- Joined
- Jan 14, 2006
- Messages
- 12,735
- Reaction score
- 15,624
- Points
- 113
- Location
- At home on the range in Wyoming
Previously I posted our test cooks for chicken and brisket, and again thanks for all the advise. Our first competition is still 4 months away and yesterday the adventure continued with pork butt. Since my last post the head cook has attended a judges class and is pre-registered at a couple of events, hopefully he can judge at least once before we cook. One team member has a new pellet smoker and has never smoked a butt.... so he was in charge of cooking two trimmed down butts. The kale boxes are getting easier to build, so we stuck with that garnish. We're cooking everything at 275°, so we stuck with that pit temp. We looked through about 30 examples of boxes, and picked four to use as a guide.
The good: Good balanced flavor and moistness. Tenderness was very good. We actually wound up with more (box worthy) pulled than we needed, and it all came from the horn and the little layer of strands that lives just under the fat cap. One butt's injection was Kosmo's + water, the other was Kosmos + apple/white grape. We liked them both.
The bad: We opted to cook this practice run in pans and the smoker was crowded. I think the pans influenced the airflow and confused the thermostat because we had temp swings. And even though the butts were wrapped at 155°, we overshot the color of the bark. The money muscles were skimpy and we had to also use the next inboard muscle for some of the slices.
The ugly: We allowed 15 minutes to breakdown each butt and get the meat into the box, the first one took 20 minutes... is this normal for most teams, or do boxes get easier to build as time goes on? The boxes were full and weighty, but is that too many choices for a novice team to submit? Is it safer to go with 6 slices and some pulled? The cook didn't have a de-fatter, so we weren't able to dip the meats in juice... but we thinned some sauce and tried to make due.
For next time: We'll only cook one butt and fine tune the cooking and resting time table. I'll probably go a tick stronger on the injection to push out more porky flavor. We'll do a traditional wrap instead of just covering the pan.
Here are photo's of the finished boxes for comment.
__________________
The good: Good balanced flavor and moistness. Tenderness was very good. We actually wound up with more (box worthy) pulled than we needed, and it all came from the horn and the little layer of strands that lives just under the fat cap. One butt's injection was Kosmo's + water, the other was Kosmos + apple/white grape. We liked them both.
The bad: We opted to cook this practice run in pans and the smoker was crowded. I think the pans influenced the airflow and confused the thermostat because we had temp swings. And even though the butts were wrapped at 155°, we overshot the color of the bark. The money muscles were skimpy and we had to also use the next inboard muscle for some of the slices.
The ugly: We allowed 15 minutes to breakdown each butt and get the meat into the box, the first one took 20 minutes... is this normal for most teams, or do boxes get easier to build as time goes on? The boxes were full and weighty, but is that too many choices for a novice team to submit? Is it safer to go with 6 slices and some pulled? The cook didn't have a de-fatter, so we weren't able to dip the meats in juice... but we thinned some sauce and tried to make due.
For next time: We'll only cook one butt and fine tune the cooking and resting time table. I'll probably go a tick stronger on the injection to push out more porky flavor. We'll do a traditional wrap instead of just covering the pan.
Here are photo's of the finished boxes for comment.
__________________