Pork Butt Steaks Smoked in the MES
Miss Linda and I had been kicking around the idea of slicing up a pork butt into steaks for the MES 30. After reading John’s thread Pork Blade Steaks Part 1, and the comments, I knew it was a definite go. Here’s the link to John’s post:
www.smokingmeatforums.com/threads/pork-blade-steaks-“part-1”-experiments-1-2.285242/#post-1937457
John (
Bearcarver
) said that his steaks, cooked on his indoor grill, were tough so I planned to do mine low and slow.I had a boneless pork butt in the freezer, so after thawing it out I sliced it into four 1” steaks. Big steaks they were, too!!!
I applied a healthy coat of my go to pork rub and returned them to the fridge while I preheated the MES.
Since it was about the freezing point outside, I brought my sand filled water dish inside and preheated it as well in a 200 degree oven. I filled one and a half rows of my AMNPS with orange wood pellets and got it smoking nicely.
When the MES temp had stabilized at 240 degrees, the pork steaks went in to start cooking. The steaks were so big, I had to use 2 racks in the smoker.
After 3 hours in the MES, my Smoke meat probe was reading 170 degrees IT. Just to double check the temp, I used my instant read therm to test each steak. Yep 170. I had settled on 170 degrees final temp, since I’ve found that IT works well for pork roast.
A large portion of the fat—internal and external—was now gone, so I figured most of the collagen should also have rendered down.
They looked and smelled fantastic!!
Supper that night was pork steak, rice, peas, and some of my home made applesauce. The steaks were, as I said earlier, BIG. Too big for one apiece, so Miss Linda and I each cut what we wanted off a couple of steaks. Unfortunately, the plated picture is floating out there somewhere in the Ethernet. Gotta love technology. LOL.
So how did the steaks turn out? Well….they were a lot tougher than I had expected. Nice and juicy, but definitely not fork tender. Actually they were noticeably tougher than sliced roast pork. They weren’t exceptionally tough, the meat chewed fairly easily, but we did use steak knives at the table. The texture was very close to the meat I was raised on—medium well to well done. Somehow I thought I had escaped my childhood meals, but apparently not. Sigh.
Possibly they need to be taken to a higher IT to be tender. I’ll give that a try next time.
The flavor, however, was great. We thoroughly enjoyed the steaks. To tell the truth, we enjoyed them for 3 consecutive suppers. Normally, leftovers only see 2 meals, but the steaks were good enough that we had no problem eating the same thing for 3 days in a row.
Any and all suggestions for improving on these smoked pork steaks will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks for looking.
Gary
