OK, so here's how it went:
Saturday evening, made the marinade using Joshua Weissman's recipe (
https://www.joshuaweissman.com/post/tacos-al-pastor)
Had a bit of a freak-out - at 9:10 PM, I discovered that my achiote paste had gone off. Luckily our local Nugget Market doesn't close till 10:00 PM, and even more luckily, they still had a couple of packets in stock!
A couple of tweaks to Weissman's recipe - I added some MSG, and once I had it all built I thought it could use a bit more zip, so I added a bit of Kashmiri chili powder. Checking the reserved portion the next day we felt it was a bit under-salted for marinade purposes (although it tasted great on a spoon), so we did give the meat a light sprinkling of additional salt prior to cooking.
For the meat, I had purchased two Costco pork butts and trimmed them hard, basically to the same shape that I use for buckboard bacon. There's about 7 lbs of meat here.
I then sliced these up into steaks:
and into the marinade.
Sunday, Josh came round with his new knife. It's AEB-L steel, 245 mm gyuto with birdseye maple and purple heart handle, with a Denka-style finger notch. Custom built by Matt Sicard out of Ontario Canada.
So naturally he wanted to play with it. He made the fixings.
While he was doing that, I set up the workspace in the back yard. We got the FTG, the Treager, the Weber with rotisserie attachment, and the Engelbrecht mounting the Carson Rodizio set up. The plan was to try this two ways and see which method worked best.
Mounted the meat on each spit between two pineapple halves. The Weber spit has spit forks, but this are not available for the Rodizio spit.
Rodizio spit goes into the Traeger. I start on "smoke" and slowly wind the temperature up to 225. Over 2 hours, the internal temperature goes up to about 105 F.
Weber spit goes straight on the weber. I've got about 6-8 coals lit on one side, with a smoke box loaded with pellets and hickory chips on top. I had a pellet maze on the other side. The smoke box worked a treat, but I've had no luck with my pellet maze - I can never get it to stay lit. I'm sure there is a thread on this forum somewhere that can tell me what I am doing wrong!
So after two hours (we could have waited longer but TBH we got bored), we pulled both spits. Internal temp between 105 and 110F.
Next, we trimmed off the pineapple skins and started the high temp cook. On the Rodizio:
And on the Weber:
Now it's a case of waiting till the meat is bubbling and nicely caramelized on the outside, shaving bits off and back on the grill:
Close-up of the final product:
And service: