Fire went out during the night - 10 lb butt

Posts: 13,155

there is bacteria everywhere.  i didn't say there wasn't.  but let's understand that it is not all bad.  there are more bacteria on you right now than there are cells in your body.  that is fact. 

additionally, your toothbrush has e. coli on it, and you let it sit out for weeks on end.

why are you not concerned?

well, i can tell you that you won't get sick from bacteria, even e. coli (the stuff on your toothbrush) unless it is the DANGEROUS strain, or a dangerous bacteria.  your gut is teeming with e. coli.  just not the bad strain.

so, a chunk of meat.  yep, bacteria in the blood.  bacteria in the meat.  prosciutto is a salt cured chunk of pig which has been bled, salted, and (at least in parts of italy) pressed at ambient temp while it cures.  the interior rocking along at room temp for years, even before the salt gets a chance to reach the center and cure the meat.  there is some thinking that there are beneficial bacteria (see Harold McGee) which additionally transform the prok into 'prosciutto'.  so yeah, bacteria can exist in meat.

but we need to understand that it is not 'all' bacteria we need to worry about.

the bacteria of concern in slaughtered animals is that which is found not in the blood of the animal, but in th animal's gut.  if that bacteria, during slaughter,  comes into contact with the meat, that is a bad thing. 

but it isn't going to get INTO the meat.  unless, like hamburger, you grind it.

having typed this a bajillion times in a futile attempt to stem the panic, i'll try again.

why is it i can eat a steak at 125 safely, but if i were to grind that steak first and then cook it, i need to cook it to 160? it's because, i will have risked mixing external bacteria (which might be from the gut of the animal) into the interior of the burger.  that bacteria would safely reside there at 125, in a burger, so i'd better cook it higher to be safe.  in a whole piece of un-molested meat, the danger is on the exterior.

my point about this poor bastard's pork butt is that after 5, 6, seven hours in the grill, anything on the exterior is DEAD.  unless he rolls it around on some bacterially suspect killing floor, or otherwise contaminates it (puts it out on a buffet line for a typhoid carrier to cough on), his meat is fine.

although this meat is not 'cured' in any sense, we can still aply the logic.  i can hang an uncooked leg of pork in my basement at ambient temps (right now, 70 ish) because i have taken pains to make it inhospitable to dangerous bacteria.  salt, etc.

the lesson isn't that we need to cure a pork butt for it to be safe in the grill if the fire goes out, we need to understand whether the meat is in a state which is inhospitable to bacteria.

let's see.

salted (rub) on the exterior after rinsing. that's precaution one (and actually the real reason meat ever received salt and pepper to begin with, to dissuade any bacteria from getting a foothold.  and to keep away things that bring bacteria, like flies).

put into a 250 degree environment.  well.  that exterior bacteria, whatever survived the salt, anyway, will quickly be killed off by virtue of the heat.

smoke. not an ally of bacteria. another strike against it.

then i look at the fact that this guy's pork was 130 when he took its temp again.  which means it was ABOVE that.  his re-lit 300 degree fire did not raise a cold piece of meat 130.  that meat was still cooling, and he found it to be at 130. it will still lose heat even in a climbing oven. 

i don't want to brow beat anyone into eating something they don't feel safe about.  i just, personally, cannot operate willy-nilly, guessing and conjecturing. 

after a person throws out their first chunk of pork, they should really sit down and research what the heck is going on, and don't simply take a vote from anonymous online people about whether it is safe or not.

and they shouldn't take my less conservative advice (who the hell am i) any more than they should take the advice of anyone else, even if more conservative.

they should know what they are doing when they do it.

i've thrown out a couple butts in my time too.  but now i am not guessing or wishing when i do.

as for sterilizing meat and still making it edible.  i don't know what that means.  there's a lot of excellent information out there about how food is and can be pasteurized, especially with the sous vide craze taking hold.

food can be made ridiculously safe, if not technically 'sterile'.  again, 'bacteria' are not bad.  SOME bacteria are.

if you do not know why you can eat an apple that's been in your fruit bowl for a week, but you will toss out a steak left on the counter for four hours, then time to so some homework.

i cannot remember a story in recent news about a person getting sick from any whole piece of meat. it has lately been unwashed vegetables, spinach, or ground meat.  even if there were a case of someone getting sick from whole meat, it would be outnumbered by so many other stories of tomato recalls, that it is statistically far less significant.

face it, people are afraid of what they don't understand.  and when that fear has a tiny bit of truth to it, but is otherwise not  quite accurate, the tiny bit of truth is what is clung to and pointed to, rather than the whole picture.

witness how many more people are afraid of flying than driving in a car.  there's no underestimating the power of the human mind to misunderstand risk

carpaccio anyone? rare steak? sunnyside eggs?

For myself, though, what I see is case reports (and many more than the few I selected, and much more reading on the subject besides) where people who were experienced  BBQers with many years of cooks preparing and serving food that made people sick, even though they'd been doing it that way for years and had never made anybody sick before.  So when I see 100% of people who study food poisoning all saying the same things, I figure if I follow their recommendations, I'm really unlikely to join that group of BBQers who had never made anybody sick before.

But you make a good case, and maybe you're right.

Peace.

Theo