Quick question about my butt.

Jeffroe189

Last night I put a 10lb and 6lb but on the egg at 2am I meant to stagger them and put the 6 Lb on at 8am. I realized what I had done and pulled at the 6lb off the egg and put it back in the refrigerator. It had only been on the egg maybe 10 to 15 mins. I had been on long enough for the outside to get warm. When I took it out to put it back on at 8 it said it was 52-54 degrees. 

My question is did it sit in the refrigerator for 6 hours and spoil? 

Would you just cook it and eat it or throw it out?

Thanks everyone.

Theophan

You probably have a pretty small, but not zero, chance of making yourself and others desperately, miserably, hospitalizably sick.  It very well might be fine, but if it were me, I'd pitch it.

There's a really helpful booklet published by the FDA called, "Cooking for Groups," and it points out that bacteria multiply rapidly (and that means exponentially!) between 40 and 140 degrees.  If your pork was above 40 degrees when you took it out of the fridge, then it was even warmer than that for a long time. The recommendation by experts who study food borne illness is that meat and other perishable foods must never stay in that "danger zone" between 40 and 140 more than 2 hours.

Just an example of the math: if bacteria are in the right temperature zone, they may double every 20 minutes.  So if they were thriving in that "danger zone" from 2 AM until 8 AM, then they may have doubled 18 times.  2 to the 18th is 262,144, so in that 6 hours of bacteria happily thriving, they may have grown not hundreds of times more numerous, not thousands of times more numerous, but HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of times more numerous...

Foghorn

While what @Theophan says is true, I would cook it because the end temperature of pork butt is around 200 and that kills everything. And the bacteria are only really on the surface of the meat and that surface has been exposed to inhospitable temps in both the egg and the refrigerator. When you put it back on the egg, once it hits 140 it will spend many hours at temps that kill the bacteria. If this were something with a lower finishing temp like a prime rib roast I would toss it out.  Or if it were a meatloaf with ground beef where there were actually bacteria introduced into the middle during the grinding I would definitely toss it. 

Theophan

While what @Forhorn says is true ...  

I agree that the risk probably is low.  Where we might be disagreeing is whether the risk is zero or not.  The problem is that we're not talking about a small risk of catching a cold.  We're talking about a small risk of people being really miserably sick, or in elderly, the very young, or other immune compromised people, maybe worse than sick.

And I think there's a very small mistruth often quoted on this forum: It's true that in a big chunk of meat like a pork butt, most of the bacteria are on the surface.  But what's not true is that the interior is completely sterile!  There are bacteria inside meat, just very few compared to the surface.  If the meat is handled properly and kept at the right temperatures, there are way too few in the interior to make people sick.  That's why the risk in cooking steak rare, or even eating steak tartare (prepared properly) is very low.  But... if the meat goes for too long at unsafe temperatures, the very few bacteria that actually may have been deep in the meat can become very many bacteria.

Plus, some bacteria like Staph. aureus produce heat-stable toxins.  In other words, while the bacteria are growing, they produce a poison that can make people very sick.  If the food then is thoroughly cooked, the bacteria that produced the toxin all die... but the toxin is still there in the thoroughly cooked food!  Staph is a common cause of food poisoning, and there have been outbreak reports of staph in pulled pork barbecue!

I admit I lean toward the paranoid end of things, but it's because I've studied up on all of this stuff (retired physician).  I think the risk is probably pretty small, but, again, it's not a small risk of catching a bad cold.  It's a small risk of making people really miserably sick.

pgprescott

Yes your butt looks big in those pants. Oh, wrong question. Carry on.

Don't risk it.