open-pit barbecue.

So I start out with a fire. This may consist of burning up some of the sticks in the yard and other bits of bark found around the splitting area, maybe a few smaller oak pieces. The thing is to get a pile of nice coals that has some carrying power. On to of that I place selected, clean-grained apple wood splinters and slowly let them work down to some coals but also retain some flames.

Once perfect (subjective, yes, but my Neanderthal back ground gives me an edge) I toss on the meat choice, in this case Pork Chops of 3/4 inch thick. We cover with a barbecue sauce of one's choice, sometimes commercial, other times featuring our's made of tomato catsup, mustard, soy sauce and maple syrup. There are of course, other spices but if I told you I would have to kill you at a later time for disclosing the secrete.

Cook each side for 6-8 minutes under a diminishing heat, maybe adding a few more apple wood slivers, and when the juices just run, that puppy is ready. It is the savage way. Venison, beef, wild turkey, salmon all in the rough. What a way to go.