Year of the Pig

This past weekend I made my first ever trip to Maine, to attend a wedding in Belfast. Alissa and I jumped at the excuse to get up to Maine, and we had a fantastic weekend enjoying the beautiful Maine coast in mid-June. We were early enough to avoid collision with the Maine tourist hordes, yet we had a beautiful weekend of long, sunny 80 degree days filled with dramatic New England light. Being so close to a National Park, we pushed on a little farther up the coast early on a Friday morning to visit Acadia, and just a couple of miles outside the park, I smelled the smell of burning wood, and turned my head to see an enormous barbecue rig parked on the side of Route 3, in the parking lot of some kind of Church or Tabernacle, right next to the Super Shoes. The sandwich board out front read, “CZY D P1t BBQ” and I knew I couldn’t pass this up. I got a quick OK from Alissa and did a 180, pulling up right next to CZY D’s montrosity of a BBQ pit.

I walked up to CZY D himself and announced that I would be interested in some Ribs. I complimented his rig, and he gave me a quick tour of the smoking chambers loaded with pork shoulders, brisket, ribs, chickens, sausages and BBQ beans. I was kind of in awe of the rig, which was apparently brand new, custom made from somewhere in Texas. He was obviously pretty proud of it. As his first Rib customer of the day, he announced that I would be getting a large (half) rack, which he packed up in a styrofoam box. I was on my way.

It was just before noon and we were again on our way to Acadia, this time with a delicious smell of smoke and ribs filling the cab of the truck. We sped along, headed for the first picnic area of the park, just over the bridge to Mount Desert Island. We got there and pulled into a parking spot. The day was gorgeous with a bright blue sky and we strolled down to the picnic tables looking out toward Frenchman Bay, carrying our box of ribs.

The ribs tasted good, but mainly because we were sitting out at picnic tables in a gorgeous place enjoying the great view and the very pleasant New England weather. The ribs themselves were nothing to write home about. In fact, in other situations, I would call them bad. The meat would barely stay on the bone so that you could hardly seperate the rack into individual ribs without it falling apart into a big meat pile. It was a large meaty rack of spare ribs, including the rib tips. I am fine with the boney and cartilagey rib tips, but these large ribs would probably be difficult to get tender from just smoking. In fact, the very large bones were soft from the cooking like they were boiled forever or pressure cooked. If you weren’t overly careful when biting meat off the bone your teeth could sink right into and through the bone, which when you aren’t expecting the taste of bone in your mouth, is pretty nasty. I would say that the meat itself was actually pretty flavorful, but that didn’t matter much cause the whole rack was drowning in a mass of sweet, sticky barbecue sauce, which was absolutely overwhelming. CZY D has him one fancy rig, but needs some lessons in cooking ribs!

Anyway, I still enjoyed my ribs, sitting there in the sun and planning our day ahead at Acadia, which is a really beautiful National Park. I ate 3 ribs then and one later, watching the sun set from the awesome vantage of Mount Cadillac, making for a total of 86 ribs in the year of the pig. Or, about 2 pigs 26, if you prefer.