After the pseudo debacle with my first smoke I decided to dive in and cook a couple of pork butts last weekend. I invited some friends over for a “guys day” since my wife was taking the baby to see some extended family. The stage was set for pulled pork, PS3, and Hi-def movies…
A couple days before the event I went to my butcher and picked up 2 boneless pork butts cryovaced. On Thursday (06/05), I unsealed them and rubbed with the same Butt Rub that I tried on the ribs the weekend before and wrapped them up for 24 hours.
Friday night I fired up the WSM at around 8:30pm and put the meat on around 9:00. Looking back I think part of my problem with temps on the first cook was that I was reading between 2 racks of ribs and the cold meat was messing up my readings. For this cook, I found two little metal picture hangers in a “homeowners kit” that I had laking around. I hung these hangers from the top rack and set the probe on the “u” shaped end letting me get a temp from about 1 inch below the rack. Seems like this worked pretty good.
Since this was my first overnight cook, and I still didn’t trust my thermometer very much, I resigned myself to staying up all night and keeping an eye on the cook. Temps were holding pretty good around 240-250 until around midnight when a pretty good thunderstorm came through. I ran outside in the rain and opened up the vents a bit since the temp had dropped down to about 200. The rain stopped after about 1 hour and I got to go back out and adjust the vents again to slow down the rising temps. I let the temps stay around 250-260 this time and they held there all night long, even let me sleep a bit on the couch…
I went back outside to turn the butts over at 9:00AM and check the internal temp of the meat. They were around 170 at that time and I was shooting for around 190. Got to 190 at about 11:30AM and pulled the meat off of the smoker. Since I don’t have a cooler at the time to wrap the butts up in foil and hold in, I put them in foil serving trays and tented more foil over them.
Here are a couple of pics of the butts right after they came off of the smoker.
Unfortunately these were all of the pictures I took that day, sorry, I got a little excited and my hands were rarely clean enough to work an SLR… I promise to do better next time.
I let the butts cool for about an hour and a half until my friend Mitch came over and then proceeded to start pulling the pork apart. Each pork butt filled one of these medium sized trays from BJ’s with pulled pork. There was a good smoke ring and plenty of “bark” to mix in. I had trimmed the fat cap off of one of the butts (the first of the 2 pictures above) and left the other one as bought just to see how each turned out. The trimmed butt had a lot less waste when I was pulling and more of that tasty bark.
At around 3:00PM everyone (Mitch, Ashley, Nick, David, and Larry) had arrived and we dug into the pork. Since I am not yet to the point of making my own sauce (will one day) I bought a gallon of Williamson Brothers BBQ sauce www.williamsonbros.com
The pork went over very well as we watched Pans Labyrinth on HD-DVD and played Gran Turismo 5: Prologue on Playstation 3. Thankfully there was plenty of pork left over for my wife to enjoy and to take some to my folks the next day.
All in all a great day and for sure made me want to fire the smoker up again very soon. I think I will try to do some ribs again next and hopefully not make the same mistakes I made on the first try, after that it looks like I will do pulled pork again for July 4th and have my family and inlaws over for that. Wish me luck!
