Pork Butts ---revisited

ric3677

Ok, So I get up at 6 expecting the egg to be doing it's thing, and it wasn't. It was at 3, but now nothing coming out. It went thru a giant load of lump in 14 hours. The butts smelled delicious when I got out there but most of them were over temp. All of them wanted to fall apart when I took them off. This is way, way faster than all of the other Butts I have cooked.

so I got to thinking...it's bitter cold..the egg needs to keep warm....and so it's burning faster, creating more heat doing so...cooking faster. Any other ideas?

The more I think on it the madder I get...all that bark, burned to a crisp

Happy Holidays to all

Rick in Mt.

Austin Smoker

Bummer...a similar experience is what led me to finally break down from my "old school" tendancies and request a Guru II from the jolly old man in a red suit this year!

Is it possible that the temp spiked between 3am and 6am? This cold explain the accelerated lump use and the badly burnt bark...the thought of which makes me very sad. :( :pinch: :S :blink:

Chef Jeff

Austin Smoker:
You are gonna love your Guru! It was one of the first things I bought after my BGE and I would not have been able to do long cooks without it. I love being old fashioned with the lump and slow cookin', but when I can mix in some new technology, especially when it makes things easier, I am in heaven.

Ric3677:
Bummers on the over cooked butts. Good butts is one of my favorite things. Could the daisy wheel have spun a little on you when you checked things at 3:00?

Celtic Wolf

First how big were the butts? 14 hours at 250 is ideal for a butts less than seven pounds.

Have you calibrated the thermometers?

What brand of lump were you using?

Cold is not going to make the lump burn faster. Unless you have a Guru or a stoker the egg doesn't have a mind of it's own. "Ohh I am cold I need to burn more" isn't going to happen.

Did the wind pick up between three and six and if so could your egg have been facing into the wind?

ric3677

Ok Pete...here's the answers
Two butts at around 8 pounds and two around 7 pounds
They were all over done....the down side burnt the upside actually eatable.
I haven't calibrated the thermos but after 10 or so cooks this fall, all coming out great, I didn't feel the need to check on them. The lump is the same RO that I have used in the past and is part of the pile that I have had for sometime. Nothing new there.
The wind didn't come up, thank God! and the egg was pretty well covered so that the Stoker could get some of the heat coming off of the Egg.
I didn't mean to say that the egg was "cold" but that the ambient air around the egg was in the -6 to -10 range and that the egg was cooling faster than it would if it were 50 0r 60 out. Is this not true? Therefore it is using more lump?
I am wondering if the temp probe for the grill might have been too close to one of the butts.
All in all, the butts were eaten and everyone said they were good....I knew that they weren't my best effort.

Rick in Mt.

fishlessman

with all the cold meat in there you were getting a false reading on your temp probe, your stoker compensated and made sure the temp reading climbed up to your setting. if you had looked inside under the inderect setup i bet you would have seen a fire that was huge. been there without the stoker, to get the dome up to 250 i had the vents wide open for an hour before i realized what was wrong. there was a900 degree fire, but gages only read 250. i think with those big cooks its better to stabilize and trust things for several hours rather than believing thje gage readings

Celtic Wolf

I am with Fishlessman here. I have taken to clipping the pit probe up on the stem of the BGE Probe.

Too bad you are using that stoker log program. You would be able to tell if the temp spiked between 3-6.

ric3677

Yeah, I think both of you are on to something. That's the last time I try 4 butts at once. Unless I put one on the small. I think I need to get the stoker hooked up to the computer so I can tell when I have problems.

Thanks for the advise and time. Nice to have a place to turn.

Rick in "cold" Mt.

Celtic Wolf

Cooking four isn't a problem