

The second Porkth of July! This year I finally tracked down a pork butt. For some reason, in NYC it is near impossible to get an untrimmed butt. The Picnic is easy to find, but I wanted to smoke a good ole Boston Butt. After tracking one down at a butcher shop, and paying more than I should’ve (actually Marisa picked it up, and paid, sucker!), the first part was over. That got me thinking, now that I have my new WSM, why waste all that room? So I went to the grocery store, and picked up a picnic (on $ale! too)

As usual, my method was a combination of several recipes. I didn’t want to smoke it for 14 hours, but I also didn’t want to do it hot and fast. I basically went with an augmented Big Bob Gibson recipe combined with a Slap Yo Daddy recipe. I didn’t do much trimming, except for removing the skin on the picnic. I chose to inject this baby, so I didn’t have to do a lot of mopping and opening the smoker, extending cook times. The injection was made up of apple juice, water, sugar, BBQ rub, hot sauce, salt and Worcestershire.

After I got both injected, I rubbed it down with some McCoy’s rub. In the past I have made my own rub, but I have so many bottles of rub, there is no point in making my own right now. Most are similar, and get the job done quite nicely. I was happy with the ingredient list, so I covered the pork in olive oil, and rubbed it down nicely. Into the fridge it went, to sit overnight. I made sure to put it in a pan, because last time the injected pork leaked through all 3 bags all over the fridge.

I woke at 7 am (earlier than I do for work, yuck) I lit the coals at 7:30 am. For some reason the 20 or so coals I lit took forever, and I didn’t get them into the smoker for almost an hour. Not sure what happened there. I had the chamber filled with unlit coals and some applewood chips and hickory chunks. The smoker got up to temp, and the meat went on at 8:30 am.

The smoker held it’s temps very well. Since it was a new smoker, I was worried about high temps. It pretty much sat where I wanted (between 250 and 275.) I did have to fiddle with the dampers, and knock some ashes off a few times though.

The pork was right on schedule, I estimated to wrap the pork at 1:30, and hoping the meat would be 150 degrees. Sure enough it was, and it was wrapped with some juice, butter, beer and hot sauce.

I was estimating to be eating 6 or 7 pm or so, but the pork cooked fast, and hit it’s 190 mark by 4:30. I let it sit in the pan for an hour. Since it was finished so early, we trucked it over to Marisa’s parents for a BBQ. (Selfish me, had planned on cooking 15lbs of pork for just Marisa and I.) Once we got there I pulled it and the bones pulled out without any difficulty.

Pulling it was a breeze, and the bark survived the wrapping pretty well. Marisa made coleslaw, and I had some homemade BBQ sauce I made the week before. I added some apple juice and hot sauce (also homemade) to it, for it to be more of a pulled pork sauce.

The pork was super moist, and was a big hit. The leftovers went into food saver bags, vacuum sealed, and into the freezer. I can’t wait to have some delicious pulled pork in the middle of the winter. I just need to throw the bags into some hot water, and some more sauce, and I am good to go!

Click here for my full cooking log.