Why Did It Take So Long To Cook Pulled Pork

[crankybuzzard]

Thanks!! I figured I'd try to summarize all the great things I've learned during my 18 months in this forum. This forum is unlike anywhere else where "blowing smoke" means making stuff up and obscuring the facts. Here it means giving people great advice and sharing wisdom gained from years of experience. I would have thrown out my MES if it weren't for this forum.

Perfect example of one of the main reasons I love this place!

 

[joeb23]

Wow, great write up JohnMeyer!!!!  I have a lot to learn and this was very helpful!!!!!

 

[schlotz]

Excellent write up John.  I too believe you can smoke and eat in the same day. Like most things, practice (and taking good notes) is the key.  When I know we will be entertaining with plenty of other things to get ready, I fall back to the foil method which has never failed.  Get the butt to 155° -ish, double wrap in heavy foil and crank the temp to 300° (smoker or oven). Since the butt is still probed, its IT is monitored until reaching 200°.  It's then pulled, put in an alum pan & placed in a cooler with towels below and above for a minimum of two hours.  Our 8-9# butts normally reach 155° around 5-6 hours and 200° approximately 2-3 hours later.  Since each piece of meat can vary in time to reach 200°, I start early enough to allow for it.  If they get done quicker, no problem, extra time in the cooler. Otherwise there is still 2 hours at the end for cooler resting.

Having smoked plenty of butts, I can say we haven't noticed much difference in flavor from running at 225° or 250°. Bark however is a different matter.  Foiling softens it, so that's a consideration you have to wrestle with along with the stall that accompanies leaving the meat unwrapped.  

Either way, you get GOOD EATS! 

Matt

 

[joeb23]

I know this sounds like a stupid question but when you say put in the cooler, is it literally a cooler (like you would take on a picnic)?  Why do you put the towels(paper?) in and are the towels dry?  I assume you do this so the meat finishes cooking and absorbs the juices?   Sooooo much to learn, lol.

Joe

 

[schlotz]

Yup a real cooler.  Dry towels help it maintain temp. Yes you could use paper but I personally think towels are better insulators.  For safety, you want to make sure your meat stays above 150°. Really isn't a problem with this method. You can easily maintain well above that for a number of hours. The rest period is very important regardless if wrapping or not.  It allows remaining fat to render in with redistributing juices. Amazing things happen during this time. We never cut it short.

Matt

 

[joeb23]

Thanks Matt

 

[hondabbq]

Others have said don't cook by time but use it as a guideline. That is true.

I do butts all the time and I never go that low. The lower the temp it is cooked at the longer the stall will be

I gave up doing over night cooks and the all day 15 hour cooks. I cook my butts at 275 and it if want it quicker I have done turbo butts at 350. It has never failed me yet.

If you are doing it at lower temps you can wrap and bump the temp to get it to the finish line.

I have done all the above cooks on my LBGE and my GMG Jim Bowie

 

[hondabbq]

The acronym for it is FTC Foil Towel Cooler. I have kept butts hot for 4-6 hours then pulled to serve.

 

[sauced]

Johnmeyer, that was a very good write up!

Point for that one sir!

Agree!!!!

Point 

 

[joeb23]

Well I just checked the thermometer.  I waited until the water was boiling consistently then put in the tip of the thermometer about 3 inches.  It read 210 degrees.  2 degrees off, not bad.

Joe

 

[crankybuzzard]

Well I just checked the thermometer.  I waited until the water was boiling consistently then put in the tip of the thermometer about 3 inches.  It read 210 degrees.  2 degrees off, not bad.

Joe

What elevation do you live at? 212 is for sea level. As you go up in altitude, it lowers a bit. You may not be off by 2.

 

[joeb23]

I live in the by Lake Erie.  The elevation level of Lake Erie is 653'.  Maybe its not off by that much.  I never realized that the elevation level made that much of a difference.

 

[crankybuzzard]

Good info here, and you're pretty good...

https://www.fsis.usda.gov/shared/PDF/High_Altitude_Cooking_and_Food_Safety.pdf

 

[pc farmer]

Good info here, and you're pretty good...

https://www.fsis.usda.gov/shared/PDF/High_Altitude_Cooking_and_Food_Safety.pdf

That's a good read right there.

 

[joeb23]

Interesting reading.  Thanks Crankybuzzard.

 

[smokered]

I have the Traeger Lil' Texas and have cooked several butts on it. I have learned to up the cooking temp to 275 and I also wrap at 160-165. I like to use a foil pan and aluminum foil, so it collects the juices. They take about 9 hrs, depending on size.

Here's one of my latest ones.

IMG_1644.JPG

• smokered
• Apr 5, 2017

 

[joeb23]

I have the Traeger Lil' Texas and have cooked several butts on it. I have learned to up the cooking temp to 275 and I also wrap at 160-165. I like to use a foil pan and aluminum foil, so it collects the juices. They take about 9 hrs, depending on size.

Here's one of my latest ones.

 

 

[johnmeyer]

 
Well I just checked the thermometer.  I waited until the water was boiling consistently then put in the tip of the thermometer about 3 inches.  It read 210 degrees.  2 degrees off, not bad.

Joe

A few weeks ago I provided some additional information about calibrating a thermometer. Altitude is definitely the #1 issue, but at 600 feet above sea level, the boiling point is still pretty close to 212.

Here is that post, in case you're interested: Thermometer Calibrating Tips

 

[gunpowder]

Time also varies by the amount of butts in the smoker as well as meat variability. I have had butts go quick and also have had butts go 16 hrs when I had it packed for a big job. Some were done early, a couple just liked the sauna I guess. When I have a lot of butts I like to rotate the racks 1/2 way through.

I have 70 pounds to smoke for Sunday noon. I had wanted to start this morning but my MES kicked the bucket. My new MES is in the initial 3 hr heating to get it ready to smoke. I will probably do two runs of 35# although I have had them packed with 9 butts before (probably about the same poundage. It did fine but made some of you more nervous than me when I posted :D

 

[Shannymarie]

As others have already stated, the problem you ran into is called "the stall." I don't think anyone mentioned why it happens. This will be a good thing for you to know because, in the future, you can take action to overcome the problem so you can get your food on the table at a reasonable time. You just have to know what you are trading off when you do one or more of the things I am about to describe.

The stall is caused by the meat sweating. As the moisture in the meat comes out from the meat getting hotter, it evaporates from the surface. This evaporation cools the meat, just like what happens when any of us sweat. With a really big hunk of meat, you often end up with a long period of equilibrium where the heat going into the meat is exactly offset by the cooling from evaporation. This can go on for hours: I've had it go on for over four hours with an eight pound pork butt, and during that time, the temperature did not go up even one degree.

If you are spraying the meat with apple juice (or anything else), that will put more moisture on the surface, and increase the evaporation, thus making the stall last longer.

No that you understand why it happens, here is what you can do about it.

Increase the smoker temperature. From what I have read in these forums, as well as my brief (18 months) experience, 225 is too low a temperature for a pork butt. Most people seem to use 250, or even a little higher. You don't want to go too high because one of the reasons smoked pork butt is the king of BBQ is the delicious taste you get from the juices that render out of the fat. To get that taste, you need to smoke for a long time. So, my recommendation is to smoke at 250, but no higher, even though others seem to have success with much higher temps.

Decrease the spritzing. Most pulled pork recipes call for spraying some sort of sugar water on the pork about once an hour. This is supposed to help build up the desirable "bark" which is loaded with flavor. However, it also cools down the meat quite a bit and, with an electric smoker, it may take 5-10 minutes for the smoker temperature to return to 250 after you open the door to spray the meat, so you lose a little bit of time there (not much compared to everything else). I don't like to decrease the number of times I spray, but if I were in a hurry, I'd stop the spraying.

Don't inject. I have never injected any of my meats, so I have no idea what I'm missing. However, I am pretty sure that the extra moisture will increase the amount of evaporative cooling. One person recently posted that he got a stall on a chicken smoke, something I didn't think was possible with such a relatively small piece of "meat." However, it turns out he had injected it, and I suspect that was the reason he got a stall.

Foil it. This is the tried-and-true stall killer. A lot of people in these forums don't like to do it, and as a result, they have a somewhat negative phrase for it: "the crutch." I think some people think it is cheating. However, it works every time, and will get you "home" in a jiffy. It should be obvious why this works: the moisture coming out of the meat can no longer evaporate. This completely and totally stops the evaporative cooling and, since the heat from the oven can instantly penetrate the foil (aluminum is a great conductor of heat), the meat must heat up.

I did another pulled pork two days ago. I always take notes (I suggest you do this as well) so I can time my next meal more accurately. I somewhat disagree with others who say you can't get the food on the table when you want, but you do have to make some compromises. For this last pulled pork smoke I used my external smoking can attached to my MES 30, with the AMNPS tray lit at both ends. The smoker was set at 245 degrees until I foiled, at which point I bumped it up to max (275). I didn't want to increase the temperature that much, but we needed to eat (I was late getting started and didn't get the pork in the smoker until almost 9:00 a.m . -- try not to start that late).

Time Temperature

0:00 40

1:23 70

2:00 86

3:35 118

5:04 138

6:00 145

7:00 151

8:15 151 (foiled and put smoker at 275)

9:30 192

9:50 201 (pulled)

BTW, note that my times are referenced to 0:00, rather than a time of day. I have a count-up timer and always start that at a beginning of a smoke. I find this incredibly useful because I always instantly know how long the smoke is taking, and I can refer to my notes from earlier smokes to see what to expect next. If you start with more or less that same cut of meat, butchered in the same manner, it has been my experience that the process is somewhat predictable, although there are always variations. As others have said, you should always cook to get the meat to a specific temperature rather than simply cook it for a specific time.

You can see the stall starting to happen about five hours into the smoke, and at seven hours it is has become a full-throated stall. At 8:15 I put the pork in the disposable pan that I put on the rack underneath. It was full of all the drippings. I then put thick foil over the top and sealed it well. As you can see, the temperature started shooting up almost immediately (actually, it took ten minutes before the temp went from 151 to 152, but it rose rapidly after that).

I have one more pork butt (Costco sells them two at a time). When I do the next one, I will start it at 5:00 a.m., not 9:00. I will definitely light both ends of the AMNPS, just as I did this time. I will still spritz, but I may do it every two hours rather than every hour, because the moisture didn't seem to fully evaporate between spritzes. I will still use 245 degrees as the smoking temperature, although I might go up to 250, since that seems to be a temperature commonly recommended in these forums and, as you are finding out, these people know what they are doing.

This was my third pulled pork. The first one took 12:15 until I took it out, plus two hours in the cooler. That was before I knew any of what I just wrote. My second one took thirteen hours. I knew everything before I did that one, but really wanted to see if I could beat the stall without the foiling, but after eleven hours I got hungry and foiled it.

Now that I have the AMNPS and an external "mailbox mod" I am tempted to start the next one at midnight, let it go for 14-15 hours, and then let it sit in the cooler until we feel like eating. I still want to see if I can do at least one without any foiling.

Oh yes, if you do foil, you don't need to keep adding smoke because the foil block any of it from getting to the meat. Depending on your smoker it can save both time and money by not wasting wood chips.

Thank you so much for this. I made my first pulled pork yesterday and ran into all the issues mentioned throughout this thread! Could you please tell me if you fill your water tray? Or should I NOT be filling?