Pulled Pork

Bump that dome temperature up to 250-275. It is hard to get a piece of meat to 200 degrees if the egg is just 215. At 165 internal you may not even be thru the stall yet.

I did a pork butt, first one, last night.  I had read many posts about the length of time to cook.  And since I have a several dozen cooks on it now, I have learned a bunch about temperature control and what the different areas of the egg are vs other areas.  I started a fully loaded fire box yesterday morning but just was running behind.  So I knew that I was not going to get 11 to 12 hours to smoke it.  So instead, I just ran my dome to 300F.  I started at 11:25am and was done about 4:30pm at an internal of 195F in the thickest part of the butt.  I probed it all over with the thermapen and found an area still at 183 so I moved the dual probe to that area and continued until that area was at 195F, and that took an additional 45 minutes.  The time between 180 and 185 was over 1.5 hours...the stall.  What I wanted to point out, is that my grid temp, 2 inches off the grid is consistently well below the dome temperature, until 4 or 5 hours into the cook.  Even toward the end of the cook, with the dome temp at about 310F, the grid remained at about 290-295.  I have found that especially at the lower end of the range, around 200-225F dome temp, my grid is barely over 165F!  A suggestion would be for low and slows, to get a good dual temp probe setup, and cook to internal, but monitor the temp of the grid, not the dome...unless your using an adjustable rig from the CGS, and in that case, your actually cooking raised up in the dome anyway.  Different areas of the egg are at different temperatures.