Fail or learning opportunity

Thanks everyone for the advice and encouragement. Today was crazy but the pork turned out better than I feared. I was able to pop into the house at 1000 and again at 1200, and the therm still hovered around 165-170.

dirtsailor2003 I appreciate your tips and I definitely was wondering about the temps. The wireless thermometer was brand new and I hadn't thought to check accuracy on It before using. But at 1200 I poked the meat in a few spots with my instant read which I have checked, and it matched up pretty well.

My oven does have crazy temp swings. I've checked it out of curiosity but not as rigorously as you described. It seemed to spike to about 50deg above the set point and stay pretty high for a while, then kick back on at 10 below set point and spike pretty quickly again . So I figured my oven runs a little hot, but was really guesstimating at where to set it last night.

I think I was figuring IT would eventually just reach equilibrium with the average oven temp but I see that I was pretty far off with that logic. I failed to consider the evaporative cooling with all that moisture and the fact that I had put the meat in a cool pan and sprinkled on a 1/2 cup of cold juice.

Also now I wonder if the swings in the oven temp are worse when empty, but are dampened when there's a heat sink (uncooked food) inside. In this case my oven would not run as hot as I had thought. I didn't really watch the oven temps today to test this theory. But the theory might just be BS because my camp chef holds temps much better than that, with or without meat.

At 1400 I decided it was time to crap or get off the pot even though my IT wasn't budging. Probe went in without too much resistance but not smooth like butter. I decided to just pull it and see what it looked like before anything else went wrong.

Here's what it looked like coming out at 1400
Kinda soggy bark, some decent shrinkage from the shoulder bone.

Bone pulled out relatively clean but it wasn't really smooth or easy
That was the shoulder blade. Didn't get a pic of the leg bone. It wasn't as clean.

Moment of truth. Decent smoke ring I guess.


Texture was all over the place. Some was pretty dry. Some was soggy. Some bark was weirdly like poorly cooked chicken skin, but some bits were nice and chewy. I should have kept track of which parts had what texture.The chicken skin got tossed.

Flavor was quite bland. Not really smoky and didn't taste much of my rub. Forgot to mention i had a nice midnight snack of a large chunk that had stuck to the grill when I pulled it from the smoker. That chunk was awesome, with nice bark, good flavor, decent smokiness. I guess all that time in a tepid sauna washed off all the flavor. I saved and de-fatted the dripppings from the pan, I think I will mix it back in to the pork before I portion leftovers for the freezer, maybe that's where all my flavor is.

noboundaries I appreciate the advice re uses for "less flavored" pork. I might keep some without the drippings for these purposes.

Finally the end result. I had been curious to try some South Carolina style mustard based sauce so I had mixed some up a few days back. I reheated tonight's portion mixed up in that sauce and it saved the day.

The whole family loved it. I thought the texture suffered from reheating like that but I liked the flavor. We might need to move to our neighbors south of us because this might be how our family does barbecue now. Someday I hope to learn what it tastes like on skillfully cooked pork.


I guess I might throw in a few more pics I had planned for a qview

The beast un-trimmed

After my hack job. Note the rapala filet knife. Wrong tool for the job. The other secret ingredient to this cook is a few drops of my blood.

Rubbed. Of course I forgot to write down my recipe.

We'll call it at that, I've taken enough of everyone's time. Thanks for looking. I've learned a ton from these forums between this thread and just lurking.