Fire up your Orion Slow Cooker for a fantastic Independence Day BBQ, it’s officially outdoor season! The sun is hot, picnic tables dressed in red and white cloths scattered across a green lawn, friends and family sip on cold drinks, while clouds of smokey, sweet pulled pork and brisket float above. The nostalgia of this image is tattooed in my mind when I think of a classic Fourth of July BBQ. The Orion Slow Cooker will create fireworks for everyone’s taste buds at your next outdoor summer party. This slow cooker is easy to use and by easy I mean you will never serve hockey puck burgers or dry chicken again. The Orion slow cooker is small enough to fit outside on an urban patio, yet can cook enough food to feed a full house. It's all about the great outdoors, wherever you choose this summer with Orion.
The 100% food grade stainless steel Orion Slow cooker is a multi-purpose cooking tool, that can be brought anywhere. You can steam veggies, smoke your very own bacon, or convection cook perfect salmon filets. Orion Slow Cooker is equipped with a large cooking chamber and poultry stand that can have a juicy turkey ready in just 2.5 hours, 3 rib racks to hang those succulent baby-backs, as well as cooking grates for veggies, fish, sausages, you name it. The assemblage for this slow cooker is easy, clean, and quick. I don’t know about you, but after a big meal and maybe 3 or 4 margaritas the last thing I want to do is clean. A drip pan catches all of the excess oils on the slow cooker and when lined with tin foil it makes clean up a breeze. A cooking manual comes with your Orion Slow Cooker and provides cook times and techniques for all meats, fish, and poultry. The Orion Slow Cooker can have a rack of ribs ready in under an hour and a half, and a full brisket in under 5 hours! The slow cooker prepares delicious meals at a faster pace, leaving you with more time to spend cooling off in the pool or playing cornhole with friends and less time sweating over an unreliable grill.
A 12.5 lb bag of instant light charcoal briquettes is all you need to get the party started. For smaller cuts of meat, less charcoal can be used. Wood chips are an optional choice when using the Orion Slow Cooker to enhance color and flavor of your food, and no need to soak the chips in water like most smokers recommend. Hickory wood chips are recommended for pork, turkey, and chicken and best used when smoking brisket or pork. Orion also says lemon wood chips help to add citrus flavors to your salmon, while mesquite chips work best with beef. Orion features their own wood chips which are 100% hardwood, bark-free, forest grown only chips that have been manufactured with this particular BBQ style of cooking in mind.
Let’s get this Fourth of July menu cookin’. A recipe that will be memorable this summer is our Tennessee style pulled pork sandwich and smoked potato salad on the side to take it up a notch. All you really need for a classic Tennessee barbecue pulled pork sandwich is a potato bun, a pile of Orion Slow Cooked pork, and a squeeze of the classic vinegar barbecue sauce. This recipe is for a 6-8 lb Boston Butt. To start, dry off your meat and rub down the butt ahead of time with Orion’s Poultry and Pork Dry Rub filled with savory spices and can be purchased on Orion’s website. Place the meat on bottom cooking grate inside the Orion cooking chamber, then it’s time to fire up charcoal in the slow cooker! A common question is, “where do I put the wood chips?” The wood chips are supposed to be sprinkled between the drip pan and inside the cylinder wall, once the coals heat up the stainless steel walls will be hot enough to make the chips smoke, sending out signals of delicious things happening wherever you’re cooking.
The Boston Butt will take as little as 3 and a half hours until it becomes melt in your mouth tender. Once the meat has reached a temperature of 195 degrees, your ready to go. Set the meat aside to rest, and later go back to it with 2 forks to pull apart the meat into stringy morsels of flavorful pork. Tennessee style BBQ wouldn't be complete without a tangy sauce. A quick, easy recipe calls for 1 cup of white vinegar, 1 cup of apple cider vinegar, 1 cup of ketchup, 1 tablespoon of brown sugar, 2 tablespoons of hot sauce, a dash of Worcestershire sauce, finish the sauce off with salt and coarsely ground black pepper. Just place all the ingredients in a pot, bring to a boil, whisking the ingredients together to make sure all the sugars are dissolved, then allow the sauce to cool. Any Carolina BBQ fan will be loving this sweet and tangy sauce. To amp up this dish, I have smoked potato salad that will really bring a warm smile to your family and friends faces. The recipe calls for 2 lbs of Yukon Gold potatoes, washed and dried. Puncture each potato several times, and season with salt, and pepper. Place the potatoes on the indirect heat next to the pork butt slow roasting away. The juices from the pork will flavor the potatoes as well. While they are cooking mix together 2 cups of mayonnaise, 2 tablespoons of yellow mustard, 1 tablespoon of apple cider vinegar, 2 stalks of celery chopped, and half a cup of yellow onion chopped in a bowl. After about 2 hours they are ready to go, or once they are tender in the center. After the Yukon Gold’s are cooled, mix them in with the mayonnaise mixture and allow to chill for about an hour before serving. This creamy element will help to balance the tangy, sweet pulled pork sandwich!
Orion’s Slow Cooker will make long lasting BBQ memories this Fourth of July.
Enjoy the great outdoors with your loved ones and wow them with delicious, flavorful food.