Does 35 lbs of Boston Butt fit on a BGE??
Tomorrow is my birthday. 37 years. 37 raises an obvious question. Does 37 lbs of boston butt fit on the Big Green Egg? Or, because that was all they had, does 35 lbs of boston butt fit on my large BGE? I know I can do a single butt well. Can I do 4 well?
The answer is: YES! But not without a bit of egg-gineering in the process.
I picked up an 18.5″ cooking grid from Home Depot, along with 3 foot long, 3/8″ threaded rods and a handful of nuts and washers. I chopped the foot long rods down to 8″ and bolted ‘em to the grid in tripod position.
Once the BGE was up to temperature, I put two boston butts on the original cooking grid and placed the second cooking grid, with two more boston butts, over the top. From there, it is just a matter of wiring everything into the Stoker and not messing with the damned thing again.
The lid just barely closes.
Click on through for the full details….
I started with 35 lbs of all natural Boston Butt. Now, Boston butt is not actually from the hind end of the pig, It is the cut of meat across the shoulder blades right behind the head.
The 35 lbs is divided across 4 boston butts; about 8 lbs each.
This particular cut of meat is ideal for slow cooking at a low temperature because it has a lot of fat and connective tissue throughout. This tissue breaks down into a gelatinous goo once the internal temperature of the meat crosses about 165 degrees. The internal temp will actually stop and hold at that level for several hours as this process happens!
Conveniently, boston butt and other kinds of meat that are ideal for low-and-slow cooking are quite cheap. P&W had the boston butt for $1.49/pound.
Next, I trimmed the butts a bit to remove some of the fat from the bottom. Not all of the fat, but nor did I want to have that much fatty goo dripping into the coals during the cook.
Even though the Stoker could maintain the temperature correctly, I don’t want that much burning fat goo smoke throughout the Egg!
Once trimmed, I rubbed the butts down with something close to Alton Brown’s rib dry rub.
I couldn’t find any jalepeno seasoning, so I used “bumhot” instead. Bumhot is a mixture of several species of hot peppers that my parents grow and dry. Peppers from around the world. Brilliantly tasty stuff.
I also added a bit of dried orange peel, dried lemon peel and dried ground ginger. Hopefully, this will come through as a slight tropical fruityness in the crust; a very very mild jerk flavor.
The four rubbed butts were then dropped into a cooler with ice (in a bag so as to not make soup) for about 6 hours. This lets the spices sink in a bit.
About an hour before I was going to fire up the egg, I took chunks of Apple wood and dropped them into a bucket of red wine and water to soak. In the bay area, Barbeques Galore seems to be the one stop spot for buying good chunk charcoal and smoking woods. Avoid mesquite unless you really want that distinct mesquite taste!
The apple wood will be the primary smoke source.
The egg was then loaded with hardwood chunk charcoal. Kingsford just does not cut it for the long term cooks!! I fired it up with the electric starter, much easier and no chemicals.
I’m fairly convinced that stacking the fuel really doesn’t matter. The key appears to be to start the burn on one side with the electric starter. The burn will progress out from there.
Even with a 20 hour cook at 210 degrees, there will be no need to add fuel to the egg. Actually, I had nearly enough fuel left over from the first Boston Butt adventure to do this cook!
This is how the egg will look for the next 20 hours. The wires are to two grid sensors, only one of which is actually being used to control the fan. The other is an experiment to see how consistent the temperature stays throughout the cooking chamber.
I have two food probes in action. One is in a butt on the bottom rack and the other is in a butt on the top rack. About 5 hours in and the two seem to track each other within 10 degrees. I’m looking forward to having a proper Mac OS X client app for the Stoker so I can watch exactly how the temperature changes over time and how often the fan is kicking on, etc. I’m not looking for that much more control but I do want to better understand exactly how quantity of meat, preparation, type of fuel and other variables impact the cook!
I also took the time to install the Stoker properly. It is now living on a shelf in an outdoor utility closet near the Egg’s table. Because of the single-wire serial bus technology, I simply bought a 1/4″ stereo extension cable and some 1/4″ stereo splitters from Fry’s. I have one wire going through the wall.
Since it is pouring rain, moving the Stoker into a protected environment was very important. I also taped the various plugs quite well and added some aluminum shielding over the fan attached to the BGE.
That is all so far. Tomorrow, I’ll either have a post-mortem on how I managed to produce 20 lbs of pork briquets or how I successfully made properly fork-pulled pork…
December 10th, 2006 at 6:45 am
I must say this is awesome.
I am also encouraged to know that I am not the only person interested in Cocoa programming and slow-cooked pork. You sir, however, have taken this to another level, with the addition of sensors and a slow-cook monitoring client. Huzzah!
December 10th, 2006 at 11:08 am
My wife got me a Weber smoker last month. I’ve fired it up four times, and been happy with the results.
I learned that the hard way :-). Unfortunately, the only thing I can find locally right now (NH) is mesquite chunks and hickory chips. There used to be a great BBQ store near the office, but they went under a couple of years ago. If I don’t find a local source soon, looks like I may be mail ordering smoke wood chunks.
December 10th, 2006 at 1:55 pm
Wow- thats ambitious, looking forward to the postmortem. BTW- happy birthday!
December 10th, 2006 at 1:56 pm
BBTW, just noticed your favicon.ico. Do you play Go?
December 11th, 2006 at 1:18 pm
Happy Birthday!! I am looking forward to seeing the results!!
December 11th, 2006 at 1:23 pm
Holy cow Bill - you keep outdoing yourself with the BGE! Happy Birthday!
December 12th, 2006 at 2:07 pm
Rama: the favicon looks to be the Hacker Embelm which is derrived from Conway’s Game of Life; note that the markers are in the squares, rather than on the lines as they are in Go
December 12th, 2006 at 2:10 pm
I recommend Hickory for the smoke.
Try pulling by hand. Using a fork dries out the meat.
(At least you are not slicing it. You can taste the blade when you do that.)
December 12th, 2006 at 2:24 pm
I used cabernet soaked Apple for the smoke. I’ll give hickory a try, but was worried that such a strongly flavored wood would overpower the meat flavors with that long of a cook.
As for pulling, if I pulled with my hands about half of it would just go straight in my mouth! I pulled the pork at the table as it was served so there was really no chance for anything to dry out.
December 12th, 2006 at 2:33 pm
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January 6th, 2007 at 2:37 pm
[...] I configured the Egg with the original grilling grid and the riser grid that I built. I placed a pizza stone on the bottom grid. [...]
July 17th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
Yo bbum,
I stacked my grids exactly as you did and tried my first 35 pounds last night, and the butts turned out great but the fuel ran out a few hours too early. I used the shorter fire ring accessory and an upside-down plate setter with a drip plate with a drip pan. I put the two-tiered grill on that, which needed to be spaced a little closer than yours to fit.
I’m also doing three nights of cooking, as I have over 150 folks coming to the house for a party this weekend. I have a dozen 9 lb butts that are just amazing! My friend is a local butcher so he took good care of me.
I didn’t fill the coal all the way up to the platesetter and I didn’t have as much room for fuel as you do with your setup. I also had old coals in there from the previous burn and they probably didn’t have as much life left in them as I thought. I decided to try it this way, though, so all sides of the meat have that yummy roasted bark (I use a lot of a very robust dry rub and liberally coat the meat with it). The good news is that the meat was actually done and was falling off the bone already. It was completely through the plateau and all the gelatin had converted, but the temp didn’t get past the mid 180’s.
Tonight I’ll try using only new fuel and filling it up more aggressively. I’m just really glad that Boston butt is a s forgiving as it is, and that the Stoker makes the process so easy. I’m figuring out that there aren’t too many ways I can screw this stuff up, which for me is a very good thing!
Thanks again for all the great info and advice you give about three areas of interest that we share: Geekdom, BBQ and Tequila! My son is a photographer and we love your camera work as well.
- Bash