Smoked Pork Shoulder in BFE (w/ pr0n)

Hey guys-

So, this weekend I went an annual camp-out at Trego Hot Springs in Black Rock Desert, Nevada with some friends of mine. Feeling the need to contribute my new-found prowess at making decent Q, I had planned on bringing my UDS with me. However, just the other day, I figured out how to get my 22.5 OTS to cruise at 225-250 very reliably, so I decided to take that instead. It worked out great!

First, here's our camp. You can see the OTS in the foreground.



Like I said, it's BFE. Like camping on the moon. I love it. :wink: It's a great place for motorcycles, drinking, guns, jackrabbits, tannerite, and *safe* combinations thereof. You know, stuff your wife won't let you do. Except my wife is cool, and she was there with me, having all kinds of redneck fun.

I used Chris Lilly's recipe, which can be found here:
http://www.bbq-brethren.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1343659
The day before we left, I prepared the rub and the injection marinade (EDIT: I cut the recipe in half, as it was for a 16-pound roast), stuffed the roast into a gallon ziploc (barely), and double-bagged it. When in camp, I injected and rubbed the roast and got it on the grill at 8 am.

On the OTS, I found that if I light half a chimney of charcoal, fill a Weber indirect charcoal basket to flush (not heaping) with that lit charcoal, open the bottom damper to about a 1/8" slit and the top to about 3/16", it'll sit right in there at about 230-240 (in 70 degrees outside temp). It worked GREAT. I got some Weber-branded applewood chunks and just tossed one directly on the coals, as it wasn't getting quite enough heat on the grate just above the coals. I only went through three ~3" cube chunks and had smoke rolling out the whole time.

Here it is at about 150 degrees, fat cap up. I've got one probe of my Maverick ET-7 in the meat and the other one held up by the meat but measuring air temp. I would've used my ET-73, but I fried the meat probe on my gas grill... :doh: The charcoal basket in the foreground has coals and wood in it; the one on the other side is empty. Of course I completely forgot to add apple juice to the meat during cooking and before foiling, but it still turned out VERY moist.



The meat took 10 hours to reach 200 degrees, and I only went through three refills of charcoal. In fact, I added the third batch of charcoal only 1.5 hours before it was done. This thing rivals the efficiency of a UDS, and is great for low-and-slow cooking! Being new to using a Weber kettle, this is a revelation to me, but is probably common knowledge to you guys. :wink:

And here's the carnage! Everyone LOVED it. For sauce, I took a bottle of Sweet Baby Ray's Original and cut it about 50/50 with apple cider vinegar, and it was incredible.



I highly recommend Chris Lilly's recipe, especially if you're new to this like I am. I tried another recipe before on some small butt roasts that involved marinating for 24 hours AND injecting AND letting it sit for 6 hours, and this recipe doesn't require all of that prep work AND it tasted much better. This one's a very safe bet, and applewood smoke works incredibly well with it.

Definitely gonna add this recipe to my list of go-to recipes. :thumb:

gsmith said:

pork looks tasty

what does BFE mean?

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Bum Fu*k, Egypt. It's a mythical location that is somehow as far away from every kind of civilization as you can possibly get.

Interestingly, in airline acronym coding, BFE stands for Bielefeld, Germany...

-Rodney

Johnny_Crunch said:

I think it means he is in a remote area :wink:

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Yep. :thumb: http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=40.771231,-119.116913&spn=0.003868,0.008256&t=h&z=18

{Midnight ☼ Smoke};1400512 said:

Food looks good and it sounds like a lot of fun being in BFE...

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And for some reason, good food tastes twice as good when you're out in the desert, so there were some weak knees all around when I served this stuff. :-D

Riverside BBQ said:

I just picked up a 22.5 Weber Kettle. I was wondering how it handled, low and slow. I had heard it could produce some good Q. Thanks for the tips. It'll save me a lot of time tweaking the vents.

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Here's more on that: In the first batch of coals, I had actually used about 2/3 chimney, which filled the one basket heaping and the other basket with about 8 briquettes. At that point, it really wanted to run at 285 or so. I got some water and doused the coals in the far basket and a couple of the briquettes in the corner of the near basket, and all was well. When the coals ran low, i.e. it was down to a single layer of coals in the basket, I just dumped more coals in on top of them, left the lid off for about 5 minutes to get the coals going, and then just replaced the lid. Also, when I say a 1/8" slit on the bottom damper, that's a the widest point... it was barely cracked open. Temperature was measured by that probe that is protruding from the side of the meat. After foiling, I just used the scrunched up foil at the end of the roast to wrap around the top half of the temp probe.

$15 for those charcoal baskets is a great deal, BTW. Also, the swing-up cooking grate is very nice to have. I had bought that for my UDS, so when I got the OTS, I just swapped grates and all is well. I don't really need it on the UDS anyway!

bbquzz said:

Looks like good food and great fun. Probably easier to haul the OTS rather than the UDS, especially when you are going to BFE. I started my BBQing with a OTG and a Smokenator, like you said pretty easy to get in running low and slow.

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Yep, hauling the UDS out to BFE is more of a BFD for sure.

I'm intrigued by the smokenator. One side of my roast *was* a bit more dry than the other...

So, I'm thinking I might be missing something here... If I was to fill both baskets half full of unlit charcoal and then add 1/4 chimney of lit charcoal to each one, I'd probably get the same result AND wouldn't have to add coals as often (not that every 4 hours is a pain), along the same lines as the Minion method. I think what I've found is not that 1/2 chimney of charcoal is the total quantity I need, but that this is the total quantity that should be lit *at one time* to set up a burn rate that keeps the temp I'm looking for, without having too much charcoal lit and having to wait for the thing to slow down. As we UDS users know, that takes much longer than ramping it up! Maybe I'll try this next time, as well as some radiant barriers to keep the pork from "seeing" the coals. A water pan above one of the charcoal baskets might be a good idea too!

I always tell myself that no matter how much everyone loved it, it can always be better. There's always something I didn't do quite right that can be improved, and at this point in the game, those "somethings" are usually fairly significant. :wink: