This site has long understood that sandwiches always taste better when someone else makes them. It turns out there’s science behind this:

When you make your own sandwich, you anticipate its taste as you’re working on it. And when you think of a particular food for a while, you become less hungry for it later. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, for example, found that imagining eating M&Ms makes you eat fewer of them. It’s a kind of specific satiation, just as most people find room for dessert when they couldn’t have another bite of their steak. The sandwich that another person prepares is not “preconsumed” in the same way.

Via Tommy Bennett.

This one might be a little involved for a normal Sunday of focused football watching. But it is nonetheless bold. Also, because I now have about seven pounds of pulled pork, I haven’t eaten much else since I made it so I’m not sure I’ve had any other snacks of note.

This is a pulled-pork sandwich with pickles and peppers:

I’ve made pulled pork before, but I think I got a lot closer to perfection this time. I got a line on some awesome Duroc pork through our man Alex Belth. Here’s what you need:

A pork butt (or Boston butt), preferably awesome
Barbecue rub*
Yellow mustard
White vinegar
Cranberry juice
Butter
Sugar
Salt
Olive oil
Aluminum foil
Pickles
Peppers
Barbecue sauce
Potato rolls
A smoker, and whatever fuel and wood your smoker needs

*- I use a rub of my own devising based on a combination of suggestions I’ve seen in cookbooks. It consists of (in descending order of amount) paprika, black pepper, salt, chili powder, cumin, garlic powder, onion powder, and cayenne pepper. I don’t remember the exact proportions I used. Basically you can just open up your spice cabinet and start dumping a bunch of stuff in a bowl and it’ll probably be alright. Google “Barbecue rub” and you’ll find a ton of recipes. Just expect to use a lot of paprika.

Also: I have this hilarious meat syringe with which I injected the pork before smoking it. I don’t think it’s necessary. If you don’t have one of those, you won’t need the butter, sugar and salt and you can skip Step 2 below.

Remember to wash your hands and utensils thoroughly after they touch raw pork. I shouldn’t have to remind you of that but now you can’t sue me if you get trichinosis.

1) Roughly 4-8 hours before you want to start smoking, take the pork butt out of its bag. Pour vinegar over it, and work the vinegar into the pork with your hands a little. Coat the entire butt with a generous amount of yellow mustard. Liberally pour rub all over the butt — really cover that sucker because that rub’s going to be smoky and delicious in like 20 hours. Pat the rub onto the butt, giggling because of how often the recipe says “butt.” Then cover your butt and refrigerate.

2) About a half-hour before you smoke the butt (ha!), melt about a half a stick of butter in a small saucepan over low heat. Add 1/2 cup of cranberry juice, a tablespoon of salt and a tablespoon of sugar and stir until they’re dissolved. Let the mixture cool a bit, then inject it into the pork right before it goes on the smoker.

3) When the smoker is about 220-degrees Fahrenheit, put in the pork with the fatty side up. Find some way to entertain yourself because waiting for pork to smoke can be agonizing.

4) Combine about 2/3 a cup of cranberry juice and 1/3 a cup of olive oil in a bowl. Or if you don’t want extra dishes to clean, just drink a small bottle of cranberry juice down to the label and fill it back up with olive oil, like you did in high school when you made a brass monkey because you liked the Beastie Boys so much. Only do not drink the cranberry juice/olive oil mixture. Also: Do not drink brass monkeys. They’re gross.

5) Every now and then, check the thermometer on the smoker to make sure it’s around 220. If it’s not, do what you need to do to get it back there. Not a big deal if it goes above for a while or below for a while as long as the smoker’s between about 200 and 300 degrees.

6) After about four hours, lightly coat the pork with the cranberry juice/olive oil mixture. I use a spray bottle for this step, but you could use a barbecue mop or a silicone pastry brush if you don’t have that. If you don’t have any of those things, I don’t know, brother. You’re up the creek I guess.

7) When the pork’s internal temperature gets to about 165 degrees (mine took about eight hours to get there), pull it off the smoker and wrap it in aluminum foil. Put it back in the smoker for four more hours.

8) Remove the pork, unwrap it and let it cool for at least a half hour. It’s still going to be pretty damn hot inside, but by this point there’s just no way that’s going to stop you from turning the pork into a sandwich.

9) Grab a handful of pork and pull it off the butt, then pull it into smaller pieces. You want to get a good mix of the lighter, interior meat and the outside stuff with the rub on the edge. When you have enough for however many sandwiches you need, stop. You can deal with pulling the rest of the pork later.

10) Construct a sandwich with the pork, barbecue sauce, pickles and peppers on the potato roll. I used a Carolina-style mustard-based barbecue sauce, but I’m not the type to tell you any one barbecue sauce must be used with any one barbecue meat. I used Mariachi peppers because they’re what I have and they’re delicious. They’re spicy and sweet, so if you can find a pepper like that I’d recommend it.

11) Eat the sandwich while you try to think of other ways to use all the remaining pork.

This might have been the best sandwich I’ve ever constructed at home. The pork was smoky and juicy, the barbecue sauce sweet and tangy, the peppers crisp and spicy, and the pickles were pickles. Oh and the roll itself is soft and sweet, a perfect complement to all the stuff that’s going on here.

By using chicken skin for its texture and powerful flavor in all sorts of dishes, chefs are legitimizing what used to be a guilty pleasure, whether they call it gribenes, yakitori kawa or cracklings.

There is no more-committed evangelist than Sean Brock, executive chef of Husk and McCrady’s in Charleston, S.C. If it can be done in the kitchen, Mr. Brock has done it to chicken skin: He marinates it in buttermilk, then smokes and deep fries for a crunchy appetizer served with hot sauce and honey.

– Sarah DiGregorio, N.Y. Times.

OK, does anyone know where I can get my hands on some chicken skin without actually pulling the skin off chicken (and thus later having to cook and eat pathetically skin-free chicken)? Because smoked, deep-fried chicken skin with hot sauce and honey is practically begging to be a Bold Flavors Snack of the Week.