Rib roast stalls twice?

[Kristof Jozsa]

I was smoking an ugly piece of rib roast the other day (no kidding, it wasn't a beautiful piece of meat at all). I thought it would still make a great pulled beef, like I did from the chuck roast a week before. I originally aimed for a target core of 210F and had hit the stall at around 154F. Foiled after 5 hours and temperature rised right until 194F and then it stopped. Nothing has happened in the last 2 hours, it remained at a 194F core.

I'll show the chart from my notes about the cook (numbers are in Celsius unfortunately, blue being the core temp, red the grate temperature, otherwise I hope it's straightforward):


At last I got bored and pulled it off (guests were getting hungry) and it was really good but I had to use a bit of the gravy to soften it back up. I'll show a picture of the result:



What has happened here? What could that second stall at 194F be? Is it possible at all to smoke a rib roast to be pullable or that's not possible at all?

 

[Len Dennis]

Well, I would hazard a guess it was just a tad overdone . Med-rare is around 130-135o F (well done is ~140o. At 194o, well tsk tsk ). Not a lot of fat to render in pr rib either.

Good luck next time.

 

[Kristof Jozsa]

Right as I said, Len, my intent was to make pulled beef from this meat.. so it was overdone as part of the plan The beef was really fatty anyway, I had cut almost a pound of fat off before rubbing and it was full of huge fat cores inside as well. The original roast I bought was almost 6 pounds and the end result (after getting rid of all the fat) was slightly below 2.5 lbs!

 

[Bob Correll]

I've never seen grain like that in a rib roast.
Got any before cooking or before slicing pics?
Never heard of cooking one for pulling, so no help there.
Here's what I'm used to seeing, cooked to medium rare:

 

[Kristof Jozsa]

All I have is these two - at the start:


and before foiling:


I've seen the whole piece of meat in one at the butcher where one end was the chuck and the other end was this part, said to be a rib roast.

 

[Dustin Dorsey]

I've had that happen. I'm not sure what causes it but if it does I start checking for tenderness every half hour or so. If you somehow unfoiled it and didn't really close it back up you could be getting a 2nd stall from evaporative cooling.

 

[Timothy F. Lewis]

I'm with Bob, a "prime rib roast" here is really a whole stack of ribeye steaks on the bone, what you have looks very different from my idea but, who knows about regional nomenclature anyway?
New York strip, Kansas City strip, strip loin, the list is confusing from regions in the US let alone half a world away.