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Family Pork Butt

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    Family Pork Butt

    This weekend, I have a few cousins, my dad, and my uncle over for a sort of guy's night. We held it at my place because I had offered to cook.

    First off, I want to say that the following combination basically verbatim is an extremely righteous combo:
    Pulled pork + slaw + vinegar sauce is how I rate most barbecue joints. It's my favorite thing in barbecue. Last night, I made stuff that's better than anything I've ever eaten out.

    Additionally, I made buns for sandwiches using this recipe from the Kitchn. (By the time I had noticed the brioche bun recipe it was too late. The proof time was too long! I definitely want to give those a try next time.)

    Finally, I am a huge, huge fan of Alton Brown's pressure cooker greens.

    This was an excellent meal. Everyone left very happy.

    For anyone who wonders, here's the process I used:
    1. Sous-vide a 16lbs. pork butt for about 12 hours at 165ºF.
    2. Remove it, cut it in half, and chill it a bit in the fridge.
    3. Take it out and salt it while it's still a little moist and put it back in the fridge.
    4. Take it out the next day, spritz it, and put the rub on. Leave overnight.
    5. Two-zone at 225ºF, cook and smoke for 6 hours.
    We got good bark and pretty good smoke. You don't have to let it sit as long as I did. I just like to break up my big cooks over a couple days.

    So, a few issues and lessons learned:

    I need something other than a large stock pot for sous-vide. I cheated and used some plastic container that was too big. It took the Anova like 6 hours to raise the temperate from around the 130ºF to 165ºF.

    I used to follow the advice noted in the coleslaw recipe where you salt the cabbage to draw out liquid. I think I got the idea from Good Eats. I took the advice of the linked article and didn't. Thank goodness. I have been following that advice blindly forever and it's one of the reasons I rarely make slaw—it's just too much of a commitment. Just toss the stuff together and BOOM! Slaw.

    I didn't love the slaw on its own. It was okay. However, it is probably the best sandwich or mixer slaw I've ever had specifically because I don't think it stands out too much on its own. It's a better compliment piece and it does it really well.

    Pork butt is extremely forgiving, as anyone who has cooked it knows. It's ready to go after 8-12 hours at 165ºF in sous-vide. What's better is that you don't need to hit 165ºF to be done. You can go by happily and you'll likely hit a sort of mini stall around 180ºF. Normally, the stall is a pain but when you're trying to have food ready and it's ready, you can just leave it in the smoker. I wanted my guests to see these things leave the smoker.

    I had a bit of an "incident." I often sous-vide meat in the bags it is packed in. It's just plain easier that taking it out and bagging it again. This has never been an issue before, but in this case the bag ruptured over night spilled juice into the water. Besides making a mess of the container, I was effectively engaging in rib terrorist like activities. The meat was exposed to water, but it didn't creep all the way in. I'm guessing maybe 1/3? I lost juice to the water and some from the meat I imagine. I have no idea how long it was in this position because it happened while I was sleeping.

    Fortunately, I save my purges from past cooks and had a pork purge from a couple weeks ago. (I reduced to it about a 1/3 of what the picture shows so it was super concentrated.) I heated that and mixed it in with the pork as I was pulling it.

    I think I'm going to make a sandwich from leftovers right now. I'll post a picture of that later.

    (I have no pictures. This actually gets me in double trouble. Not only do I have no shots of the meal, my mom who is a huge genealogy buff wanted pictures of me and my cousins together which rarely happens. We were too full to remember.)

    #2
    Not my typical breakfast but... I'll live. Haha.
    Attached Files

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    • HouseHomey
      HouseHomey commented
      Editing a comment
      Looks like a fine breakfast. What do you mean?

    #3
    Good recovery!

    Comment


      #4
      Ah, so there was pork! At least enough for one sandwich.

      Good job! Thanks for the details. I haven't tried SVQ pork yet.

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        #5
        Beautiful!

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          #6
          Your sandwich looks delicious and a nice writeup!

          Comment


            #7
            binarypaladin, Just what fuzzydaddy Said! I appreciated your description of the Souix Veee Doooo Process! I have a New Unused Joule still in the Box❓
            I just don't PARLEEE VOOO SOUIX VEEE DOOO so Gutte❓
            Eat Well and Prosper! From a Backyard Cremator in Fargo ND, Dan

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              #8
              Excellent write up. Where in the world did you find a 16lb. pork butt? Largest I've seen around here are 9-10lbs.

              Comment


                #9
                Was that 16pounder cut in half already! That's usually the case. Great write up! I've done that SV pork now 3times but shut them into smaller pieces.

                Comment


                  #10
                  The butt was whole. It pretty much "fell" in half after I took it out of the broken sous-vide bag. I cut it a little. I also cut off the mushy tip that was the most directly exposed to the water.

                  The butt was 16 lbs. I got the biggest one I could from Costco.
                  Attached Files

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                  • binarypaladin
                    binarypaladin commented
                    Editing a comment
                    You can actually see the line down the middle where it split. It was connected though, just loosely.

                  • ecowper
                    ecowper commented
                    Editing a comment
                    That's two butts ... Costco sells pork butts in a two pack with bone removed. :-)

                  • binarypaladin
                    binarypaladin commented
                    Editing a comment
                    Well, that answers that. I feel a bit silly now.

                  #11
                  binarypaladin That looks like two butts in a single pack: it seems to be pretty common. I wonder if the "loose connection" you saw was just gunk that gave the appearance of it sticking together. Anyway, no trouble there.

                  The bag incident isn't so bad: water doesn't really come gushing in, you just have some dilution of the juices (and lose some of your purge to the bathwater). No reason to throw away the contents of the bag, just reduce them and resign yourself to having less.

                  I'm a bit more curious about the "stall" you mention between 130 and 165 F, because that's way too long for anything under 20 gallons What are the mechanics here? Is your hot water 130 F, so you fill your container from the tap and bring it to temp with the Anova? Or did you get the water up to temp, drop the meat in, notice that it dropped to 130 and it took hours to climb back to 165? What container did you end up using?

                  The single most important thing you can do to reduce heat dispersion is to cover your water bath with plastic wrap to reduce evaporation, especially at relatively higher temperatures like 165. (Of course it wouldn't really matter if you cooked a steak at 131 F for an hour.) This is absolutely paramount in case you're using a wide shallow container like a half-filled cooler, because it's the surface area at the water/air interface that matters. So, for instance, if you're using an open container, a tall round pot is more heat efficient than a wide rectangular box. I cannot overstate how much of a difference this makes: cover your containers, people!

                  The second most important thing you can do is to use an insulated container (covered, of course!). For some reason I can't find them with a quick amazon search, but most restaurant supply stores have 24"x16"x12" polystyrene containers that cost a few bucks and are perfect for this job. Not the fancy Cambro ones with indentations to slide hotel pans in them: just crappy little boxes of 1/2" thick polystyrene with removable lids. They will easily contain 4 gallons of water plus 20 lb of meat, which is round about the limit of what an Anova can comfortably heat and circulate. You can even cut a hole in the lid to accommodate your circulator so you don't need to worry about plastic wrap.

                  Or you could buy a 20 qt Rubbermaid container with a lid. That's more expensive for less capacity and worse heat retention, but it can double as your bacon/corned beef curing vessel if you can fit it in your fridge

                  Comment


                    #12
                    I used a pretty large container. As soon as I start measuring things in gallons, the likelihood of reduction is pretty low. Haha.

                    As for the stall on the sous-vide, I think I was working around 10 gallons, but maybe 8. There were no markings on the container, I just had to find something that would fit. It was way deeper than it needed to be though. The hottest water from my tap is right around 130ºF. It took hours to climb. The butt was fridge temp when I put it in and I didn't wait for the water to come to temp first. (I generally don't on cooks over 90ish minutes.)

                    I'll check again on my next big cook. It's possible it was the result of me getting the WiFi notification late or something but when I was downstairs checking it periodically, it was rising really slowly.

                    My next kitchen upgrade is going to be a better sous-vide container. Some kind of hard polycarbonate unit and maybe something with one of those expanding racks and a lid. Although I hadn't considered polystyrene. You're talking about those white, cheap, throwaway coolers, right? (Of course, Google answered that for me.)

                    I don't mind the two butts. I like more surface area anyway. But I'll keep in mind that's what's in there. I remember thinking, "Man, that must have been a huge pig."

                    Comment


                      #13
                      One thing to keep in mind, binarypaladin , from a food safety viewpoint, is that the very center of any food put into the sous vide bath has to come up to 130°F within 6 hours, according to Douglas Baldwin, sous vide food safety expert. He recommends that large pieces of meat be cut into smaller chunks to make this happen.

                      I like the Lipavi polycarbonate containers with lids that I bought at Amazon. I have the smaller and a larger one. I use the smaller one for longer pieces like pork tenderloins as well as for pieces that are too large to fit into the stockpot. I use the extra large one when sous vide-ing several pieces of meat, like pastrami. The lids fit nicely and work great with no evaporation, at least over the 36 hour cooks I've done.

                      Small Lipavi with Lid: 3 gallons (12 qts) 13" wide 10" long 8" high

                      Large Lipavi with Lid: 6.5 gallons (26 qts) 13" wide 21" long 8" high

                      Kathryn

                      Comment


                      • binarypaladin
                        binarypaladin commented
                        Editing a comment
                        I think I did fine on the temp. It took time to get to 165, but the water was around 130 from the start. Additionally, when I smoked it, I ended up hitting right around 180 anyway so everything should be dead.

                      #14
                      binarypaladin If it was 8-10 gallons of water and you left it uncovered, then yeah, I'm not surprised it took that long: the maths works out (1 kW for 6 hours to increase water temperature by 35 F = 20 C gives about 82 litres or 21.5 gallons, so you lost about half your energy to evaporation, dispersion and warming up the meat, which is about typical).

                      I think your arms and back are a better judge of weight than your eye. 16 lbs of meat, plus 8 gallons of water, plus the weight of the container adds up to over 100 lbs. I trust your avatar but I wonder how easy it was to move around

                      fzxdoc makes a great point about food safety: in this case I think you were ok because your water was at 130 and rising, and because you had two pieces next to each other instead of a massive shoulder, but yeah, generally speaking it's a better idea to get the water up to temp and break up larger chunks. Plus, I understand the convenience of plonking your cryovac-ed meat straight in, but I prefer to do my trimming with raw meat.

                      I am exactly talking about the cheap-o flimsy coolers boxes: they're waterproof and a lot more solid than they look, and they make amazing faux cambros as well.

                      Big polycarbonate containers are the gold standard in commercial kitchens, and I have a large gastronorm-sized one that I use for this purpose. When I want to pull all the stops I nest it inside one of the cheap coolers and it basically holds the temp by itself.

                      Comment


                      • binarypaladin
                        binarypaladin commented
                        Editing a comment
                        At the end of the day, good insulation and a lid are imperative for big cooks. The cooler is brilliant. I think I'm going to nab one this weekend. I ate leftover pork basically all week and was not sad in the least.

                      #15
                      Okay, I could not figure out how to start a new post, so I will put it here and hopefully get a response from some of the seasoned veterans. I have a 3.5 lbs Snake River Farms collar I am smoking this weekend for pulled pork, I am hoping I can get a rough estimate on the time it will take to smoke at 225. We are going up to our townhouse in State College and I do not want it to finish while I am playing golf and have to relay on my girlfriend or one of her family members to care for the hunk of meat. Click image for larger version  Name:	IMG_0469.jpg Views:	1 Size:	2.10 MB ID:	360456Click image for larger version  Name:	IMG_0468.jpg Views:	1 Size:	1.93 MB ID:	360457

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