Simple pork brine

On Saturday I will smoke 2 pork butts and 1/2 of a loin. I did a simple brine of about 3/4 of a gallon of apple juice, and handful of kosher salt, and bulb of vampire repellent smashed with my meat tenderizer and 2 smashed habaneros. I used a dedicated cooler just for brining purposes. On Saturday I will dry the meat and use my "mystery mix" rub. The mystery is because it is the leftovers of previous rubs that I've made that I store in a container until it is full. Once full I use it on some pork because it goes so well with many different spices.

The results of 9 hours of smoking the butts and 4.5 for the loin.

Looks great!

My husband has come up with a really simple pork brine. We often will buy a full pork loin and then cut it into chunk portions. The chunks are a single thick slice which when cooked will be enough to feed the two of us. Think thick boneless pork chop. We drop these chunks into ziplock bags. We add a bay leaf (laurel leaf), roughly cracked pepper. Then we make a brine with ho****er, kosher salt, and molasses. This gets pored into the bags till the liquid will cover 1/2 of the pork cunks. We then finish by adding cold water.

The chunks are then put in the freezer. The freezer? The reason is that in the 1/2 to hour it takes for a deep freezer to freeze the pork chunks, the brine has about 1/2 of the time it needs. Then when we take the chunk out to cook, we defrost the chunk in warm water. This takes about 1/2 hour... So all told the brine has an hour or hour and a half to work.

We then grill, saute, smoke, or bake as we would like our pork chunk! Often it is just on the grill with some delicious sauce as a light mop. Then we slice and share! Yum!