Smoking Pork Shoulders??


 

Beau_Jess

New member
Hey Guys,

Looking for some wisdom.....Yesterday I smoked 3 - 7lb Pork Butts on my 22.5" WSM at 225°F to 250°F. This was my 1st time smoking them and I understand it is not necessary to wrap Butts during a smoke. So yesterday after about 13 to 14 hours smoking at close to 250°F they got stuck at 196°F but would not budge hardly at all. I was aiming for a final temp of 203°F but ran out of time and had to pull them at the 196°F. Is there a second stall? Would wrapping help in getting to the 203°F faster? Maybe I was running too low on fuel although my smoker was still holding at 250°F. Anyways the Pulled Pork turned out good but did not go as expected and I feel it could have been a little better. Live and learn I guess . Any ideas?? Also, do they make any handy devices to easily add fuel/charcoal to your WSM during a smoke??

Thanks and Smoke on
 
I've experienced the second stall before. Most people don't. If it does that on me I just start checking for tenderness and quit worrying about temp.
 
I've experienced a second stall, most recently on the butt I smoked last week. Try planning your cook and allow plenty of time for unforeseen problems like this so you can just wait it out. If you're finished a few hours early, butts stay hot nicely in foil and a good cooler. If you can't do this and you're sitting around 196 try bumping up your pit temp 5 or 10 degrees if you're unhappy with how they probe. Patience is the key.
 
I've experienced what you're talking about with a second stall but I've always considered it to be more related to simple (or not so simple) thermodynamics rather than a phase change in the collagen. You're trying to push a big thermal mass with very poor heat conducting properties to a temperature that's relatively close to the ambient temperature of its environment. The closer you get to that ambient temperature, the longer its going to take for heat to transfer to the interior of the meat.

I have never wrapped a butt prior to removing it from the smoker, so I have no idea if it would speed the process, but my basic knowledge of physics suggests it would have no positive impact on the time required to complete the cook. Maybe there's something going on with trapped steam resulting in better heat transfer. That could speed things up.

I'm with Dustin on the temperatures. With pork butt I use temp just as a gross gauge of when to start manually checking for it being done. I go by feel for the final determination. The thermometer probe should go all the way in with very little resistance. Check it at 190-195F and you should notice little resistance near the surface and then greater resistance as the tip of the probe gets near the center. That's the part that isn't done yet. You want the whole thing to feel like that outer bit.

For adding fuel during a cook I have what I think is an ash shovel from a fireplace set. No idea where it came from as we don't have a fireplace. It will hold about a dozen briquettes. It's actually quite handy around the outdoor cooking equipment. I use it all the time in the grill to scoop up partially used briqs for the next cook.
 
just start checking for tenderness and quit worrying about temp.

i start checking at 195 degrees; at that point i remove the meat probe, and check every 30 minutes until tender. i've learned that cooking to temp is more important when grilling, on the BBQ tender is where its at.
 
Second stall?? Is that possible?

I just smoke three butts (9 to 10 pound average) on my 18.5" WSM, and I pulled them at the 12-hour mark (meat was near 195°), wrapped them in foil, and placed them in a 350° oven for about an hour until temps reached at least 205°. In my limited experiences, I find that butts reaching the 205° mark makes for easier-to-shred meat.

I could have let them smoke longer, but it was after midnight, and I needed to clean up.
 
I don't remember running into a second stall, but that could just mean I wasn't paying attention.

As far as charcaol management, several years ago I bought a Buddez dog food container at Sams. It holds three full bags of KBB, 60 lbs. and keeps it bone dry in all kinds of weather. Then I picked up a large metal ice scoop to get the briquettes out of the container:

scoop_stainless_1.jpg


Keeps the deck neat, the KBB easy to get to, and the scoop is great for adding briquettes to the WSM on longer cooks.





BD
 
There's a whole other world of wet bulb and dry bulb temperature at play. Wet air conducts heat better than dry.
 
There's a whole other world of wet bulb and dry bulb temperature at play. Wet air conducts heat better than dry.

Yeah, but... It's dry air outside the foil. The heat transfer might be more efficient from the foil to the meat but you've still got dry air transfer from the heat source to the foil. Seems kind of like a one-lane road dumping into a four-lane road. You can move a lot more cars through the four-lane section, but you're still limited to the cars coming through the one-lane section. The number of cars per hour is going to be determined by the one-lane road. The only way I can see it making a significant difference is if the bark is resistant to hot air but not to hot moist air. But my bulb might be wet and therefore not burning as brightly as it should. :cool:
 
Yeah, but... It's dry air outside the foil. The heat transfer might be more efficient from the foil to the meat but you've still got dry air transfer from the heat source to the foil. Seems kind of like a one-lane road dumping into a four-lane road. You can move a lot more cars through the four-lane section, but you're still limited to the cars coming through the one-lane section. The number of cars per hour is going to be determined by the one-lane road. The only way I can see it making a significant difference is if the bark is resistant to hot air but not to hot moist air. But my bulb might be wet and therefore not burning as brightly as it should. :cool:

lol. The way I understand it is, this. Most of the time you have evaporative cooling going on so meat cooks at the wet bulb temperature. This is what causes the stall. Once the surface of the meat dries out, it starts cooking at the dry bulb temp and no longer benefits from evaporative cooling. Wrapping subverts the stall because the meat can no longer benefit from evaporative cooling. If you unwrap though, to try to firm up the bark, you need to make sure it's fully cooked because the surface of the meat is still wet, and suddenly you are cooking at the wet bulb temp again and you'll stall.
 
I found an article that claimed to be based on "scientific" investigation into the topic. This said the stall is almost entirely due to the water in the meat causing evaporative cooling as it works toward the surface. Natural pork shoulder is about 65% water, so there's a lot of water that can push its way out and stall the cook. In essence, the culprit in the stall is the energy required for phase change, but it's the phase change of liquid water to gaseous water rather than of collagen from solid to liquid. As long as water is still working its way out of the meat and evaporating from the surface, most of the heat in the smoker is going toward converting that water to steam rather than toward raising the temperature of the meat. The energy required to change liquid water to steam is massive.

The whole thing is a balance between heat trying to push its way into the meat and water working its way out and causing evaporative cooling on the surface. If the heat is low enough, there's not sufficient heat pressure to overcome the evaporative cooling and you'll stall until virtually all of the water from inside the meat has evaporated. At a sufficiently high heat, the heat pressure overcomes the evaporative cooling and allows the internal meat temp to continue rising. From what the article said, at 300F there's virtually no stall because there's enough heat pressure for evaporative cooling to not be an issue.

So it would seem there is a choice. You can do 225F and endure the stall, possibly ending up with a dried out hunk of pork shoulder. Or you can wrap the shoulder once it hits the stall to prevent evaporative cooling, possibly ending up with limp bark. Or you can do 225F until you hit the stall and then jack the temp to 300F and power through it, getting crispy bark and a much lower overall cook time.

I'm definitely going to try the latter approach on my next pork butt.
 
I've been smoking-up quite a few Pork Shoulders lately - my findings / preferred technique have been refined over the years as follows:

-I make a modified version of Chris Lilly's rub (use Turbinado sugar in place of the brown and white sugar, back-off on the Cumin and use toasted, granulated onion)
-I trim more of the fat-cap off than I used to = get more bark that would otherwise peel-off with the fat layer
-I skip the injection (with the big, fatty shoulders that I get [usually around 9 lbs each], I find that I don't need it)
-I don't sweat the temperature too much, so long as the smoker runs between 225 to 300. If it spikes, I dial it down / if it cools, I open vents a crack and/or add coals
(I used to use a Tell-Tru stuck into the Topmost Lid Vent Hole - but now use a grate probe with my new Thermoworks Smoke.)

Typically run 12-14 hours
When temps get to around 195-F, I start checking for tenderness
I ALWAYS rest them wrapped tightly in foil (they stay HOT for a long time this way - remove them from foil in 3-4 big chunks and keep the rest foiled to keep 'em hot while shredding)
Some are "Done" at 195-198 and some are better at 200-210 but the "poker" does not lie - it should go all the way in "like buttah"...

Hope this info helps
 
I ALWAYS rest them wrapped tightly in foil (they stay HOT for a long time this way - remove them from foil in 3-4 big chunks and keep the rest foiled to keep 'em hot while shredding)
As I discovered the hard way last year, there's a difference between "resting" and "holding". During the "rest" you want the internal temp to come down to under 160F so the cooking stops. What I did was tightly wrap four large butts right off the smoker and immediately put them in the cooler. The result was that they continued to cook for hours and went way beyond any reasonable point of doneness. They completely fell apart when I started to pull. I ended up with a lot of mush. It was still edible and didn't taste bad but the texture was weird.

Learn from my mistake. Let the butts cool a bit before putting them away to hold. Based on the whole evaporative cooling thing, they should cool down faster if you don't wrap them right away.
 
...I pulled them at the 12-hour mark (meat was near 195°), wrapped them in foil, and placed them in a 350° oven for about an hour until temps reached at least 205°.

I cannot agree more with this statement. It's very convenient to finish them in the oven and then go straight to the cooler to rest. I follow this procedure and think it works very well.
 
What do you guys think about basting the shoulder during the smoke/cook like seen here:

http://bbqpitboys.com/pork-roast-low-and-slow/

You smoke for 5 to 6 hours and then baste with the water/Apple juice/pork drippings every couple hours or so and then pull it when it hits temp. Good idea?? Bad idea??

My thinking is that you will significantly increase the time of the cook by doing that. I'm not sure it really adds that much to the finished product. Also, at least with my 22.5 WSM if I take my lid off for 2 long it goes into afterburner mode. At higher temps it's probably fine. For low and slow, it may just prolong the cook too much. If you do it, I would spritz with a food safe spray bottle so you can do it quickly.
 
Based on what I mentioned above about evaporative cooling, dumping more moisture on the outside of the meat seems like a good way to prolong cooking. You're also losing heat every time you open the lid. If you're cooking at 275F+, then maybe this would be okay. At 225F you're just making the process take a lot longer.

With the pork butts I've done in the last few years I put the meat on, close the lid, and don't open it again until I'm probing to see if it's done.

This kind of reminds me of a long time ago on the Food Network, back before they became the Food Game Show Network. It was coming on Thanksgiving and all the cooking shows were talking about how to do turkey. Alton Brown made a big point out of NOT basting the turkey, saying that each time you open the oven door you just add ten minutes to the cook time. Then I watch Bobby Flay make a big point out of NEEDING to baste the turkey every 15 minutes to keep it from drying out. I'm going with Alton on this one.
 
I cannot agree more with this statement. It's very convenient to finish them in the oven and then go straight to the cooler to rest. I follow this procedure and think it works very well.

Thanks, Jeff. Frankly, I haven't finished very many butts *outside* of the kitchen oven yet.
 
...a long time ago on the Food Network, back before they became the Food Game Show Network...

LOL! I thought I was the only one that felt that way. I much prefered that channel when I was learning something. It really hurts seeing even Alton going that way.

Jim
 

 

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