Smoking the Butt

For Labor Day, we had a few friends over.  We briefly discussed grilling lamb and doing a Meditteranean feast.  Two issues.  1.  We had never made lamb, and I don't like trying new recipes on guests.  2.  Lamb is almost $20 a pound.  Enter pork butt/shoulder.  Pork shoulder is one of my favorite cuts of meat, any sort of meat.  For starters, it's got fantastic value.  We got a 9 lb shoulder at Wegmans for $12.  You do the math.  Also, it's versatile, and hard to mess up.  For the party, I chose to do North Carolina style pulled pork sandwiches.  North Carolina style is vinegar, rather than sauce, based.  For the primary recipe, I used Stephen Raichlen's from his book, How to Grill, a summertime staple.  First you make the rub, a basic American BBQ rub with paprika, salt, pepper, brown suger, and smoked salt.  You can use regular salt but the smoked salt makes a difference.  I also used some smoked Spanish paprika. 

You rub the butt and let it cure overnight, up to 24 hours.  Then you use indirect grilling to smoke the meat for 4-6 hours.  You do this by using a drip pan with the charcoals on the sides of the grill, rather than directly under the meat.  Then you add coals and smoking chips once each hour.  It is supposed to get charred after several hours, I think I used too many coals initially because it looked like this after only 1 hour.  I was panicked that I had ruined it. You can see the hickory smoking chips on the sides, which have been soaked in water so that they have a slower burn and produce a lot of smoke.  The lid remains closed throughout to circulate the most smoke around the pork.

Additionally, I made a mop sauce from a recipe I found online, it involved apple cider vinegar, apple juice, brown sugar, and bourbon.  Raichlen's mop sauce does not use bourbon.  Each time I added coals, I mopped the butt, keeping it nice and moist and adding as much flavor as possible. 

The end result was fantastic.  After letting the pork rest for 15 minutes, it pulls apart in your gloved hands.  It was tender and juicy.  We mounded the pork onto hamburger buns and topped it with North Carolina vinegar slaw.  My wife made an amazing mac n cheese that involved bacon and potato chips.  Nuff said.  We made a bourbon punch with citrus peels, sugar, club soda.  Sorry there is no pictures of the sandwich and sides, the ravenous crowd must have dug in before I thought of it.  It fed 6 people and we sent everyone home with leftovers.  The process was a little tricky in the rain, but the grill remains mostly closed so the only tricky part is getting fresh coals to light each hour.  I tried, unsuccessfully, to rig a tent to block the rain, as evidenced by the rope in the picture above.  Overall, a nice end to summer.