This is long and rather uninteresting, but could be of use to any WSM owner contemplating their first overnight smoke. Feel free to ask any questions you may have and if I can answer I certainly will.
I had two monster (12lb each) pork shoulders that had been in my fridge and needed to be used soon. I'd been planning for the last week and a half to wake up super early one of these mornings and get it going but alas late nights turned into late mornings so finally I decided to brave my first overnight cook on my Weber Smokey Mountain 22" last night.
In my brief experience with the WSM it holds temps like magic, so I felt confident giving this a try. I injected and rubbed the butts around 6pm and put them back in the fridge. Around 9pm I got the smoker going with a healthy (massive) heap of charcoal (minion method) and 6 large cherry wood chunks. By 9:30pm the smoker was at 250F so I put the butts on and closed the bottom dampers to about 33% open. By 10pm I ever-so-slightly adjusted the dampers to get the temp to hold at 250F and I was off to the races. I checked in again at 11pm and it was still at 250F with just the right amount of smoke coming out of the top damper. Went to bed by midnight and woke up at 8am on the dot. Like an excitable child on xmas morning, I rush down and check the smoker in my robe: 250F still! The WSM is a madman, giving a whole new definition to the word reliable. And contrary to the weather forecast, it ended up raining about an hour after I went to bed and all through the morning and afternoon. It didn't seem to affect the WSM performance at all.
Internal temp at 8am was 178F.. just breaking out of the stall (my plan to wake up around 4am and foil was thwarted thanks to a perfect rainy/autumn Oregon night providing me ample uninterrupted sleep). The upside to not foiling is I had a wonderful bark on the butts.. the best bark I've managed so far -- or so I thought! More on that shortly. By 1pm I had reached a perfect 203F on each butt so I wrapped them tight in foil and put them in my oven (not turned on, just a good holding spot) until 4pm.
Two things to note:
The bark was tasty, but the meat right under was pretty dry and almost like shoe leather. Fortunately I could 'tear' these slabs of hardened meat off in large/thin pieces to reveal the moist meat underneath. I maybe lost about 20% of the meat due to this hardened shell, but that's a small price to pay for the ease of smoking the butts overnight while sleeping. Had I managed to wake up and foil at 4am I likely would've avoided this dry meat on the surface. Still, it was an easy fix to remove the layer of tough meat before shredding the good stuff.
It was my first time injecting, and probably my last. I used Butcher's BBQ injection and while the process was novel, all it seemed to do was add a flavor and salt level that just didn't jive well with me. It wasn't bad per se, but it's entirely unnecessary. And all those phosphates and msg has had me chugging water all evening, my buddies too. I actually like the taste of real pork without additives, so I'm not sure why I injected in the first place. Likely to satiate my curiosity.
Next time I do an overnight smoke I'll be sure to set my alarm so I can spritz and foil when necessary, but overall I'm very pleased with the experience. I'm not a big thermometer guy, but I don't need to be thanks to the WSM.
I had two monster (12lb each) pork shoulders that had been in my fridge and needed to be used soon. I'd been planning for the last week and a half to wake up super early one of these mornings and get it going but alas late nights turned into late mornings so finally I decided to brave my first overnight cook on my Weber Smokey Mountain 22" last night.
In my brief experience with the WSM it holds temps like magic, so I felt confident giving this a try. I injected and rubbed the butts around 6pm and put them back in the fridge. Around 9pm I got the smoker going with a healthy (massive) heap of charcoal (minion method) and 6 large cherry wood chunks. By 9:30pm the smoker was at 250F so I put the butts on and closed the bottom dampers to about 33% open. By 10pm I ever-so-slightly adjusted the dampers to get the temp to hold at 250F and I was off to the races. I checked in again at 11pm and it was still at 250F with just the right amount of smoke coming out of the top damper. Went to bed by midnight and woke up at 8am on the dot. Like an excitable child on xmas morning, I rush down and check the smoker in my robe: 250F still! The WSM is a madman, giving a whole new definition to the word reliable. And contrary to the weather forecast, it ended up raining about an hour after I went to bed and all through the morning and afternoon. It didn't seem to affect the WSM performance at all.
Internal temp at 8am was 178F.. just breaking out of the stall (my plan to wake up around 4am and foil was thwarted thanks to a perfect rainy/autumn Oregon night providing me ample uninterrupted sleep). The upside to not foiling is I had a wonderful bark on the butts.. the best bark I've managed so far -- or so I thought! More on that shortly. By 1pm I had reached a perfect 203F on each butt so I wrapped them tight in foil and put them in my oven (not turned on, just a good holding spot) until 4pm.
Two things to note:
The bark was tasty, but the meat right under was pretty dry and almost like shoe leather. Fortunately I could 'tear' these slabs of hardened meat off in large/thin pieces to reveal the moist meat underneath. I maybe lost about 20% of the meat due to this hardened shell, but that's a small price to pay for the ease of smoking the butts overnight while sleeping. Had I managed to wake up and foil at 4am I likely would've avoided this dry meat on the surface. Still, it was an easy fix to remove the layer of tough meat before shredding the good stuff.
It was my first time injecting, and probably my last. I used Butcher's BBQ injection and while the process was novel, all it seemed to do was add a flavor and salt level that just didn't jive well with me. It wasn't bad per se, but it's entirely unnecessary. And all those phosphates and msg has had me chugging water all evening, my buddies too. I actually like the taste of real pork without additives, so I'm not sure why I injected in the first place. Likely to satiate my curiosity.
Next time I do an overnight smoke I'll be sure to set my alarm so I can spritz and foil when necessary, but overall I'm very pleased with the experience. I'm not a big thermometer guy, but I don't need to be thanks to the WSM.
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