I few days ago I decided I wanted to try the BBQ Pork sandwich, fried pickles and beans from Vol 5 of MC.
It seems I can't get pork shoulder with the skin on here in Minnesota so the butcher suggested I go with a steak on the bone. Spoiler: It worked just fine! Here it is all bagged up
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That went into the 150 F water and I pretty much forgot about it for 3 days.
The next day I decided to make pork stock for the first time, I've made MC Chicken stock many many many times but this was the first time with pork.
This is for the beans, and it requests brown stock which we prefer. Here is the pork and veg before it went into the oven.
We have a Thermador oven and it has a roast setting which worked great in browning all this. It then went into a pressure cooker with tyme and rosemary for 2 hours.
The result looks like this after it's been strained:
My wife reduced pomegranate juice for me to make pomegrante sryup, and I forgot to take any pictures of that. It was funny since the day before she heard Lyun on the splendid table talk about making your own and Alton Brown has a recipe for it in his later years book. She just reduced juice and wow it's potent!
I then realized the beans required Tomato Confit to which my wife joked about needing tomatoes (there were a few kgs of them on the kitchen table waiting to be processed from the latest batch of the garden).
She skinned them all and I prepared them for the oven along with bayleaves, tyme, garlic, light corn syrup, and evoo.
These spent time in the oven, I used the convection setting since I figured that would dry them faster and it sure did. They were flipped over and dried until they were deep red.
It was no fun removing the tyme from the tomatoes, I got what I could off and left the rest. I sieved the oil and vacuum sealed that with the tomatoes:
There is 75g of confit here, I made 1/2 the recipe. Only 30g was required for the beans but this tastes great by it self so we're going to put it on bread.
Then I was ready for the bean sauce, take the stock, minced onions, confit, pomegranate syrup, mustard, scotch instead of bourbon, maple syrup (we only had class A), and paprika instead of the pepper combine and reduce. This is what that looked like this:
The beans were soaked over night, and pressure cooked for 25 mins. Once things were cool enough the sauce and beans was combined and seals in a bag. This was cooked sous vide for 1 hr at 176F and the result looked like this:
Ok now it was time to make the fried pickles. I had a heck of a time finding pickling cucumbers but managed to get some on Friday and they went into a bag with the long list of ingredients and spend a few days in the fridge. They came out this evening and I pulled out 125g or so of them, here they are drying off before they go for a dip in the batter:
The batter is Trisol from Modernist Pantry, water, AP Flour and some yeast - we used dry so for 1/2 a recipe it was 1g. Note for those that make this if your pickles are small this makes more batter then you need. 125g is 1/2 pickles and 1/2 batter is too much, we'll make 1/3 or 1/4 of the batter next time.
So the pickles went into the batter and then into the oil.
Back to the pork, it came out of the water before the beans went in (I only have 1 immersion calculator, the 2nd one I backed on KS 2 years ago is way way behind on deliveries) but this was all fine:
Here is what it looked like after 72 hours:
It fell right off the bone, and was so easy to pull apart:
The BBQ sauce was the Kansas City one because my wife picked it. She doesn't like very acidic BBQ sauces (while I do) but even if this BBQ sauce had ketchup as the main ingredient the 15 other things I added made it amazing! We used one of our own hot peppers in it which really elevated the taste, interesting it was most spicy when it first came off the heat, it mellowed out as it cooled and then was in the fridge. Here's the BBQ sauce, it's stupid good just by itself!
So I measured the pork and added an equal amount of BBQ sauce. Mixed away and this was the result:
And the final plate:
We forgot the sherry vinegar at first so I wasn't as sure about the beans until I added some of it. Then the beans became amazing! The pickles are the best fried pickles we've ever had. just the right amount of crunch and the zingy pop of the pickle. My wife says I can make them whenever I want. The bun is 1/2 because I found in past I need 1/2 bun at a time or the bread gets soggy. It's a toasted bun and the meat just melts in your mouth. I HATED pulled pork growing up because it was dry and inedible no matter how much BBQ sauce you put on it. In Ivan Ramen's book on Ramen he has a recipe for slow roasted pork with fat. I made that and thought the pulled pork was good but it needed a lot of BBQ sauce (which was from a bottle, albeit a good bottle). This blows that pork out of the water!
I need to find something else to cook for 72 hours 
I made the Turkey Leg Confit twice for T-Day and practice T-Day a few years ago and that was OMG off the charts good too. We've had the sous vide set up for a few years now but I mostly have used it to cook chicken.
Anyway hopefully this helps anyone else that wants to make this, it's worth it. If you do the beans don't forget the sherry vinegar.
