The average Fourth of July celebration usually includes a few key ingredients – grilling, cold beer, good friends and a helping of colorful explosions.

But a truly great celebration, like a truly great dry rub, is all about those lesser known ingredients. In the case of our Fun Fourth, we’re talking slow-smoked pork shoulder, a roll of four thousand firecrackers, an air rifle and few very serious law enforcement officers, among other things.

I should say, I really wanted to do this post as a play-by-play on the Fourth, but I was way, way too dirty to even think about touching my phone. Honestly, I looked like I slept in garbage.

Here’s how the weekend went down:

July 3:
We arrived at Robbie and Jenny’s place in Union, MO around 2:00 on Friday. After eating everything we could lay our hands on (we didn’t stop the entire way), it was time to head out for supplies. I stuck around the house to keep an eye on Max (Robbie and Jenny’s five year old) and watch Real Genius, Val Kilmer’s second film after Top Secret. I’ll watch anything that delivers retribution by way of popcorn.

Brooke, Jenny and Kendra came back with food and drink. Robbie came back with a sweet-ass Daisy 8800 high-velocity air rifle. We immediately retired to the back porch to shoot cans and bottles. After about two hours of decent marksmanship I hear:

Police officer leaning over the roof of his car, his handgun trained on Robbie: Drop the fucking gun, man!
Robbie, both hands up: Whoa, it’s just a BB gun!
Police officer, not budging: I don’t fucking care. Drop. The. Gun. Now!

After letting the officer inspect the weapon and being asked a lot of questions about our (lack of) criminal histories, the officer informed us, it’s not okay to fire any kind of gun within the city limits, especially when it looks like a .22 rifle to passers by. Lesson learned. I also learned I can deal with a loaded gun pointed at me without peeing my pants. This skill will absolutely come in handy again.

The rest of the evening was less eventful. Max decided to impersonate a very unfortunate pirate.

Captain Max, world's unluckiest pirate

July 4:
“Jacob, it’s 8:30. Gotta go start the smoker.”

Zombied my way downstairs to start the smoker. Here are the ingredients for a good day:

One tried and true smoker

One awesome nine pound pork butt

Quality all hardwood lump charcoal

Also, you’re going to need about nine to twelve hours, a few pounds of hickory chunks, a steel will and enough cold beer to see you through the day.

After about six hours, your conquest is going to look like this:

Oh, you smoky temptress!

Do not give in! You’ve got to wait for perfection.

When a pork shoulder is ready, the bone will slip out effortlessly and it’ll be completely clean. It’s going to take how long it takes, and that’s usually about an hour to an hour and a half per pound. For at least six hours, you’re going to want to keep that heat right at 225 degrees and consistently add hickory chunks to the smoker. The first six or seven hours are when you’re going to get the most smoke penetration. After that, wrap that bad boy in aluminum foil and take the temperature to 350 for the remainder. Sneaky secret – you can actually do this portion in the oven if you’re sick of babysitting the smoker. As far as I’ve experienced, it doesn’t have an appreciable effect on the end product.

Well, that’s how it’s done. I wish I’d taken a picture of the end product, but we got on it pretty quickly. Looked something like this:

Cheers,

jae