Butts... does it matter...

[Tom Ferguson]

Does it matter whether you cook a butt laying flat or stand it on one "side"?

My last cook I had 2 fairly large butts and they were kinda crowded on the top rack.

If I could have stood these butts on their side, there would have been plenty of room. Now sometimes the butts will have a natural flat side that you can stand it on... sometimes not. So I was wondering if I made a rectangular frame with a couple of cross pieces, and on those cross pieces I put a couple of "spikes" that the butt could rest on.

Would the holes in the butts be a problem?

 

[Chris K]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>
Would the holes in the butts be a problem? <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Seriously, I wouldnt think it would be an issue at all. People use squers all the time for ribs and have no problems. A rack to fit more pork would be a great idea in my opinion.

 

[Ken Nelson]

When I'm pressed for space, I'll stand three butts on edge. Their corners will usually touch until they shrink to where they can be rearranged without touching.

Butts don’t spout juices like a fire hose from where the thermometer probes are stuck so I don’t see any problems with an excessive amount of moisture escaping from where the butts would be skewered on a vertical stand-type apparatus.

You may get a lot of opinions about whether there's any advantage to cooking butts flat or on edge, but here's my take on it.

I don't believe the meat is going be any moister if it's cooked fat side up. The moistness of the meat is due to the liquids within the cells and the bits of fat dispersed throughout the meat.

The notion the fat will magically percolate through the meat during the cook and moisten it strikes me as hooey. I once did an experiment at home with a brisket flat that might seem bizarre to test the 'trickle down' theory.

Just before I put it in the smoker, I peeled back about 2" of the fat cap and put a healthy drop of green food coloring at the point where the fat was still attached to the meat. I put the flap back in place so the dye wouldn't evaporate and smoked it fat side up.

According to the legend, the finished meat should've had a green vein running from top to bottom as the dye passed through the meat with the melted fat.

Instead, the dye only stained the surface of the meat where it had pooled with the melting fat during the cook and ran off in rivulets where it had met the least resistance to its movement. Where I had placed the dye originally, it had penetrated the meat by less than 1/8" during the 10 hour cook. There was virtually no penetration where it flowed horizontally with the melted fat.

Like I said, it was a weird experiment. Veins of green are great in strong cheeses but not too desirable in meat. Maybe this would be a good topic for the Mythbusters to investigate?