Pulled Pork for 230 people how many butts?


 
R

Ron Grey

New member
Hello all. The Firehall I'm at does an annual fund raiser for our local Children's Hospital during a Halloween Dance. Every year I'm in charge of the food and with the guest's ticket price they get free food. This year we're trying something different. We will try to sell pulled pork sandwhiches for $5 while also leaving out meat and cheese trays along with snacky chips etc as the freebies.

Any ideas or suggestions on how many lbs worth I should cook up? It'd be different if I could say this was catering for over 200 people and it was a meal. Instead this is a night of dancing, drinking, and eating if one is hungry. When we gave away hot dogs all night as an example, we'd purchase 250 hot dogs and knew not everyone would have one. Since this is money we raise for charity wastage just cuts into what we can donate. My initial guess is around 60-80lbs of butts to be cooked on 2 WSM 18's and a Primo Oval XL. When serving a $5 sandwhich we'd also like for people to feel like they for something toasty and worthy. No skimping out here! Thanks in advance.
 
There is an excellent catering calculator in MS Excel format floating around the internet. I've used it several times and it tends to be right on.

For 230 people, I would cook two cases, plus 2 butts, or 18 butts. 60-80 lbs is about a case, which, rule of thumb is (I believe) will feed 100 people. The problem with your initial calculation is that the yield for finished product to raw weight, if you're lucky is about 55% - 60%.

You can easily do 6 butts on each WSM. I don't know how many you can get on a Primo XL Oval - I don't have one of those..... yet!

One suggestion - make sure you've got plenty of help pulling or chopping the pork for serving. I worked up a case by myself last spring and I was pretty much give out after cooking and prepping the meat!

Good luck!

Pat
 
Thanks for the reply. Ya that catering spreadsheet is awesome. I've seen that before. Normally I would have just used that. In this case I feel like I'm just winging it because of the unknown factors of how many people will buy a pulled pork sandwich. When I make sandwhiches on the film sets, out of about 25lbs of butts I can make about 60 sandwiches on the small hamburger buns. Haha maybe I've just answered my own question come to think of it. Maybe I can do two cases so around 100-120 lbs. That way I can get them all done on the 2 WSMs.
 
Brian lol you may be right. The good thing is I still have my Primo, but also 3 guys at the Firehall have GMG pelletsmokers that they'll let me play on I'm sure. As for photos for sure! I hope there's a zombie costume chomping down on a pulled pork sandwich for me to share lol
 
Ron, one factor is the size of the sammie. At restaurant a PP sandwich is usually piled high and spilling over. That doesn't, IMHO, make sense for a charity event. I use hamburger buns and put a nice ball, halfway between a golf ball and tennis ball, on each. One butt makes about 25 sammies, so your 230 runs to about 10. Since I have one 18" WSM, and I only make for 200, I make two batches of four over three days. (I also get a volunteer, preferably pretty, to help with the pulling.)

Hope this helps.

Cheers.
 
Thanks Micheal that more or less confirms what I was thinking. So around 10 butts which depending on the size of each, I'm thinking 8-10lbs a piece is what my supplier has. The most crazy part of this is that this is actually a dry run for a much bigger event at my daughter's school. They do a walk-athon fund raiser and I've been told there's over 500 people! I may recruit some fellow firefighters to help out lol
 
Ron, one thing you could do is take some of those 9x9 Styrofoam leftover trays with you and if you see you are going to have excess pork, you can start selling it by the pound near the end of the event.

Pat
 
Thanks for this series of posts. We're going to set up a table at a local Oktoberfest celebration and sell pulled pork. I think we need to plan on serving around 500 so I don't know how I'm going to pull it off with just one 22.5" WSM! Given the discussion here, I think we'll go with around 20 butts to play it safe. If we sell out early, that will be a good thing!
 
Pat thanks I never even thought about that! Btw, another question. With this much meat, would it be best to pull it all at once or keep some foiled in cambros and pull them as needed? Not too worried about not having enough time pulling in a crunch as I'll have lots of help.
 
Tony I'll have to keep an eye out for the results of your cook. I'm going to be in and around the same numbers the next round sometime in the Spring.

Dave ya I was thinking the magic of pulling the pork live may be good. For the non bbq'ing folks, I don't even think they realize what a cooked pork butt off a smoker even looks like lol
 
Allan LOL just like this evening I had my folks over for dinner. I've cooked 3 briskets every other day on my WSM in the last week. What I started yesterday was a complete trial run for the competition I'm in on Sunday. Despite it being one of the best briskets I've ever done, my mom kept asking if it was burnt and if it was ok to eat the burnt looking part of the meat lol. My mom thinks the smoke ring is pink because it's not cooked.
 
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