Pork Butts in WSM

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menk45

Fire Starter
Original poster
Jun 23, 2011
36
10
Jefferson City, MO
I have a 18.5 WSM and recently replaced switched to sand in the water bowl.  I filled the bowl with sand and wrapped the whole thing in foil.

On a Friday night, I trimmed and rubbed a couple of ~9lbs butts and stored them in the fridge for the next morning.  Saturday morning, I'm up just before 5am, got the charcoal going and the smoker warming up.  Unwrap the butt and rubbed again.  Smoker up to temp and ready for the butts.  I should have recognized things were going to smoothly...

When I had the water bowl, I would put one butt on the bottom rack, one on the bottom, and let the drippings fall into the water bowl.

It wasn't until I was ready to put the butts on the smoker that I realized I couldn't do it that way.  Solution seemed easy enough, just put a couple of drip pans on the bottom rack, the butts on the top rack, and let the drippings fall into the pan.

OK, ready to go...uh, nope.

The butts were too big to lay side by side on the top rack.  After a moment of panic, I remembered we had some bamboo skewers, so I stood the butts on end and ran the skewers through the butts.  The thought was that they would stand up and support each other, without touching. 

Below are pics of them standing and one of the finished butts.


 
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  looks goood
 
Looks great! I have yet to use the bottom grate on my 22" WSM...I always put foil pans there. I've also never tried using sand.

Just a thought: if you're using sand, and you want to use both grates, couldn't you indent the sand in the middle (making it concave), and place foil on the top of it to catch the drippings? Might need a turkey baster to get most of the liquid out when done though. Also, the sand would have to be of a consistency to hold its shape well. Again...just wondering.
 
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