Smothered Pork Neck Bones and Gravy | Old-School Southern Recipe

Hey, what's up, everybody? Hey, today, I'm going to take us all back, right? I don't know. You know, like if you knew, if you knew school, you might not know nothing about this. But for those of us that grew up with our Southern grandparents and stuff like that today, I'm getting ready to show you guys how to do a Southern, you know, neck bone. Listen to this. We're going to do Southern neck bones and gravy. Let's get it. OK, you guys look, so we're going to go, you know, get right into this video. You know what I mean? So I can show you guys how to make it right. So let me make some room right here. And then everything that you guys are seeing right here is on my website. That's Smokin' and Grillin' with A.B. Dotcom and that's W.I.T. A.B. Dotcom. Now, this right here, these are the star. These are the neck bones. I've already just pulled these out and patted them dry. I just got another one of these just so I can any residual water that comes out. You know, I just like to get everything as dry as possible. Right. So if you guys want to know what they look like, this is what they look like right here. Now, I do have one. No, I guess it will be like a caution. You guys want to like handle them. And you can see sometimes when they cut them, it'll have like a little thin piece of bone. So as I, you know, clean them, I rub them, you know, and make sure that they don't have any splinters of bone. That's the only thing about the neck bones, right? All right. So these are still kind of still kind of dry. Just wanted to show you guys these right here. Now we can just get right into it. OK, so with a name like, you know, like Southern style neck bones, mother neck bones, neck bones and gravy. You guys might think there's a whole lot to it. It's really, really simple. If you've been following this channel, you know the basic things that we do. We come up with a rub or a seasoning. We put that on there. Then we do a little browning. Yada, yada, yada. Nothing has changed. Right. So now I'm going to go ahead and just add all of my ingredients. Everything that you have for the seasonings, you know, for my website. Look real simple. I put all of this in here. And, you know, obviously that's salt. You know, I mean, some people might think that's a lot. But when you come to like the pork, it will take it. It's not really a lot. Do you guys got to trust me? I watch my salt intake, but we still want to make sure it tastes good, right? So we get it like that, and that was kosher salt, by the way. Get yourself a whisk or do it old school like grandma used to do or grandpa and use a fork, however you want to do it. And then we bring this into play. I'll drop this in my hot, soapy water, right? And now what I'm going to do is I'm going to season, folks. I mean, we want to season. I'm going to mix them around a little bit, and then we're going to make sure we have enough, you know, to do the backside of them also. All right, so I'll get in here, just move these around, turn them over. Just like you guys are seeing right here. Oh, yeah, look at all that right there. Now that's seasoning, folks. OK, so once you have everything, you know, seasoned up, what I did was I got a medium flame underneath the bottom here. I don't know if you guys can see that. If you can, that's just a medium high. I started warming up my Dutch oven. Obviously, that's what we'll be using, right? So now I'm going to go ahead and put some of my, this is extra virgin olive oil made by Branch and Vine, right? Look at that. You just want to get a little bit down there, just like a couple of tablespoons, you know what I mean? Just to get you going, right? Now, this will be familiar for you guys to make short ribs, you know, pot roast, you know, things like that. We just want to do the same thing. Once it's coming up to temp, I'm going to raise this up to about a medium high flame, and then we're going to go ahead and start to brown. All right, so now that my oil, you know, is nice and hot, it's ready to go. I'm going to bring these into play, right? So neck bone, it's really not going to be, this piece happened to be halfway good. It's not going to be like a square piece of a chunk of meat, but we're going to brown on all sides. I'm going to go ahead and start on this flat side first, right? And then as we just grab these, now that was nice and fleshy right there. This one has a little bone. And I'll bring the camera and put it in the inside in just one second. You know what I mean? So and then we'll just put it in like this. OK, so what you want to remember is, listen, we're not trying to cook this either. You know, a pretty big piece of meat, pieces of meat, right? All we want to do is get some color on it, you know, brown it, make sure it leaves some bits in the bottom of it. You see that right there? Look at that right there. Yes, sir. Now, we're just going to keep rotating this till we got color on all sides and then we're going to continue this process. So we'll take that one, put that in there. I'm going to check this one, make sure this one is right. Oh, yeah. You guys can see that this is what you what I mean when I say brown. Now, I'm going to turn this fire off right now because I've been running a medium high flame. Right. We're going to let it cool just a little bit. And then we're going to turn it back to medium. You know what I mean? And then we're going to go ahead and start making this gravy. Look at that. That's what you want, folks. Tell me this ain't taking y'all back. All right. So here's where we are now, right? We didn't took everything out. You guys just see me, you know, take those out. I got those in a bowl separately. I reduce my heat. Actually, I turned my heat off because I just wanted to be able to control it right now. I got a medium flame underneath the bottom of it. I got my onions cut. Now we just add these to it. Now the onion and pork go together hand in hand, folks. And this right here, everybody grew up with an onion gravy, you know, with a with an onion gravy. So that's where we are right now. OK, so look, you remember we had a little fire down there. It's picking it up. That's the acidity, you know, from these onions. You get enough onions in here, that's going to clean all of that up right there. But this right here is how you get the great tasting, you know, taste, right? That is nothing but seasoning. You know, I mean, it kind of like sticks down to the bottom. You know, then we pick it up. Once we start adding, you know, our chicken broth and all that to it. Oh, my goodness. This is where it starts from, a great foundation. Now I'm getting ready to make sure I just keep this on medium. I actually turned it down just a little bit. What I want to do is start prepping and getting ready to mince, you know, my garlic, right? Now we're going to use about four garlic cloves. You know, it depends on the size. If you guys got some small ones, you know what I mean? I'll probably use five. Now what I'm doing is I'm bringing it over here close to me. You see that? Now, check this out. I'm going to load up my garlic press, bring this on top. And when I mince this, look, notice I'm putting it right here on top. That way I don't burn, you know, the minced garlic. I just put it on top right here because I'm trying to teach, folks. You know what I mean? It takes a while. Then we got to load it again. And then any residual that you guys see right here, look, I put it in here. That's going to become garlic that goes in there too. All right, so we just continue this. Actually, I can get two in here like this, right? We'll just go ahead. And now, ooh, look, now we working, folks. Next, I turned it down. You know, I'm a little bit below medium. And now I mix, right? And I'm going to keep moving this around, right off the bat. As soon as it gets hot, you can smell it. Garlic, onions, fine. And if you want to, you can go ahead and put a quarter, you can just go ahead and put a tablespoon of butter in here. These are like tricks that I learned over the years. Now, by me looking at my onions, yeah, this is where I want them to be. You can see about how soft they are. You know what I mean? This is good right here. Now I'm going to bring my flour because we got to cook that out, right? I'll just go ahead and add all that in there because I'm going to work it, right? And we'll just move this back and forth. And we'll cook this for about a minute, right? See how I just sopped up all of the goodness that's in the inside. Now we just want to make sure we keep, get it flat. We don't want to taste no flour. Okay, so now once we cook this for about a minute, I actually went about two minutes, if you ask me, right? Now I'm getting ready to add my chicken stock. Now we're going to need about four cups, so that'll take all of this, right? But notice how when I put this in here, I'm going to keep this moving. I just like to get everything to mix because it'll thicken up on you because we did put that flour in there, right? There we go. Now I'm going to raise my fire up to high, right? Now look, this is chicken stock. If you guys have broth in there, that'll work too. And then for some of you guys that have pork stock, that'll work also. All right, so my fire's still high. What I'm doing here is just want to see it roll before I set it up, you know, on low. So it'll simmer. Now we're going to add the W sauce, right? And that's for flavor, folks. And then some of you guys, you guys might know something about this. For those of you guys that are new, this will give us a little bit of that color, right? So we're going to add some kitchen bouquet to it. There we go. This is how we're going to get it dark. It does have a little bit of a flavor to it also, but look at it now. You see it just turning instantly, you know, on a darker brown, right? Ah, yeah. Now, you know what I got to do, folks. Can you guys know, can you tell me down in the comment section below what I'm about to do? Ah, I'll beat you to it. Got to add some pepper to it. Gravy, folks. I like to be able to see my specks of, you know, fresh black cracked pepper. All right. So now that we got it, it's at a simmer. I just lowered my temperature. My fire underneath the bottom. I'm going to add my bay leaves. Let's get them hydrated. Now, something I should have said, it'd be nice if you guys have like an extra, you know, an extra box of chicken stock or whatever liquid you guys are using. You know what I mean? That right there will serve as like, if you want to add some more, because when we put this in here, we need to make sure it's submerged. So all of this needs to be submerged at least about three quarters of the way, you know, for the cooking. Right? So I've made the adjustment inside of the, inside of my web, you know, my website, so you guys can, you know, get it right. You know what I mean? As long as you got an extra one, you're good. But you know, it's just like taking a bath. Once you get in, the water rises. Same thing with this gravy. And look at that right there. And this should get y'all going, folks. Look at this piece right here. This is going to be mine. Along with a couple other pieces in there. Now, we've got it in there like that. What I'm going to do is, make sure all of it has a little gravy on it. To start, I'm going to add my lid on it. You see them onions right there? That's why I didn't keep cooking them, because I want them to do their thing, you know, and be in here for this gravy. Instead of making them, you know, super translucent and small in the beginning, let them work in here. Let it transfer its goodness in here. All right, so now we got Bailey. We got it all in here. Ooh, this will make grandma proud right here, y'all. Now, all we're going to do is put this top on there. I got it on super low underneath. I'm going to actually transfer this over to my stove, and I'm going to see you guys in about two and a half hours. Then we're going to check the tenderness, right? To be honest with you, listen, let's just say it's really like three hours. I'm going to check it at two and a half, right? So in an hour and a half, I'm going to come and just check it. I want to look and make sure I ain't lost too much liquid. Make sure my gravy is still, you know, pliable like I like it. And then we go the rest of the way, right? All right, so look, now we're done. I did check it, you know, just to make sure nothing was sticking on the bottom. But with that amount of gravy, if you had it on low, it shouldn't. So I kept going. At two and a half hours, I hit it with a toothpick to make sure it was, you know, super tender. I ended up going, just letting it go three hours, right? So break it this way. Yes, sir. Look at this right here, folks. Look at that. Look at how soft and how tender it is. Oh, this already is broke up. Now, this is going to take a lot of people back to the old days. Look at that. I don't need to show y'all with no toothpick or nothing like that. You can just see it is super tender, right? So let me go ahead and plate it up. Oh, and if you guys look right here, I got my rice. Now, I just made a video, you know, doing a hamburger gravy, you know, over rice to show you guys how I make rice, right? Look at that. That's ready to go. Let's go ahead and get this, you know, plated. Ooh, got to get some of that gravy everywhere. Got to be more careful. All right, folks, look, now that I got it plated up, you know, let me know. This is what you guys saw on the thumbnail. You know what I mean? Come on in here, come on. You want to see how, you know, how tender it is. I was getting ready to hit it with this knife, but you see how it kind of like just, you know, pulls away? Look, just the bone, right? Y'all tell me. You see that right there? Look, let me just go ahead and get this gravy. Hey, I feel bad, folks. Hey, bon appetit, y'all. I don't want to say nothing, but I might be part of that gravy, that gravy king. Mm, mm. Okay, I can't wait to hurry up and tell you guys this, and out of all the times that I done made this, you know what I mean? Aided with my family, you know what I mean? Some of my aunties, you know, stuff like that, was making it, you know, like when I was younger. I never thought of this, folks. This right here is the pork version of an oxtail. I'm not going to lie to you. Look at the gravy. It's rich, but not as rich as it is when you do oxtails. Taste comparison, whatever the wow you get when you have good oxtails, this is what you get right here. I'm trying to, you know, I'm grasping and trying to like describe this. I want you guys to, you know, go to your local grocery store. Some of y'all saying, I ain't never seen it. You know what? When you ain't looking for something, you never seen it. Just like buying a car. Once you buy it, you see your car everywhere, right? Now I'm telling you, talk to your local butcher and ask them and tell them you want to get them pork necks. You know what I'm saying? And it will go from there. Now for everybody else, tap in and just say, AB, I took you way back. And outside of that, listen, if you're new to my channel, let me take this time to say, thank you for watching this video. Don't forget to like, smash that subscribe button, and tell everybody out there, there's a channel out here that's simplifying these recipes and taking the mystery out of cooking. Now, maybe in about 10 minutes, my cornbread will be ready and then I'm about to eat. Know what folks, I'm out. Peace.