It's Butt Day

[DaveD]

Lots of butts flying around the Pit this weekend! Doing one on the SnS kettle today, also using the new Fireboard 2, which I am quickly falling in love with. Great to be able to monitor temps both on the phone and on a browser tab for when I'm sitting here.

Got a bone-in butt weighing in at almost exactly 8lb/3.6kg. I had misremembered, thinking it was boneless, and would have cut it in half and repeated the "halve and halve not" experiment to include the SMOKE step on the pellet smoker, but that's going to have to wait for another day. Instead it'll just be a normal butt cook, another step forward in learning to manage the SnS kettle.

Fired up the SnS with a dozen B&B coals in the corner of the insert, then loaded up the rest of the space with unlit and put three apple wood chunks on top. Dry brined the butt overnight and doused with Memphis Dust half an hour before Go Time. Took about half an hour of vent fiddling to get things settled down.


Trimmed some of the fat cap off, which wasn't very thick to start with.

On the kettle shortly after 8am. One probe above the bone, the other below.

90 minutes in, all nominal.


Temp profile thus far. I have no idea why it did that step-down a little while ago, I didn't touch it. But it's right where I want to be, averaging around 270F/132C, just fine for Buttsville.



More later!

[DaveD]

Yon butt is proceeding apace. As the temp profile shows, things were gradually drifting down, and a peek inside led me to add a few more unlit coals to the initially-lit end, which was fading fast, and with some vent tweakage got things back where I wanted them, it's settling down at about 260F/127C. Temps are now reading identically on the two probes, no surprise there, nor any surprise at getting good and stallin'.



Here we are 3 hours in:

And at 4 hours in, before & after adding those few more coals.


Also gave it a spritz a couple times so far...

Keeeeeeeeeeeeeeep going....

[WayneT]

Looking good, real good!

[Allon]

Yes, it does look good...

[theroc]

Curious about what vent settings you wound up with when the temp settled in the 260-270 F range?

[WayneT]

Ditto. I’m struggling to keep my temps below 280F.

[DaveD]

Will address this below...

[Finster]

Interesting putting 2 probes in the meat...

[DaveD]

I know, only two!

[holehogg]

Even though I'm almost " bilingual" after the years being here it's very nice of you to include the metric system in your posts.

[DaveD]

You are most welcome. I love SI units and loathe that screwed-up British engineering-based nonsense, but I'm forced to use it. Being a lab guy makes using real units not just second nature but first! Early in my career I lived in the UK for two years, then Australia for the next three, and just loved living in a metric world. Everything is so easy, just move the decimal place back and forth. 1 litre of water weighs 1 kilogram! Genius.

[DaveD]

Alrighty, time for the Butt Update. Pulled it out to wrap in 3 layers of butcher paper and return to the kettle. Having to gradually open up the vents to keep things holding at 250ishF/120ishC as the charcoal burns its way across the insert. At first I could do it with the bottom vent closed, smoke-hole about 50% open, top vents about 1/3 open. Eventually migrated to top vent & smoke-hole wide open, finally had to open the bottom vent a bit too.

I have no idea where the original probe locations were after wrapping, so just stuck 'em back in there trying to get one on either side of the bone as I had before. Temps drifting down as the paper soaks with juice and it all heats up, then it will take off again. Bark and color look wonderful. I was also able to collect about half a cup/120ml of drippings caught in a foil boat on the charcoal grate under the roast, and have strained that into a foil-lined pyrex pan that I'll use to roast the taters that'll go along with dinner.






Steady as she goes...

[DaveD]

Welp, that kettle fire just died right down, even adding some unlit to the seemingly-robust coals didn't take. Time was slipping away so I fired up my pellet smoker to 300F/150C (took all of ten minutes) and popped the wrapped butt in there while I have the sides in the oven. Almost at target T now after making that move, and then I can rest it awhile before I pull that pig. Strikes me that this will now be SOP for kettle-smoked cuts: do the first X hours to get the wood smoke from the kettle, then move it to the pellet smoker to take advantage of its hands-free 100% rock solid temps while the kitchen oven is otherwise occupied. No more worries about late-stage fuel probs, and I can use each tool for its strongest suit. Win!

Next up: after-action. Stay tuned...

[DaveD]

Using B&B, and for most of this I had the bottom vent closed anyway, so that wouldn't matter. But once I did start opening the bottom vent, I made sure to sweep thoroughly before setting it wherever, to make sure no ash was in the way.

[DaveD]

rickgregory also, I did indeed get a solid 8 hours, but this butt ended up taking almost 11 total. I'm sure there is a way to have kept it fueled the whole time, I just haven't worked that out yet (only the 4th cook on this kettle).

[rickgregory]

Oh, 8 is pretty good. You can sweep the ash out and refuel (ideally with lit coals) to get more, but that's a pain since, to avoid ash getting on the food, yo have to remove it, do all the above, put the food back and let temps get back up.

[DaveD]

Alright, end result was pretty stupendous. The pork was melt-in-mouth tender, super juicy, super smoky. Absolutely great, we are delighted with the outcome. My sides were not so great: roasted some cauliflower slabs, but should have done so right on the foil with the EVOO & seasonings instead of on a rack above the foil-lined pan. Very dry and limp. Roasted some taters using the Jess Pryles recipe I've been favoring lately, using drippings I collected from the kettle. Very tasty but made the taters stick to the foil despite my straining the liquid before adding it. No biggy though, still tasted great.

[texastweeter]

Not what I was expecting and now I'm disappointed

[DaveD]

Well, not sure what one might have expected from a smoked pork butt, but sorry to disappoint...

[texastweeter]

I mean based on the title of the thread! Sorry, the que looks amazing though.

[Washblue]

Lmao texastweeter

[WayneT]

Dave, I've had great success smoking cauliflower steaks (1.5" thick) on my PB. It takes about 1.5 hours but they come out golden brown, tender and smoky. My $0.02.

Glad the butt came out great. I had the opposite problem yesterday on my SNS​ smoking a rack of spare ribs. Early in the cook, I had already come close to snuffing out the fire with too little airflow so went in the other direction.


Finally, near the end of the cook (~3:00 pm) I closed the bottom vent entirely and tried to control the temp with just the top vent. That worked out better and as the ribs neared the end of their smoky journey, temp settled in between 225 and 250F. my target. It was quite windy here yesterday so that method may not work next time without a stiff breeze drafting across the top vent. But, don't you love the FB 2 and all the data it provides? I annotate my cooks like crazy with it so I have no excuses not to either nail the same cook or improve if needs be.

[DaveD]

I do love the FB app! My one beef with it is that one has to mash buttons fast to power the thing down - hold down the bottom button then hit the top one in the five seconds you have before that menu disappears. Definitely a first-world problem