Rare sdbelt post: Great butt results!

sdbelt

It seems like I never post here anymore, and honestly I don't even lurk much, but alas it's not because I don't want to. Instead I've just been a tad busier these days, coupled with eating quite a bit less BGE'd food.[p]At anyrate, I did get a chance to cook a couple of butts for the Super Bowl. Friday evening dinner with the neighbors yielded the desire to have a shin-dig. They'd never tried my BBQ, so I volunteered to bring over some pulled pork if they'd show the game in HDTV on their 100" screen. Seemed like a good trade to me.[p]With the somewhat short planning period, I bought a couple of 6 lb butts on Saturday afternoon, immediately seasoned them with some Dizzy Pig course grind, and let them sit in the fridge a few hours. At 6:30pm, it was time to start the fire. I wanted to pull the butts off the Egg by 6:30am, because I would be out of the house from 7a-11a. [p]Then I realized that I'd almost run out of Hasty Bake. Dad gummit! A quick trip to Walmart yielded some kind of crap in a 10 lb bag, but what could I do? I'd lit what Hasty Bake I had before leaving for Walmart, and when I got home poured the Walmart junk on top, along with 3 decent sized pieces of apple smoking wood.[p]20 minutes later, with the dome temp stabilized at 250, I put on the 2 butts, indirect over a plate setter, with a couple of cups of apple wood and apple juice in the drip pan below the grid. I set my Maverick remote thermometer in the thicker butt and the alarm for 204. A couple hours later the temp spiked up to 300, so I shut down the bottom vent a tad, and all was set again at 250. I went to bed at 11:30pm, and set a mid sleep wakeup for 3:30am. [p]I awoke without alarm at 2:30am, so I checked the progress. The meat was at 181 and the dome was still a rock steady 250. Damn I'm good! (ha...like I had anything to do with it...the Egg did all the work!) I then woke at 6:30am, surprised the Maverick hadn't sounded. A check of the meat therm showed just 189 and the dome had fallen to about 225. That told me the fire must have gone down or out. A look down in there showed that the Walmart junk had never really caught on fire.[p]Even though my desired internal temp hadn't been reached, I decided to remove the meat anyway, and wrap it in foil and put it in a cooler. I've heard of folks doing this religiously, but had honestly never done it for more than an hour or two. This would give it 6+ hours in the cooler.[p]At about 1pm, I removed the butts from the foil and started pulling...and immediately I could tell something was different. It was clear that the meat was extremely tender (much more so than usual), and on top of that, one of the butts had rendered more fat than I'd ever seen.[p]The result was spectacular. The juiciest, most tender, most flavorful pulled pork I've ever had. The bark is perfect, just plain the whole thing. The Dizzy Pig rub is some tasty stuff, and I gotta believe the foil treatment contributed significantly as well. Overall, the process seemed perfect.[p]May we all have great BBQ this year.[p]--sdb

Cornfed

sdbelt,[p]Thanks for the excellent report. Also, you should stop by more often...and eat more BBQ...[p]Later,
Cornfed