8# butt, 7 hr. 190!


 
J

Jerry Pollard

TVWBB Super Fan
I've cooked lots of butts, but not this fast hitting the 190!!. Put the 8#er butt on at 11 p.m.last nite, wsm temp around 225, expecting to eat around noon. ET-73 has been stable, checked it last nite before using it, in boiling water, OK. Set max smoker at 300, food at 190. Temps around 268 when i went to bed at midnight. No other alarms during the nite. At six am the alarm sounded, food 190.!
Foiled and put in cooler with towels. Will six hours in the cooler be OK?
 
Did you check for tenderness or go straight by temp?? A probe on the bone can give you a false temp reading. Or sometimes, butts and briskets just 'turbo' cook and finish sooner than normal!
 
i've had that happen more than once. my longest in a cooler full of sheets and towels was 6.5 hours. the butts were still burning my fingers when pulling them.
 
Larry, i did not check for tenderness. When i inserted the food probe, i tried to make sure i didnt hit the bone. When pulling the butt off the smoker, a lot of meat "stuck" to the grate and the butt was kind of "shaky" like tender!
I think it must have just went through the cook without hanging in the "plateau". Will the 6 hours be ok if it is "done"?
 
Jerry,

I've only done butts twice. Both times, it took a lot less time than I expected. More recently, I did a 7lbs butt and it took less than 10 hours. I was cooking at around 250, so a little higher than most (I think). Turned out great, so no complaints from me. Took on smoke really nice. Bark wasn't super crusty/black, but still respectable.

I'm doing this stuff for home consumption, never for a comp, if that matters. So the way I see it, "it's done when it's done" works for shorter cooks as well as longer than expected cooks. And as long as it tastes good and pulls nicely, what else do you want?

Odds are, my next cook, I'll be taking 16 hours or something to do a same-sized butt.
 
Same thing happened to me just last weekend. I have done several butts and they usually take around 14 hours at 240. I also put mine on around 11pm and went to bed. I checked on them at around 9am the next morning and they were done! I couldn't believe it, I was sure if I should take them off or not. I didn't want to serve raw meat or something. (for the record I know it wouldn't have been raw, but you know what I meant) They both read 208 on 2 different instant reads and they darn near fell apart when I took them off. I then foiled them and placed them in a pre-heated cooler with towels. I didn't pull them until about 4pm and they were still so hot I couldn't hardly touch them.
 
You should be just fine. If the temp was in the 260's when you went to bed, it is possible that it climbed and stablized to just below the alarm....hey, as the wise medicine man once said "Sometimes the magic works, sometimes it does not".
 
When this happened to me, the butts were done at 2:00 a.m. instead of 7:00 a.m. as I had planned. And I was too sleepy to realize that I could just wrap them in foil, drop them in a cooler, and go back to sleep - instead of pulling them right away.

Sometimes they just cook faster than you expect.
 
BTW, the butt came out "just fine". Never cooked any this fast! (and have cooked a bunch of butts.) I was using the K competition brics.
first try with these. I think you're right, temp must have been running just below the 300 i set on the ET-73.
 
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