What temp do you do pork butt?

[RiverJeff]

I'm a 225 guy like the long over night operation. While "Cherry" is smoking the butt you will find me down on the dock night time cat fishing.
(Cherry is my Grid iron)

[Jfrosty27]

I have no patience for doing pork butt low and slow. So on the very rare occasion that I do make it, I use my Orion cooker. It’s a charcoal fired convection cooker with smoke and cooks very hot and fast. I never tested the internal temps but have read that it cooks at 450+. Two butts from a Costco 2 pack are perfectly done in around 4 1/2 - 5 hours every time. It’s foolproof. Way different than what has been said here but it works for me. The downside of the Orion cooker is that it’s a fuel hog. Therefore you need to fill it up with meat to justify the fuel cost. TONS of leftovers!

[Jfrosty27]

fzxdoc Yes Kathryn, it’s a turkey cooking machine! 18-20 lb turkeys are perfectly cooked in about 2.5 hours. They come out lightly smoked, golden brown, and incredibly juicy.

[synodog]

Good friend of mine has an Orion. We’ve had bbq at their place and it was great. Almost got one used for $80 a few years ago but was too slow.

[LA Pork Butt]

That Orion cooks a lot like a Cajun microwave.

[fuzzydaddy]

250 except I start the cook around 200 when I usually have thin white smoke. On my kettle.

[synodog]

I started at 225 but have evolved to 250 - 275.

[HawkerXP]

On the Weber's, 250ish. The PBC, Black Beauty, likes to run 270ish.

[Jerod Broussard]

Prolly 250-275. My Combustion will let me know on the next one what the surface is actually "cooking" at.

[Skip]

250-275 and always wrap when meat is 160-170. Family likes it so we're all happy.

[TripleB]

I do my butts on my PBC using the grate. There is no real temp control. Fill the basket with charcoal, place some oak chunks on top, pour about 1/2 chimney of lite charcoal over the top of the unlit oak and charcoal and let her rip.

Mop with a vinegar based sauce and get the internal temp up to around 190 degrees. Remove pork, wrap in foil and into a towel laden ice chest for a couple of hours.

Unwrap, pull pork, sauce and eat.

Clean PBC and repeat every few months.

[HawkerXP]

..., ..., ...!

[Clawbear57]

.........???,,,!

[Mosca]

260°, with a bump to 275° for the last hour, hit my timing almost perfectly: 11 hours. On at 6:45AM, 203° and off at 5:45PM. Final product is excellent.

[fzxdoc]

I always enjoy hearing about good cooks with a perfect result. Will this put you back on the PB bandwagon again? I can see a few PB omelettes on that griddle in your future...

K.

[Mosca]

I’m not sure. It’s still a lot of food for just us, and Mary Joan isn’t a huge fan. I’m thinking of frying some of it in bacon grease for a pulled pork/carnitas hybrid thing. Some mole, burrito shell, queso or cotija, onions, cilantro, lime, avocado.

[fzxdoc]

Yum!

[bbqLuv]

Traeger Timberline 850, set to 225*F, super smoke mode until a nice bark, then wrap with foil to collect the juice, time for rest at 205*F internal and probe tender, separated juice from fat to add to pullet pork butt.


20 hr. Pork Butt

[Finster]

260 -265 in the bronco.
280+ in the PBC

[bbqLuv]

Which is better, the Bronco or the PBC?

[Finster]

I think all of the best tasting food I’ve made has come off of the PBC

[MBMorgan]

Very similar to ssandy_561 ... but in my (lazy) case, I simply set my OG at 275ºF in Pro Mode (better smoke than PID mode) and since I no longer wrap, I just let it run overnight. So far, so good ...

[MBMorgan]

bbqLuv - It's pretty simple, really:
1. meat is ice-cold (but not frozen) when it goes on the OG.
2. cold meat plus the OG PRO mode (not PID; it oscillates around the set temp by +-15-20 degrees and is smokier than PID) = max smoke on the butt
3. 275F is fairly hot, so cooking will go faster than at 225F
4. If I wrap, it'll shave two or three hours off of the cook ... but who cares? I'll just start it late at night, get a bunch of sleep, and let it finish the next morning (and afternoon?).

[MBMorgan]

Con't:
5. If it's done early, I'll hold at 145+ in the oven until time to pull and serve.
6. Pork butt is so forgiving, that it doesn't matter how hard I try to screw it up ...

[bbqLuv]

Thank you
Traeger only has super smoke mode available from 165*F to 225*F
I kind of like the footprint of the OG

[surfdog]

I always aim for 225° if for no other reason than that is how I learned way back when. I’ve never really felt the need to change that. 225 & let it ride.

[bbqLuv]

Do you wrap? If so paper or foil?

[surfdog]

bbqLuv Rarely do I wrap anything. When I started this journey many years ago, that wasn’t really a thing. At least not where I grew up…so it never really even occurred to me. It wasn’t until I discovered sites like this that I discovered that people wrap all sorts of meats. The only people I knew that did, prior to sites like this, seemed to do so to cover up bad techniques/habits. Like a friend that would otherwise burn his ribs…small gas grill, too high a flame…yeah, that’s a problem. LOL

[bbqLuv]

surfdog
It was not until I retired a few years back that I decided to BBQ/smoking as a hobby.
Now it is almost becoming an obsession.
I started out wrapping and I found it produces good BBQ.
Maybe it is time to expland?

[jfmorris]

Mosca I base my cooking temp upon how quickly I need to get the butt done.

If I want to eat it at lunch the next day, I will start it mid to late evening the night before, and run it overnight at 225F, trusting my fan controller to maintain the temp. When I wake up I crank it to 275, and let it finish, usually by 9am, and hold until noon.

If I want to eat it for dinner, I now fire up the smoker at 275, start the butt first thing in the morning, and if it is still not past the stall by early to mid afternoon - say 2:30pm, I'll wrap in foil to speed it up, and increase temp to 300, with the goal to pull it off the smoker at 5pm, for a 6pm dinner time.

So I really use the temp to control not the quality of the product so much as how fast it gets done. I don't want to go overnight at 275 or 300, as my meat will get done while I'm still asleep. But during the day I will go at those higher temps to push through the stall and get done faster.

[bbqLuv]

well said, I learning that in my retirement BBQ learning

[Richard Chrz]

I always shoot for 235, a 15 degree swing either leaves me in the same zone of where I like to cook them.