First overnighter - North Carolina/Elder Ward's pulled pork

Since I'm so new to this I wanted to keep my first overnighter recipe authentic so I went with Elder Ward's North Caroline pulled pork recipe found on NakedWhiz. 

Started with an 18 lb shoulder/thing of beauty from my butcher (it was huge...proportions difficult to appreciate on this image as the cutting board was also huge)




that was subsequently massacred by me into this 


Mixed up Elder Ward's rub (salt, sugar, paprika, chili powder, cumin, black pepper, sage) and laid it on while getting the egg fired up around 10 pm.


Something great about being out at night alone with a fire...


Went for my usual lighting routine and thought I'd compensate for Edler's cold smoke process by waiting until the BGE came up to temp and adding more hickory (I used about four decent sized chunks distributed throughout as opposed to his one).

After temp had stabilized for an hour at 200 I tucked in the shoulder and promised not to look again until it hit 200. Something still scary about a contained fire on a wood deck next to my house. 




Watched it closely for about an hour to make sure temp was stable. I can't believe how rock solid this XLBGE is. 

Here is the temp reading at around 1 am just before bed:



Here it is a good 6.5 hours later after waking up (I'm literally still in bed here grabbing this right away thinking I had slept through a disaster):



I know it's impossible to know for sure what happened in between but I was damn sure impressed at the temp stability!

Although I was in no rush I realized I was far off my endpoint so cranked it up a touch to 225 and had a great day outside:


When it hit about 165 I cranked it up some more to about 300. When it hit 200 around 6:30 pm I finally had a peak



My initial thought was that it looked like a big lump of charcoal, so I was a bit worried and wish I had spritzed it and checked on it throughout. 

Not to worry though, after wrapping in foil and some towels the bark had softened up beautifully and I was ready to pull using an improvised set of insulated gloves - big green egg gloves with each hand stuffed in a ziplock to keep them clean. 


Inside it was perfectly juicy and moist and bark was totally edible and packed full of flavour.

I pulled some rough chunks and gave the part due for sandwiches that night a rough chop. Sandwiches got smothered in his vinegar sauce recipe (white vinegar, cidar vinegar, sugar, cayenne, tobasco, salt, and pepper I let sit overnight). Sandwiches were topped with the Mary Lee's Slaw recipe he mentions. 

Chunks were served up with the Piedmont/Western NC style sauce that's a bit sweeter with some body to it, still warm for dipping.




All in all a fantastic experience and great meal. With just my wife and 5 year old daughter we'll have some leftovers to tide us over for a bit! 

Happy Canada Day and July 4th long weekend to all!

Mike