First Pork Butt for SB


 

Sam S in SD

New member
I'm tackling my first long smoke tonight for the SB. We have about 23 adults and 24 kids showing up tomorrow. Needless to say, I gotta get this smoke right!

I have two bone-in pork butts that are each around 10 lbs. I didn't have to trim much fat at all. I plan to start around 10-11 tonight and am following Harry's recipe/method. I assume I'll finish around 10-12 on Sunday. I'm mostly curious to receive other member's thoughts about what to do if the butts finish 5-6 hours before we plan to eat. I know it is good to wrap and let it rest for a couple hours, but can I let it rest in the cooler for 5-6 hours? Would it be better to shred after a couple hours of resting and leave it in the oven in the "warm" setting? Another option I'm not considering? Thanks for any thoughts.
 
What temp? 250?

My recomendation......give yourself plenty of time. And add some extra.

You can wrap it and rest it for hours.... It will stay hot... But you cant make it finish faster. Wrapping foil, wrapping some towels, put in an ice chest. Wrapping through the stall will definitely speed it up, as will using a higher temperature like to 275.

It's really hard to nail exactly when a big piece of meat will finish cooking.



What time eating?

Harry recommends a lot of spritzing, this adds a lot of time with the all the opening of the pit. And..... This cools the meat.

You can also of course keep it warm in your oven....at 150 indefinitely.

I'm going to be honest, I don't think two pork butts is enough for 50 people. Cooked, that might be 10 lbs of meat. I would honestly think you need at least two times that if it a real meal for hungry people. There's a really large yield loss when cooking fatty meat. It shrinks considerably and loses about half of its weight in water and fat.

You can read that it meat loses about 30% of weight, but the last pork butt I cook was 7 lb before cooking and yielded 3.4 lb meat after. And it was delicious. I did not wrap it.

Here's what's left of a 7 lb pork butt after only three sandwiches have been eaten:

IMG_20181228_172819442.jpg
 
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I agree with Martin.

I've got a medium sized cooler with a tight fitting lid that, I swear, works as good as a Cambro. I've kept whole briskets and/or butts at temp for several hours without a problem. Covered with a thick beach towel, I would feel comfortable keeping them in there for at least 3-4 hours.

I also agree with the yield estimates. You can us this Pulled Pork Serving Calculator to get an idea on how much you need to start out cooking. I know it defaults to 70%, but I've never gotten much more than 50% finished product from any pork butt I've cooked and measured.





BD
 
I agree with Martin on the yield; I always lose over 40% of my weight on pork shoulders (somewhere between 40%-47%). But I'm not good at estimating how much you need per head count. There is a serving calculator or two around here somewhere. You can always deal with leftovers but running out of pork would definitely constitute not getting it right, lol. If some of those 24 kids are serving themselves you can bet they will take more meat than they will consume.

Maybe my terminology is wrong but I associate the rest as removing meat from the smoker once it hits the right temp and laying on the countertop, unwrapped for a span of time, possibly 30 minutes. Then after that resting period I can wrap it again and hold it in a cooler for x hours until it is needed for serving. Going from a smoker immediately to the cooler if it is wrapped will allow it to continue cooking, which may be problematic.

Some of my shoulders have taken 16-18 hours with pit temps above 250.

Good luck and enjoy!
 
What temp? 250?

My recomendation......give yourself plenty of time. And add some extra.

You can wrap it and rest it for hours.... It will stay hot... But you cant make it finish faster. Wrapping foil, wrapping some towels, put in an ice chest. Wrapping through the stall will definitely speed it up, as will using a higher temperature like to 275.

It's really hard to nail exactly when a big piece of meat will finish cooking.



What time eating?

Harry recommends a lot of spritzing, this adds a lot of time with the all the opening of the pit. And..... This cools the meat.

You can also of course keep it warm in your oven....at 150 indefinitely.

I'm going to be honest, I don't think two pork butts is enough for 50 people. Cooked, that might be 10 lbs of meat. I would honestly think you need at least two times that if it a real meal for hungry people. There's a really large yield loss when cooking fatty meat. It shrinks considerably and loses about half of its weight in water and fat.

You can read that it meat loses about 30% of weight, but the last pork butt I cook was 7 lb before cooking and yielded 3.4 lb meat after. And it was delicious. I did not wrap it.

Here's what's left of a 7 lb pork butt after only three sandwiches have been eaten:

IMG_20181228_172819442.jpg

I plan to cook it between 225 and 250.

I am following Harry's recipe, but i don't plan to spray it as often as he says. Doing so means i won't sleep at all, which sounds miserable. I plan on letting it go for 5-6 hours without opening it at all.

We have 45-50 people, but 24 are kids between 6-8 yo. They won't eat much. Now you guys have me worried though. Maybe I'll add some ribs.

We plan to eat around 4:30-5. If i start tonight at 10, i figure that should give me plenty of time even with a stall. Am I missing anything?
 
Am I missing anything?

Not wanting to sound condescending, this is difficult to answer. For instance, we don't know your experience at achieving and maintaining your target pit temp and varying WSM smokers can respond differently. Do you have a decent grasp on how to best ensure your pit temp will be reasonably stable while you sleep overnight? Do you have a remote thermometer with alarms so that you will be awakened if something does not go as expected?

When I first started, I wanted a pit temp of 225. Today, I don't fret the least if my pit is 300 while doing a shoulder, and that temp delta will have a huge impact on the cook time. Your shoulder's temp will rise rather quickly early-on but later, as it comes closer to your pit temp, it will creep slowly.
 
Not wanting to sound condescending, this is difficult to answer. For instance, we don't know your experience at achieving and maintaining your target pit temp and varying WSM smokers can respond differently. Do you have a decent grasp on how to best ensure your pit temp will be reasonably stable while you sleep overnight? Do you have a remote thermometer with alarms so that you will be awakened if something does not go as expected?

When I first started, I wanted a pit temp of 225. Today, I don't fret the least if my pit is 300 while doing a shoulder, and that temp delta will have a huge impact on the cook time. Your shoulder's temp will rise rather quickly early-on but later, as it comes closer to your pit temp, it will creep slowly.


I agree with above too.

There is no need to cook anything under 250-275. All it does is prolong it.

At 250, a single 7 lb butt took 12.5 hrs for me, without wrapping. Then theres time getting it off, resting, pulling, serving.

If you got a wsm, the temps may crash after about 6-7 hrs on 18" due to ash buildup .This is where. ATC compensates.
Im sure 22 does too, but i dont know when.

Waking up to find you been at 180 for unknown time tends to extend your cook....

I extended my coal ring to hold 50% more. This extended that crash until 10-11 hrs.....so i could sleep. But i succumbed to the heatermeter allure anyway.

Its frickin great to control from bed.
 
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One thing will probably be of concern for Sam, and that will be the wind overnight. I live "up the road" from Sam... well almost... about 90 miles up the road ;). Wind in howling right now with the embedded thunderstorms.
 
One thing will probably be of concern for Sam, and that will be the wind overnight. I live "up the road" from Sam... well almost... about 90 miles up the road ;). Wind in howling right now with the embedded thunderstorms.

I invested in a Maverick, so I'll be able to monitor the temps overnight. Bob is right, the rain and wind are my biggest concerns right now. Hopefully I'm not ordering pizza tomorrow.
 
I invested in a Maverick, so I'll be able to monitor the temps overnight. Bob is right, the rain and wind are my biggest concerns right now. Hopefully I'm not ordering pizza tomorrow.

Good luck.
Post back how it went.
Feeding large groups is a bit challenging.
Its hard to please everyone.
 
Good luck.
Post back how it went.
Feeding large groups is a bit challenging.
Its hard to please everyone.

Thanks to everyone for their help. I think things went pretty well, but I'll reserve the victory laps until I taste the pork in a few hours.

I started the chimney at 9:30, put the hot coals in my WSM 22.5 at 10, and had the meat on by 10:30. I had pretty consistent temps of 250-270 until around 2:15. At that point, I had a hard time getting the smoker under 300 degrees. I had two bottom vents completely closed and the third barely open. I also had the top vent only 1/2 open. It was still running pretty hot. Thanks to some of this group's posts yesterday, I didn't fret too much about it. That being said, I did open it for the first time at that point and sprayed with apple juice. My hope was that it would help bring the temp down. It really had no effect.

The meat was at 175 by 3:10. I didn't wrap it yet because I feared it was too early.

I had similar temp readings at 4:15. At that point, I pulled it, poured Harry's wrapping liquid over the top, wrapped in foil, and put them back on. They stayed in until around 6:30. I pulled them at 6:30 after getting consistent reads between 195-200. They are resting right now open in the kitchen. The temp is still around 183 degrees. I plan to foil them, wrap them in a towel, and throw them in a cooler when they hit 170. I figure I'll leave them in the cooler for a few hours and maybe put them in the oven at 170 around noon.

Despite my concerns about wind/rain, the biggest difficulty was keeping the temp low. I did have a ton of fuel loaded since it is a long smoke. I also did not add water to the water pan. i just wrapped in foil.

Any thoughts on: 1.) How to better keep the temp closer to 250; 2.) strategies for keeping the meat until 5; or 3.) anything else are appreciated.

Thanks to everyone for their thoughts yesterday and today. I really appreciate it.

Sam
 
Any thoughts on: 1.) How to better keep the temp closer to 250;

Sam

I think its a balancing act on amount of coals, amount of starting coals, and air supply.
Sounds like you have some air leakage or lid leakage to not bring temp down.

Things change in cook, some adjustments are expected.
What often happens is your coal pile gets ashed over and you're adjusting your Air Supply to match this, as the number of burning coals grows, then it finally collapses and shifts and suddenly the temperatures spikes way up as all that new Burning surfaces exposed.

But the good thing is the temperature really is not that important. It all works. As you may know hot and fast is the trend on the competition circuit Which is interesting because BBQ has always been a low and slow method. And higher temperatures especially get you through the stall faster. In the stall water is vaporized from the surface of the meat at 212F . If you're at 225 you're dT driving force for heat transfer is only 13 F. At 2:50 it's 38f (3x). At 275 it's 63 f (almost 5x). So your stalls are way shorter at higher temperature. You're simply evaporating that water several times faster due to the temperature difference. By the time you get the oven temperatures of 300 to 350 they're not even noticeable.


Sounds like it went well, congrats
But I'm betting you did not sleep much:).
A controller /fan/damper you can adjust from your bed is wonderful.
 
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I think its a balancing act on amount of coals, amount of starting coals, and air supply.
Sounds like you have some air leakage or lid leakage to not bring temp down.

Things change in cook, some adjustments are expected.
What often happens is your coal pile gets ashed over and you're adjusting your Air Supply to match this, as the number of burning coals grows, then it finally collapses and shifts and suddenly the temperatures spikes way up as all that new Burning surfaces exposed.

But the good thing is the temperature really is not that important. It all works. As you may know hot and fast is the trend on the competition circuit Which is interesting because BBQ has always been a low and slow method. And higher temperatures especially get you through the stall faster. In the stall water is vaporized from the surface of the meat at 212F . If you're at 225 you're dT driving force for heat transfer is only 13 F. At 2:50 it's 38f (3x). At 275 it's 63 f (almost 5x). So your stalls are way shorter at higher temperature. You're simply evaporating that water several times faster due to the temperature difference. By the time you get the oven temperatures of 300 to 350 they're not even noticeable.


Sounds like it went well, congrats
But I'm betting you did not sleep much:).

Ironically, I slept way better than expected, which amazes me. I also just tried a piece that broke off during foiling, and it is pretty darn fantastic. I'm definitely more than pleased with the result given it is my first butt.
 
Ironically, I slept way better than expected, which amazes me. I also just tried a piece that broke off during foiling, and it is pretty darn fantastic. I'm definitely more than pleased with the result given it is my first butt.

Awesome.

It freezes ok too, vac sealed.

I cook extra and vac seal and freeze everything.

(Its hard to not cook extra when doing butt for family, but even on sale for $1 /lb, no sense wasting it.)

Many nights during week i can pull ribs, turkey,chicken quarter, pulled pork, brisket, or whatever out of freezer, pop in microwave, and be eating good meat or sandwich in 5 minutes.

Never be afraid you're cooking too much meat
My daughter is in grad school and when she comes home she takes enough Frozen meals back with her that she rarely has to cook
 
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Congrats! Regarding how to achieve a pit temp closer to 250f I would first ask how many lit coals you started with. I typically start with 8-12 lit coals placed on top of the fully-loaded bed of unlit. However; you are learning to manage your WSM during period of wind and I am fully-shielded from the effects of wind, so I'd be clueless about knowing how to compensate for it.
 
So the pork butt turned out great. I was amazed that, after 3 hours in the cooler and 5 hours in the oven at 170, the butt was still juicy and delicious at 5. Everyone was talking about how great it tasted.

As for my temps, I may have figured out the problem. i bought a little hanging rack to hold some bbq tools. i think it may have been preventing the lid from fully closing. i did some ribs later in the day without that rack, and the temp control was much easier.

As for quantity, the two butts were plenty of food. i ended up doing 4 racks of ribs as well because i was scared i would not have enough food. the ribs were probably unnecessary, but no one complained about that either. lots of bbq is never a problem.

thanks again for all the help, everyone.
 

 

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