Roasted Pork Butts into Pork Daube

Saturday morning I took two nice pork butts(about twenty pounds)and stuffed them with toes of garlic. Between the two I used at least twenty toes. Then I seasoned the outside with seas salt, granulated garlic and black pepper. oh, and a light sprinkling of cayenne as an afterthought. Before that I rolled the Traeger out, cleaned it out and cranked it to 450 degrees to burn out for a while since I haven't used it in recently. After about half an hour I turned it down to 350° and put the butts on to roast. For this cook I don't want a lot of smoke but moreso want to roast them and allow the inside to cook slowly and melt and break down the garlic.

One of the two butts at the start.



Here they are getting close to being done. They sure did smell some gooood..................!!!



I don't cook these til like I usually do for pulled pork but it's close. I want most of the meat to stay together in clumps for the second part of the cook.



When they were done I took them off the grill and brought them inside to cool down(of course!). After cooling enough to handle I broke them down into chunks.(sorry no pictures of that)
Sunday morning I went out in the yard and picked some tomatoes, bell, Mexi Belle and Cajun Belle peppers for the cook.



Then I went and pulled down my BIG 24 qt. pot.



Alright, so I missed getting a few pictures until the end, sorry, I got busy.

I chopped up a bunch of seasonings. about seven pounds of large onions, a dozen or more tomatoes, about a head and a half of fresh garlic, celery and peppers.
A while back I planted Mexi Belle and Cajun Belle peppers. When the first few were ready on the Cajun Belle plant I plucked one off, rinsed it and took a bite. It was more like a bell pepper with a lil kick. Yesterday while chopping some I stopped and took a bite of one. Man, I was surprised! It had a spicy kick to it. I stopped chopping so many of those and went back outside and picked some more regular bell peppers to use. Lol....... I don't mind it and can handle spicy but I was making this pork daube for not just myself.

Alright so after all the seasonings were chopped I started the cooking. First I dumped a big can(when I refer to cans here I'm talking about big # 10 cans which hold 102 oz.)of diced tomatoes and brought that up to a light boil and added the fresh tomatoes. After letting that simmer about ten minutes I added another can of Contadina spaghetti sauce and let that heat up before adding about four pounds of course chopped onions, celery, and the peppers and about 15 bay leaves. I let that simmer for a while to let the onions soften but not too much. Now it was time to add the pork, I left most of the pork in big chunks as while cooking it does fall apart but I like it to still have big chunks. I like that simmer about 45 min. and then added another one and a half cans of spaghetti sauce along with black pepper, granulated garlic, red pepper flakes, Creole seasoning. I wait til later in the cook to see if or how much salt it needs.

So after several hours of simmering it's finally done.



Here's a generous serving over Penne pasta packaged to drop off today for our retiring Italian pastor. I may pick up some Italian bread for him to enjoy with this.





While the daube was simmering I also cooked up a big pot of my Zydeco Green Beans with andouille, smoked sausage, onions, a lil garlic and potatoes.



And I also made a nice pot of homemade meatballs and red gravy(yeah that was canned sauce but I did kick it up a little).(no pictures of that)