I smoked a pork butt for my wife's birthday today and the fire went out overnight. I've read a lot of the threads and the answers seem to vary based on the temperature details and the average person's judgment/risk tolerance, but can anyone help analyze my situation? I'd hate to lose all this work towards her birthday meal.
I took 17 lbs of pork butt (Costco vacuum packed, two 8.5 pieces) straight out of the fridge, covered them in mustard and dry rub (salt, sugar, spices, etc.), and put them in my Weber Smokey Mountain at 250 F at about 10:30am on Sunday. My ThermPro ambient probe registered 225-290 throughout the day but generally held at 250 F. The coal started to run out by 10pm or so so I refilled, tamped down, and by midnight the internal probe registered about 180. I thought shoot, I'm going to have to get up in the middle of the night to deal with this. I refilled with some more coal, stabilized the smoker temp at 250 F, and went to bed at 2am with an internal meat temperature at 188 F a temperature alarm set for 200 F. Unfortunately the alarm never went off, or perhaps the unit shut off, but I woke up at 4am to see an internal temp of 185 F and a smoker temp of 220 or so. Being still terribly tired, I fell back asleep and woke up at 8:30am to an internal temp of 119 F and a smoker temp of 72 F. Clearly everything had burned out. I pulled the butts off the smoker and put them in the oven (picture attached) and am now waiting for them to come back up and hopefully hit 190-200. My questions are:
1. Can I expect it reached the 190-200 F zone sometime between 2am-8:30am?
2. Should I try to get it back to that temperature zone now in the oven?
3. And finally (and most importantly), how am I from a food safety perspective? The meat dropped down below 140 F clearly and held there for some period of time between 4am-9am when I put the butts back in the oven.
Photos attached. Thanks for the advice!
I took 17 lbs of pork butt (Costco vacuum packed, two 8.5 pieces) straight out of the fridge, covered them in mustard and dry rub (salt, sugar, spices, etc.), and put them in my Weber Smokey Mountain at 250 F at about 10:30am on Sunday. My ThermPro ambient probe registered 225-290 throughout the day but generally held at 250 F. The coal started to run out by 10pm or so so I refilled, tamped down, and by midnight the internal probe registered about 180. I thought shoot, I'm going to have to get up in the middle of the night to deal with this. I refilled with some more coal, stabilized the smoker temp at 250 F, and went to bed at 2am with an internal meat temperature at 188 F a temperature alarm set for 200 F. Unfortunately the alarm never went off, or perhaps the unit shut off, but I woke up at 4am to see an internal temp of 185 F and a smoker temp of 220 or so. Being still terribly tired, I fell back asleep and woke up at 8:30am to an internal temp of 119 F and a smoker temp of 72 F. Clearly everything had burned out. I pulled the butts off the smoker and put them in the oven (picture attached) and am now waiting for them to come back up and hopefully hit 190-200. My questions are:
1. Can I expect it reached the 190-200 F zone sometime between 2am-8:30am?
2. Should I try to get it back to that temperature zone now in the oven?
3. And finally (and most importantly), how am I from a food safety perspective? The meat dropped down below 140 F clearly and held there for some period of time between 4am-9am when I put the butts back in the oven.
Photos attached. Thanks for the advice!