Third time is the charm...

[JPP]

And to beat the proverbial dead-horse... last plot.... I promise!!!
You can actually see the beginning of the stall in the graph... not to mention
a certain amount of impatience regarding wrapping :-)

[carolts]

Very nice! Good info.

[JPP]

It *was* an easy cook... I should've added the meat temp too... I have the numbers and all :-)

[Jerod Broussard]

If you zoomed waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay out it would be more constant. Just mimic Al Gore's CO₂ output/global warming graph.

That looks normal, especially with a chunk of meat that probably started to stall around the 3 hour mark.

[JPP]

And lest I forget... the pb hit the magic 203 at 6:05 pm... here is the cooker's temp profile with annotation.... this was done by writing down temps on paper and dropping it into excel...

So a question or two:
Does this constitute a constant temperature? I think not....
Is it possible my intake vent needs to be opened up a bit more? (sea level effectively, 1/4 open)

[JPP]

Yes it was quite good... toward the end (when I wrapped the thing) I added two split chickens to the barrel as well... it was an interesting temp profile as it peaked again since I had the lid off for so long, but after the temp retreated (unfortunately I didn't document it as well) but then it came up about 5-10 degrees in the hour or so after I wrapped the shoulder... but the charcoal on the left side was almost totally spent while there alot of life left in the right side (vent facing me when I looked in). The total cooking time was about 7 hours for the shoulder, about 1.5 hours for the chicken (which was still cooking during the rest for the shoulder).

[Jerod Broussard]

Slacker!

[smarkley]

Great JOB! Sounds like you had a good cook... and success at controlling those temps.

I did a pork butt this weekend too... it was good... same-o same-o, so I didnt post pics *shrug*

[JPP]

Nor on any of mine! Pitmaster's perogative!

[_John_]

Awesome! looks great, good bark and smoke ring. That piece in the 3rd pic, I love that piece, nobody that has ever eaten a pork shoulder that I pulled has eaten that piece

[JPP]

I wasn't really planning on it as of last Wednesday, but the following day it occurred to me that I had a nice 8.5 lb pork shoulder in the freezer (don't know wth is going on but it's getting alot harder to find swift-premium product around here and it's buggin' me). I got this thing in cryovac last November and I said to my wife I ought to cook it... well she's not a huge pork shoulder fan, she claimed to like the crock-pot version of "pulled pork"(ugh!) better, saying that the last butt I did was too "porky" (what the heck ELSE would it taste like, I asked her!!!)

So defrosted Saturday, trimmed and dry brined (three tbs kosher salt) Saturday night, slathered a tbs or two of olive oil plus about 4-6 tbs of MHMR and into the pbc it went with two ounces of hickory and four ounces of applewood...

Cooked it in one big piece... hung it at 10:55 am, took it to 163 where it stalled... wrapped it at 4:40 (about) with 1/4 cup of sam adams summer ale of all things..., 203 at 5:30, rested until 6:40....

Anyway this was the third one I did... and heh, heh, heh... the raves from both my son and my wife were most gratifying...


Pictures are a shot just prior to wrapping, me with the blade bone pulled out clean as a whistle, the finished product on the cutting board, and a nice cross section cut... Meathead, your rub recipe is definitely 'da bomb! I'll never use anything else for PB or pork ribs!

I did have a good temp profile although in order to get the barrel to run at 270 or thereabouts I did have to pull a rebar... The initial max temp (using Cathryn's method) was in the low 300's so I cracked the lid to pull it up to 380+... don't know what it is but I've never gotten it into the upper three hundreds without a post initial set-up of cracking the lid. I'm wondering if my vent needs a bit of opening up... but before I pulled the rebar, the barrel seemed to want to run in the upper 240s or so...