Christmas pulled pork

[Tim in PA]

I attempted my first overnight cook and am happy to report it a resounding success. I got home a little after 4pm with my 2 year old son and started juggling getting dinner in the oven and setting up the grill and the dry rub on the just shy of 8lb shoulder picnic. The 2 year old is the wildcard. You never know what kind of attention you'll need to give him. Haha.

I used a "carolina bbq" style dry rub that I mixed together the night before. I scored the skin on the picnic. Man, that stuff is tough. I definitely need to get my Shun sharpened.




I set up a 2+2+1 chain using KBB and a water pan under to drop the drippings and provide some moisture. The outside temp over night was in the 40 with a mist type rain but were expecting a steady rain early in the morning.

The grate temp was holding pretty steady around 250º. Here she is after 3 hours.



I've used the chain method a lot but never when it was this cold. I was really surprised how fast the chain was moving along. I had to add onto it after about 5 hours. As the night turned to early morning the grate temp and dome temp seemed to differ even more. Some areas of the grate were close to 350º when the dome only showed just over 200º. I once again had to add more to the chain, I believe it was around 3am right around the "stall" which seemed to last FOREVER. If I didn't know about the stall I would have been really worried.

On the weekdays I'm usually waking up at 5am so I was starting to get worried that I'd have to be late for work. 5am comes around and I take a quick shower (I smelled amazing btw lol). The meat was right around 195 and the probe goes in beautifully so I pull it and wrap it in foil.

This is around 6am after I take the foil off.



I start to pull it and realize I need to get my kid over to the sitters. Drop him off and stop back at home to finish pulling it. The bone pulls out clean and everything pulls perfectly. This is by far the best pulled pork I've ever had so far. I'm super excited for everyone to try it tomorrow morning for Christmas brunch. I just hope that I can bring it back to temp without drying it out. I saved the drippings and will slowly reheat it in the oven with it cover and add fluid (drippings or apple juice) to help keep it moist.

Without further ado, here is the money shot:

[SixZeroFour]

Gorgeous looking bark! Very nice Tim!!

[1buckie]

Bowled a total strike on that one !!!!!


WOW!!!


that makes me want to get one out & cook it even if all the other food we got ready just sits there.....