Butt Sling for Grate-Free Pork Butts in Drum Smokers

I'm trying to figure out a way to hang pork butt in my PBC (or a UDS) from start to finish, without the need to finish it on the grate. Even though foiling isn't necessary on the PBC since it cooks even big butts in 5-6 hrs, you still need to pull it off of the meat hooks at 165 and set it on the grate before the meat gets so tender the hooks pull out. This is especially problematic when I've got a slew of other things hanging, and I've got to pull everything to put a grate in. Since I don't own a split grate, it poses logistical challenges to cooking ribs & butts and chickens at the same time. My goal is a set it and forget it pork butt that can just hang for the whole cook like everything else in my drum.

The best solution that I could thing of was to make a sling out of stainless steel. There is probably a better solution out there, given the ubiquity of UDS's and PBC's, and if anybody knows a better way, please let me know! Anyways, this all I could think of so I'll post what I did to get some feedback on whether or not folks think it will even work, how it might be improved, or how it might be scrapped all-together for a better solution.

The sling is just 1/8" 7/7 stainless steel wire rope (seven strands of seven wires). I took 4' of it, made it continuous with an aluminum ferrule, then put a ferrule in the middle to make two loops. In retrospect, putting one in the middle does make it look cool (infinity butt sling!), but I think it was probably unnecessary. All in all, it only cost $3.00 to make one, and only took about 60 seconds, so it hit my mark for cheapness and ease of assembly... :-D

You basically just put the butt on top of the cable, then pass one loop through the other hang off of that. One of the nice features of doing it this way is that it's basically a noose that self cinches, so that when the pork butt cooks down and shrinks, the cable just tightens up around it. Here is a pic of a 6lb test duck to see how it works. I think it's more secure than hooks, and the surface area of the cable is so large I don't think there is any way it's going to sink through the bark under it's own weight.

Another intriguing possibility would be to daisy-chain 2 together so that you could hang 2 pork butts per chain, one below the other. That could let me cook 8 pork butts at a time, or some variation of 4 butts, and 4 racks of ribs etc...

I think it'll work! But I do have to figure out what to do with the other 100' of cable, I probably don't need 25 butt slings... :crazy:
So what do guys think? Will it work? Is there a better way to do it?

Do you mean hang it with butchers twine, or use it in conjunction with the SS sling in order to hold it all together? I thought about using butchers twine instead of SS for the sling, but I was too paranoid that it might char and break over the course of a long cook.

That's a great looking rotisserie setup btw. That pork looks amazing! I might have to ask santa for one of those...:grin:

Well, I figure the best way to see what happens is to try it on a real boston butt. I popped in the grocery store on my way home a picked up a nice looking 7.5lb butt. It was only $1.69/lb, so the risk/return seems acceptable. A smarter man would put a grate on the coal tray so if it falls, it'll get a bit toasty, but won't be covered in charcoal. I think I'll do that; I can't abide the thought of good pork hitting the coals.

Well, at any rate, the experiment is in progress. It went on at 2:30pm. I expect it'll be done around 7:30pm.

Any bets on whether it'll survive in one piece?

Thingfish said:

Godspeed, NY Pork Junkie!

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Thanks Thingfish!

Well I just did a check-in at the 3 hr mark. Internal is reading 151. My wife is traveling so I've got 3 hungry kids ages 2,4, and 6 to feed, bathe, herd into bed. I won't be able to check it again for at least an hour and a half. I expect it'll be in the 190's by then.

I'm planning to take it all the way up to 205 internal. Pulling it at 198ish would be cheating. I think she'll hold together... :razz:

Well I put the kids to bed and checked the temp (it was still hanging...:shock. It was at about 179 degrees. I'm a little surprised that it's coming up so slowly since it was only a 7.5 pounder. I expected it to be at least 190, but then I usually wrap at 165.

I don't know whether it's coming up slower than usual because it's unwrapped, or if it's because my smoker is running a little cooler than normal. It could be both I suppose. I'm kind of kicking myself for gifting my Maverick to my Dad when he came to visit a week ago. Without my Maverick, I can't really tell how hot it is inside the smoker. All I have to go by is my thermapen.

I've been debating a getting a Fireboard since I gave away my Maverick, now I have a good rationalization. It would have been great to have the temp graphs waiting for me!

homesmoke said:

Good luck with the sling.
When mine get probe tender, I often have trouble lifting them off the grate in one piece. That would be enough for me to second putting a safety grate below it.

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Yeah, I think it's going to be interesting to see what happens too. I put a safety grate down below it...:icon_blush:

This may go down into my long list of ill-advised experiments. Still, it's fun to experiment, and even if it does spend a bit of time on the safety grate, it's still going to taste amazing. It already has the best bark I've ever put on a pork butt. The butt sling may turn out to be an incredibly bad idea, but it will have been worth it just to see the difference it makes not foiling it!

It worked! The butt made through the whole cook intact. I was kind of amazed really. I pulled it at 202 degrees.

Lessons Learned:

The bark was the best I have ever created. The flavor and texture was incredible. Although I was using my normal rub, there were notes of caramel that I didn't even know bark could produce. Since I have heretofore foil wrapped my butts at 165, the bark ordinarily looks great but is a bit soggy from the steaming. Not so this bark. It was crusty enough to make a tapping sound when hit with a fork.

That said, the meat was dryer than I am accustomed to. It was still delicious of course, but not the best I've produced. It's hard to say why because I completely screwed up the cook.

I totally underestimated the extra power necessary to "power through the stall" without foil. I compounded the issue by running out of charcoal precisely when I need the extra power. This happened because I didn't have a thermo reading the smoker temp (I gave mine to my Dad a little while ago). It's clear that I was running way, way too hot in the early part of the cook, because I basically ran out of charcoal 5 hrs into the cook without realizing it. By the time I realized it, I had wasted several hours of cook time so the meat had a long to time to dry out. The culprit I think was that I let my charcoal run in the chimney way too long at the start of the cook. I usually leave my charcoal in the chimney at the start of the cook for about 14-15 mins, but this time I left it in a lot longer, because I was using it to burn off any oils/chemicals in the stainless steel wire rope. I put the sling in the charcoal bit by bit all the way around the loop until it turned blue. I didn't even start that process until 13 mins, and I probably didn't get them into the PBC charcoal basket until well past the 20 minute mark. By doing so, I think the cook started out way to hot and burned through too much charcoal too quickly. I actually had to add a chimney of charcoal late in the cook just to get out of the stall, which I've never had to do before. I expected the cook to take 6hrs, but it wound up taking 10! So although the meat was dryer than I prefer, I have no way of knowing if that's because unfoiled butts are inherently dryer, or if it's just because I botched the cook like a bonehead. I'll just have to cook another butt to find out. :-D

Performance: The sling was actually way more stable and secure than I expected! When I took it off the rebar, I gingerly put a plate underneath it and picked it up by the plate. As it turns out, that was totally unnecessary. Once it was safely on my kitchen counter I tried bouncing it up and down by the cable to see when it would break. It actually took a lot of force! I think the reason for that was the placement of the bone (take a look at the pic). As luck would have it, the bone was right smack in the middle of where the cable was cinched on the butt. I think this really helped the structural stability. This is not always the case for boston butts however, I've had some that were nearly boneless, and some petite ones that were completely boneless. I'm curious as to how this method would work on a big, nearly boneless butt. I suspect it would be more precarious. One thing that did seem to occur was that every time I poked the butt with my thermopen to get a temp, it would swing a bit and knock a bit of the bark off. Where the wire was touching the meat becomes nicely seared, which produces an amazing flavor and texture, but also produces a band of thin "leather" around circumference of the butt which I think added to the structural stability. I also think it probably helped that the butt was a bit dryer side. Had I produced the kind of butt that basically requires a spatula to get it off the grate, it may well have spent time on the safety grate! I guess I'll have to do some more experimenting.