Fell asleep - smoker got up to 305


 
J

Justin D

TVWBB Member
Cooking a 9 lb pork butt today... got up at 4am and all was going well. At 4:45 am, the smoker was at 231... and that's the last thing I remember! :( I fell asleep and woke up at 7am... and the smoker was at 305. What's the prognosis here? It's down to 253 right now (at 7:51am). Did I screw it up too badly?

I figure it had a solid 2 hours at around 300.
 
No worries. It might just be done a little sooner than expected. I do HH butts a lot,325-350, and get great results.
 
Like Bob said - lot's of folks are cooking High Hot Butts. They are really forgiving. You're gonna be fine.

The real question is root cause. Why did it jump to 300+? Figure that out so you understand how to prevent the cooker from doing something you didn't intend in the future. You need to know what kind of charcoal, how much, what were the vent settings, is it a new or older cooker, did you iuse water, no water, clay flower saucer, sand, nothing, was it windy, sunny, cloudy, how soon after initial fire did it jump, has it done this before - if so why, what did you do to correct it, etc, etc. Anticipation is the key to success.
 
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Like all the above posts, you'll be fine. Butts are very forgiving and I've even done a couple with high heat (300 - 325) and they came out great.
 
you probably knocked an hour or two off it - lemme guess - you had water in the pan and it evaporated 'cause it was holding the temps down (vents were a little more open than they needed to be). That's my guess

Most of my recent butt cooks have been HH..... I only use the dome thermometer I drilled into it, and according to it, 275-325 is what I consider HH---- 10 hours vs 16-20 hrs.
 
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Clint said:
you probably knocked an hour or two off it - lemme guess - you had water in the pan and it evaporated 'cause it was holding the temps down (vents were a little more open than they needed to be). That's my guess

Most of my recent butt cooks have been HH..... I only use the dome thermometer I drilled into it, and according to it, 275-325 is what I consider HH---- 10 hours vs 16-20 hrs.
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Water should be fine... I haven't opened the door to check. It was around 4:30am and the temp was somewhere around 215 and I though to myself... open up those vents a wee bit more... then I fell asleep. Usually I monitor for about an hour before I'm comfortable just leaving it...
 
Don't tell me about fallind asleep! My last 3 night briskets (on at round midnight) i was sleeping despite my willingness and WSM T went up round 300F for some hours. No problems expept I overcooked them but this is another story!
 
You probably just need to dial the vents down a little more as the meat warms up. If you had a large mass of cold butt in there, after 3 hours the meat has warmed up a lot and the smoker warms up with it. I always have to dial down my vents in hour 2 some. But I'm with the other guys on the high heat method. You don't need 16 hrs to get a great tasting pulled pork. Darn I'm getting hungry now.
 
Reporting back... sorry no pics... but the pork turned out fantastic. Maybe the best I've ever done! And the cook time ended up being 17 hours... I ran out of fuel at the end (16 hours); temp was at 188... so i wrapped and put it in the oven at 250 for an hour and got the internal temp up to 196. Rested in the cooler for an hour and at 10:15pm, my fantasy football league got to enjoy.
 
Falling asleep isn't necessarily a disaster. Being asleep when the door falls off the WSM in mid-cook could be. (Don't ask me how I know... I'm just thankful the high temperature alarm in Stokerlog was working.) :)
 
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