BBQ Pork Butt

I decided to smoke some pork butt on Saturday for that night’s fight: Manny Pacquiao out of the Philippines against Erik Morales out of Mexico. Morales was putting a whoopin’ on Pacquiao in the early rounds, but Pacquiao took him out in the 10th. Great fight, good food.

I’m trying to make good on my New Year’s resolution: cook more BBQ and eventually enter a local cook-off. I’ve been reading two books on the subject, Mike Mills’ Peace, Love, and Barbecue and Paul Kirk’s Championship Barbecue, and both are full of insight into the competition world. The consensus on getting better and more consistent comes down to two things. First, keep a journal, which is easy enough since a blog is basically an online journal. Second, practice. Or as Nike put it, just do it.

I picked up two pork butts, one 6 pounds and one about 5.5. I tenderized them by poking all over with a fork, applied the rub, and poked them again, both tips out of Peace, Love, and Barbecue. My kitchen remodel still had half my ingredients boxed up, so I improvised a rub with no paprika and it came out pretty good. The one thing I did not do with the rub was, ahem, rub it. I’d heard somewhere that sprinkling it on instead lets the smoke penetrate the meat better. Sure, why not.

Improvised rub: 2 parts chile powder, 1 part chipotle powder, 1 part onion powder, 1 part garlic powder, 3 parts brown sugar, 1 part kosher salt.

I had oak chunks and apple chips, soaked them, and got the Kingsford going. I wanted predictable briquettes because this cook was really about dialing in temperature control on the WSM. The cook ran about nine and a half hours. I started around 10 a.m. with the smoker bouncing between 210 and 270 degrees F as the wind came and went, settling into a steady 230 once it died down. I mopped and flipped around the four-hour mark, then mopped again every hour or so. The meat crept up slowly: 154 degrees F at five and a half hours, 160 by eight, 165 by nine.

I pulled it just before 7:30 p.m. at 165 degrees F, the low end of what Mike Mills lists for sliced pork. He suggests 180 to 185 degrees F for pulling, but I took it off early because the internal temp had stalled for the last 45 minutes and Cutty was getting hungry. The meat came out tougher than I wanted, tough enough that I chopped it with a cleaver instead of pulling it. The flavor was good, it just needed more tenderness to be perfect. Next time I take it to 185 degrees F. Lesson learned: don’t pull early just because the crowd is hungry.