Pork Butt semi-fail


 
PeterD

PeterD

TVWBB Super Fan
So I didn't think it was really possible to mess up a pork butt. I've done dozens of them in the past 6 years of smoking, all of them very tasty and fall-apart good. On Saturday I wanted to do one without doing the full 14+ hour overnight cook that I usually do for pulled pork. I started off with a 7.75 pound butt, injected, rubbed and on the smoker at 10:30am. I let temps rise over the next hour to 275°, where I kept it for the rest of the cook. It didn't seem to stall until 196° internal, which occurred 8.5 hours in. I verified the temp with a Thermopen in multiple locations. It was not fully tender (although somewhat close). At 10 hours in, it was 8:15pm and dinner was 2 hours late. I foiled and let it sit for an extra half-hour in a 275 degree oven, but even then it was tasty but very very chewy.

I've never had a butt do this before, but then again, I've usually gone 14+ hours at 240. I've also never seen a stall at 196. It sat between 196 and 198 for about 90 minutes. I don't understand what went wrong. By all accounts, a butt at 275 should be about an hour a pound, give or take a bit, so it should have been more than done in 10 hours.

After pulling it and trying to eat it we gave up. My wife portioned it out, vaccuum-sealed it and tossed it in the freezer. Today, I re-heated one packet for 45 minutes at a rolling boil and it was *still* not tender. I'd have figured by then it should have been almost soup! I have no idea what went wrong, but this was my biggest pork fail since I started smoking. I'm beginning to think it was just a bad cut with no internal fat to render or something. Even at 198-ish, the money muscle was tough as leather.
 
I'll take a stab at this, Peter.

In my book, 196 is done. Those last 4 degrees you were looking for seem unlikely to happen until the roast is nothing but a cinder that is the same temperature as the air around it. The "stall" happens around 170 and is much, much shorter when cooking at 275 than it is at 225-250.

I think you dried your meat out by waiting for something to happen that was never going to happen.

Try it again. Don't be afraid of 300 if it creeps that way. Pull it as soon as you get readings of 195ish in several places.
 
Well that's just it -- it didn't really stall all that much on the way up like it normally does. It was a nice steady rise. It did slow down a bit in the 160s but only for about an hour. Very atypical. Grate temps were 265 to 285, but for most of the smoke it was 270 to 275, solid, on my ET-733. With pork butt, I usually pull between 200 and 205 when a skewer goes in like butter. When my temp alarm first went off at 195 I probed and it was very, very tough. So I let it go and checked every 20-25 minutes. It never got tender and the internal temps just crawled 3 degrees in 90 minutes.

Also confirming that I used two temp probes: The Maverick in a fixed location and a recently-recalibrated Thermapen and the readings were within a couple of degrees. I'm definitely not a smoking n00bie and my pulled pork is usually amazing, but not on this cook.

I can't blame it on the weather, either. Sunny, dry, calm and about 75°. You just couldn't ask for better weather, in fact. I used a foiled but dry water pan in my 2008 18" WSM and blue K for fuel.
 
Peter,

How does the connective tissue look... turned/turning to gelatin or still intact ?
Get it at the butchers or was it a pre-package ? If pre-package, any indication different than normal ?
 
Hey it happens. I've easily done over 500 shoulders and I break one every now and again. Shoulder could of came from a 10yr old wet nurse. Who knows? look up some Asian recipes. Some oil and a wok will make it right
 
I tend to agree with Todd. You might have just caught a butt from an oldster. No amount of cooking will make one of those tender.
 
It was from the supermarket where I usually get my butts. It didn't have the fat striations that I'm used to but I didn't think it would be a big deal. I didn't notice any connective tissue. It did pull, but with a lot more effort than usual. I usually don't eat my Q with sauce, but I definitely will make an exception for the 10 packets that are left, and next butt will be back to low-and-slow, no question.
 
I haven't done as many butts as you have, but those I have done have been great except I had one do the same as yours with the same results. I always do the butts on the mini in the exact same way. Just chalked it up to a bad piece of meat.
 
Couple of thoughts. First, when you smoke at a higher temp, butts and other meats will finish with a higher IT than when you smoke at lower temps,. So, a butt cooked at 240 might be ready and it's IT shows 205, while the same butt would need to go to 210 or more if cooked at a higher temp. Second is that cooking at 275 powers through the stall that you'd normally hit at 150-160ish IT. Third is that I suspect by the time your butt hit 196, your chamber temp had probably already dropped making it take longer for the butt to finish.
 
That's very interesting. I had no idea that finish temp depended upon cook temp. I've only been smoking since 2008 but that's a new one for me. I was always under the impression that 198-205ish was the sweet spot, and like I said, I go by tenderness rather than temp, but until this cook, tender and 200-ish had always coincided. I do agree that it powered right through the 160-170 stall, but it really stalled in the 190s. I'd have left it on until probe tender except it was well past supper time and completely dark out. No issue with chamber temp, though. It was still holding 275 when I pulled it and shut it down. In fact, I still had a lot of unburnt in the ring the next day when I went to do the cleanup.
 
This butt was undercooked not overcooked, imo. You put it on the smoker at 10:30 and let the temps rise to 275. So lets say you were only really cookin hard around 11-11:30, then you pulled it off at 8:30. 9 hours is short, even at 275.
 
PeterD said:
That's very interesting. I had no idea that finish temp depended upon cook temp. I've only been smoking since 2008 but that's a new one for me. I was always under the impression that 198-205ish was the sweet spot, and like I said, I go by tenderness rather than temp, but until this cook, tender and 200-ish had always coincided. I do agree that it powered right through the 160-170 stall, but it really stalled in the 190s. I'd have left it on until probe tender except it was well past supper time and completely dark out. No issue with chamber temp, though. It was still holding 275 when I pulled it and shut it down. In fact, I still had a lot of unburnt in the ring the next day when I went to do the cleanup.
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Yeah, the higher finish IT thing is kind of hard for me to figure out how to explain. Basically, the breaking down of connective tissue is a function of temperature over time. Lower temps require more time, higher temps require less time. That part is easy enough to explain. With chamber temps being higher, the IT temp of the meat rises faster and will hit a higher peak before the connective tissues have broken down. If you really wanted to, you could smoke a brisket at 180 degree chamber temp and get it to be nice and tender though it will take a ridiculous amount of time to do so. As the chamber temp never exceeds 180, the finish IT wouldn't exceed 180 either.

WRT "tender and 200-ish", much of that is due to uniformity so to speak. Most of us are creatures of habit. When we pick butts out at a store, they are generally around the same size each time. When we fire up our smokers, we generally dial in the same temp on each smoke. If you almost always have butts that are the same thickness, and you smoke them at the same chamber temp, they'll all finish at about the same temp.
 
Dave from Denver said:
This butt was undercooked not overcooked, imo. You put it on the smoker at 10:30 and let the temps rise to 275. So lets say you were only really cookin hard around 11-11:30, then you pulled it off at 8:30. 9 hours is short, even at 275.
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I believe you're right, but I'm surprised at the same time. I was under the impression that at 275 it should be roughly an hour a pound for an average consistency butt, so 9 hours, I figured, should have been enough. And there were times I was between 280 and 285, too, although not for too long. Oh well, 45 minutes in a pounch in boiling water plus a little KC Masterpiece sauce and it's yummy now.
 
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