First Pork Butt - Questions


 
B

Brian.Leblanc

New member
All,

Thanks for the info and feedback on my first smoke a couple weeks ago. I want to try two pork butts overnight (we'll end up freezing a lot) on Friday into Saturday with the plan to eat it for dinner at 5:00-5:30 on Saturday. I'm planning on cheating a little bit with the rub and the sop. I'm going to use McCormack pork rub which was great on the ribs I made a few weeks ago. I have a bottle of Stub's BBQ sauce that I could use as a sop, any thoughts on this?

I'm trying to work out the time I should light the smoker as well as the amount of charcoal in the smoker and the chimney starter. My only constraint is my son has soccer practice in the afternoon so I need to leave the house at 1:30 p.m. and I won't be back until 3:30. I think this basically means I need it done by 1:00-1:15 and I should be able to hold it in a cooler with tin foil and towels until 5:00 when it will be ready to serve. The forecasted overnight low Thursday night is 52 degrees and the high for Friday and Saturday is 72 degrees.

What do you guys recommend for the following:

(1) amount of unlit briquettes in the smoker
(2) amount of briquettes in the chimney starter
(3) start time for preheating, start time for cooking (presumably 1 hour after preheating)

The recipes on this site say 12-14 hours but the tables show it taking 16 hours so I'm trying to decide what to do.
 
Some quick answers:

1 - load the ring up leaving a hole in the middle ( minion method)
2- about 10-15 ...enough to fill the hole
3- average is 1.5 - 2 hours per pound. Without a weight listed, it's hard to say when to start. Smoking is an art, not a science.

Your outside temps are fine, as long as it's not windy, the smoker will hold temp just fine. A generic answer, I would aim for a 9-930 PM start time. Just looking at your desired finish time.
 
Cooking time will greatly depend on the size of the butts. I usually cook 6 pound butts at 225-250 for about 12 hours. I fill my charcoal ring with unlit charcoal and two or three medium wood chunks. Then, I take about 15 coals out of the center and light them in the chimney. Once they are lit, I dump them back in the center. Then I add a medium chunk of wood on top of the lit coals and assemble the WSM. I don't preheat. Once the meat is on, I just make sure that my chunk of smoke wood is smoldering and not flaming.

I would allow time to let the meat rest on the counter unwrapped for 30 minutes or so before wrapping and putting in the towel lined cooler. If you go straight from the smoker to the cooler, it could turn mushy.
Rubs and sops are all personal preference, so just experiment and see what you like. Just be careful not to sop too early and wash off your bark. I don't sop, I just spritz with apple juice after the bark is set.
 
Ken, Steve,

Thanks for the information. I should have thought of the weight as the determining factor with this type of meat. It wasn't really a factor with the ribs since they're mostly the same. I haven't gone shopping yet. I plan to go at noon time today. I live walking distance to this place: http://www.bloodfarm.net/. I'll see what they have in terms of weight and let you guys know.

Brian
 
I just got back from the store. I had them cut two pieces of boneless butt that were roughly 8 lbs each. I was a little surprised with the dimensions. They are each about 8"x10"x3". Is this what other people are getting at the store? I have the 18" WSM so I can cook them side by side on one grate on the 8" side. I thought I would have been able to get three of these on one grate but it doesn't appear that will be possible. I'll get a better idea once I put them on the grate. Cooking time should be 12-16 hours based on the 1.5-2 hours per pound estimate.
 
Steven P (Tupelo) said:
Cooking time will greatly depend on the size of the butts. I usually cook 6 pound butts at 225-250 for about 12 hours. I fill my charcoal ring with unlit charcoal and two or three medium wood chunks. Then, I take about 15 coals out of the center and light them in the chimney. Once they are lit, I dump them back in the center. Then I add a medium chunk of wood on top of the lit coals and assemble the WSM. I don't preheat. Once the meat is on, I just make sure that my chunk of smoke wood is smoldering and not flaming.

I would allow time to let the meat rest on the counter unwrapped for 30 minutes or so before wrapping and putting in the towel lined cooler. If you go straight from the smoker to the cooler, it could turn mushy.
Rubs and sops are all personal preference, so just experiment and see what you like. Just be careful not to sop too early and wash off your bark. I don't sop, I just spritz with apple juice after the bark is set.
Click to expand...

My method is very, very similar to Steve's here.

My last butt cook was 2 bone-in butts that were about 8.4 lbs each before trimming. My cooker temp was pretty much rock solid @ 240-260 for 13 hours, at which time I pulled them with internal temps of 197-200. Then a 15-20 minute rest before foiling, and then into a cooler with a towel at the bottom. I think I chose to hold them there about an hour, but they can definitely hold for longer.

I like to overbuild my minion pile for long cooks. When I'm done, I snuff it, and I am a big fan of reusing charcoal. I use them for rotisserie cooks on the kettle and other indirect projects. I'd rather have too much charcoal in the cooker, and end up with used coals for later, than have to add new coals during the cook. So, specifically, in my last pork butt cook, I used a slightly overfilled charcoal ring of unlit KBB (22" WSM), and then set it off with about 20 lit briqs. I added about 4-5 fist-sized chunks mixed between apple, cherry, and hickory and make sure each chunk is in contact with some of the lit coals. Then I assemble the cooker's center section, fill the water pan, then add the top rack with the pork butts on it. I didn't have any food on the bottom rack, just some foil to catch drippings. If I am going to spritz or mop with apple juice, I usually wouldn't start doing this until the late-morning after the butts had been smoking for perhaps 6-8 hours, so as not to wash off any bark during it's formation process.
 
Last edited:
Brian.Leblanc said:
I just got back from the store. I had them cut two pieces of boneless butt that were roughly 8 lbs each. I was a little surprised with the dimensions. They are each about 8"x10"x3". Is this what other people are getting at the store? I have the 18" WSM so I can cook them side by side on one grate on the 8" side. I thought I would have been able to get three of these on one grate but it doesn't appear that will be possible. I'll get a better idea once I put them on the grate. Cooking time should be 12-16 hours based on the 1.5-2 hours per pound estimate.
Click to expand...

I think the dimensions you listed sound pretty normal, though I usually buy bone-in, as those are readily available for me, and I like the way the bone-in butts hold their shape without tying them. Cooking time to reach a particular internal temp is more related to the surface/mass ratio of the food items being cooked than it is the weight. If you took an 8 lb roast and cut it into a dozen small pieces, it would cook much faster than if you cooked the 8 lb roast whole. Hours per pound is a reasonable guideline for planning, but it is not a hard and fast rule. The planning will become easier with experience, and pork butt is a very forgiving cut of meat to cook.

Good luck with the cook, enjoy yourself and the party, and please share your results!
 
Well, another huge success with the WSM.

http://m.imgur.com/a/4eTHy

I made the mistake of tying to start the smoker while putting my son to sleep. I got distracted with the vents at 100% shortly after adding coals using the minion method. The temperature reached 300 degrees during this 20 minute or so period. I shut down all the vents including the one on the top for 5 minutes to slow things down. The temperature still wasn't dropping fast but I decided to add the meat anyway at 8:40 p.m. My thought was that the 16lbs of cold meat and the disassembly to get meat on the second level would lower the temperature. Sure enough, the temperature in the smoker stabilized at 250 with the vents at 25% and the top vent open again. I woke up to go to the bathroom at 4:30 am to find the temperature at 200. I decided to open the vents to 100%. The temperature at 7:00 am was 190 and the meat was around 160. I added more coal to the smoker and lit 15 coals in the chimney starter. I added the lit coals to the smoker and it locked right in on 250 with the vents at 25%. The meat reached 190 degrees at 10:40. I placed one butt in tin foil and towels in a cooler where it stayed at 130 degrees until 5:00. I put the other in just tin foil and pulled it about an hour later.

The smoke ring on the meat was great and it was tender and flavorful throughout. I'm amazed at how forgiving the smoker was with overheating it in the beginning. My only loss was wasting some charcoal.

My only changes next time will be to tie the boneless roast and obviously not mess up the preheating. I'd like a better method for adding more briquettes once the smoker is running. I know some are outlined on this site. I'll have to do some reading.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

 

Back
Top