Pulled Pork

As they say – “I like Pig Butts and I cannot lie!” I’ve had it on my BBQ list to do since I got my Big Green Egg. Well, this was the weekend to scratch it off of the said list. It was really easy to do and it tasted great.

Here’s my process:

Start with 7 – 8 lb Boston Butt. (I got a 7.75 pounder at HEB.)

Take the meat out of the package and put it in a large cake pan. Rinse off all the blood and liquid and pat the Boston Butt dry with a few paper towels.

Rinse and dry the cake pan and put the Boston Butt back in the pan.

Unless you want yellow hands, put on some disposable food preparation gloves and slather the meat with plain yellow mustard. (The mustard serves as a binding agent for the rub. Once cooked, the mustard leaves no taste.) Make sure to put the mustard on all sides of the meat.

Liberally sprinkle your favorite rub onto the mustard coating. I used Dizzy Pig’s Dizzy Dust. 

Pat the thick coating of rub into the meat. When you don’t see any mustard, then you probably put on enough of the rub.

Cover the cake pan with foil and put it in the refrigerator for an hour or so. Some recipes say to let the rub sit over night. Some say that soaks into the food too much and you should only have the rub on for 30 minutes. An hour should do just fine.

While the meat is waiting, get your Big Green Egg ready.

Make sure your Egg is cleaned out and ready for a long cook. Empty  out all the old charcoal an ashes and filled her up with new lump charcoal to the top of the fire box.

Light the coals and set up for an indirect cook (plate setter legs up) at 275 degrees. Add a foil lined drip pan on top of the plate setter to catch the grease. Don’t add water to the pan – you don’t need that with a Big Green Egg. Add a couple of chunks of oak and a couple of chinks of hickory for smoke. Don’t soak the wood – just put the wood in with the lump charcoal and let them burn in for awhile. Wait to put the meat on until the temperature is stabilized at 275 degrees and there is no thick white smoke. You want a very faint bluish colored smoke.

While not necessary, I used a Stoker temperature controller for this cook and it worked like a champ. I set the temperature for 275 degrees and it kept it steady all day long.

Put the meat on – fat cap side up. If you have one, insert the temperature probe into the meat. Close the lid and relax for a few hours.

When internal temperature of the meat reaches 170 degrees (it took about 5 hours), take the Boston Butt out and wrapped it in a double layer of aluminum foil. Before sealing it tightly, add 1/3 cup of apple juice.

Once sealed, put the temperature probe back into the meat, through the foil.

Return the meat to the Big Green Egg and continue cooking until the meat’s internal temperature reaches 200 degrees. (This took another couple of hours – about 7 hours total.)

Once the target temperature is reached, unwrap the Boston Butt and transfer it to another double layer of foil. (This probably wasn’t necessary – I could have just kept it in the other foil. I retained the liquid from the first foil and saved it in a bowl.)  Anyway, wrap the the foiled Boston Butt in two towels and put it in a cooler for an hour.

After an hour, open up the foil. The Boston Butt will look like a charred mess! That’s how it is supposed to look.

The meat will be extremely tender. There is a large bone in there – it pulls right out.

My Thoughts

I’ll admit it – I watch a lot of BBQ competition shows on TV. I had great intentions about pulling out the “money muscle” and making a great presentation. I got excited and started pulling the Boston Butt apart and then next thing I new, I had a giant bowl of pulled pork.

I heated up the bowl of reserved liquid that was in the foil and added about a cup of it to the meat. It probably wasn’t necessary because the pulled pork was already so moist.

 I have always heard that you are supposed to put cole slaw on top of pulled pork sandwiches. I don’t like the cole slaw from the grocery store deli. So, I found a recipe on-line and made some cole slaw while I had a few hours to kill with the Boston Butt cook.

Click here to get the cole slaw recipe – it was great.

We kept the dinner simple. Pulled pork sandwiches with some BBQ sauce on it. I used Charcoaler BBQ Sauce from El Paso that a friend gave me. I put cole slaw on top – that was a great idea. Then we heated up a can of Bush’s baked beans.

Dinner was great. I had plenty of pulled pork left over. So, I’ll start researching to see what I can do with pulled pork.