Can you leave meat on PBC hooks for the whole cook?

Monkey Uncle said:

Thanks for the quick reply, guys.

Trying to find the one perfect smoker is tough. I'm pretty much backyard only, so I can't really justify owning multiple smokers. Decisions, decisions...

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I don't think for ease of use, price, and food quality you can beat the PBC. They are great cookers and you can crank out some AMAZING food. If you order one get the turkey hanger so you can be a rock star this thanksgiving.

Stlsportster said:

Try wrapping in butchers paper instead of foil. Also if you do use foil don't add beef broth or any liquid to the foil before you wrap. That's what changes it from brisket to pot roast.

Also. Do a search in the bar at the bottom of the page for Bludawgs KISS method.

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How do you modify the KISS method to cook on a PBC?

I hang the brisket for the first few hours...until it reaches 160ish. Then foil or wrap in butcher paper and put it on the grate.

Interesting question. I did a cook of 4 little Boston butts on the PBC last Saturday and I thought about how I could get away with hanging them for the whole cook.

I'm going to try a 304 stainless steel collapsible fry basket from Amazon and try hanging my shoulders in that. They cost $5.00 to $10.00 on Amazon, although I'm sure you could buy a 10 pack of them from a chinese restaurant supply store for $20.00. Here is the link to the one I'm looking at because it's free 2 day shipping on Prime, but it's a generic item, and there are literally a dozen brands with what appears to be an identical product just on Amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/Stainless-Fo...coding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=4YKPVMNFNDQJHWJ947ZN

Seems like it could be a good hanging solution so pork butts are truly set it and forget it on the PBC. No more pulling, wrapping, and racking!

NY Pork Junkie please let us know how this turns out

The stainless basket is 9" in diameter, so I brought some 9" plates out to the PBC to see how they would fit. You can see from the pic that they would take up quite a bit of real estate. I'm still curious to try it since I generally only do 1 pork shoulder at a time, but the size of the basket would indeed make it impossible to do more than 2 in this way. Still, at only $10.00, it's cheaper than buying a split grate, which is the only other way I can think of to do a cook with pork shoulder (which needs a grate) and ribs (which doesn't).



I think I might have another idea of how to hang my butts. See the picture below. I took a 4' piece of 1/8" stainless steel cable, and formed it into a loop. Then for some reason I thought it would be interesting to put a ferrule in the middle to make it a double loop (I'm pretty sure it's unnecessary and possible counterproductive). The wire is a stainless 1/8" 7/7 (seven strands of 7 wires each). It's good for a 1960 lb load, which is probably sufficient for most pork butts I cook, even with a over-engineering fudge factor applied .



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. Here's a picture of it of the duck hanging in the PBC. I think it's 10x more secure than hooks, and the surface area of the cable is so large there is no way it's going to sink through the bark.

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 absurd variation of 4 butts, and 4 racks of ribs (not something I foresee doing however!)

I think it'll work great! Now I've got to figure out what to do with the other 100' of cable. I probably don't need 25 butt slings...

Good solution Pork Junkie. Heck if you were really worried you could throw some butcher's string around it too.

yes, you can hang all the meats for a full cook in a pbc. Only brisket would be my worry. I have done it with great results.

How feasible would it be to hang butts or ribs in a WSM, unhook, add the water pan and grates, then place the food unwrapped on the upper and lower grates to finish off?

So you've hung pork butts on the hooks and taken them all the way to the probe-tender, pullable stage, without them falling off?

There is another option - hang the butts, get them to a certain point- and finish them in the oven. That takes all the wondering away and still leaves all your PBC space available.

I would not cook one all the way on the hooks -if it is fork tender, the chances of the hooks ripping out would be pretty good.

Monkey Uncle said:

So you've hung pork butts on the hooks and taken them all the way to the probe-tender, pullable stage, without them falling off?

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Yep! I have used it in comps before. You just have to make sure that you hook them very well....I have had one fall off though. It is a very delicate balancing act. I would recommend that you wrap it, but it can be done. You basically have to hook it under the bone.

Here is the solution that I came up this weekend to get around hooks. I call it a Pork-Swing and it works great! It comes in real handy when you've got other things hanging and you can't put in the grate.

Here's a link to the build discussion with links to where to get the parts to make one:

https://www.bbq-brethren.com/forum/showthread.php?t=252863

Check out NY Pork Junkie he has solved the dilemma of hanging meat during the entire cook, butt sling.