The Roediger House: Meal No. 717: Kamado Grill-Smoked Boston Butt

Monday, April 15, 2013

Meal No. 717: Kamado Grill-Smoked Boston Butt

I mentioned last week that my sister had sort of talked me into getting a kamado-style cooker-smoker-grill. With the beginning of outdoor grilling season, this product has returned to the aisles of Costco, and I found my way there and came home with one. As I've tried to learn a bit more about these rascals and get myself somewhat educated about them, I came across a blog that I really like, without having any idea if it dishes out good advice and recipes. It's called Blue State BBQ.

One piece of advice offered by the blogger there is to give a new kamado grill a chance to cure, by performing a 24-hour low-temp cook. Which he suggests is a great time to smoke a Boston butt, and I thought that was sound reasoning.

So this past Sunday, I got my first set of lump hardwood coals going sometime mid-morning. I felt I'd worked out the kinks enough and gotten the temperature to the right place (around 200F), and I'd already put a rub all over the pork roast and tied it. So around 1 o'clock Sunday afternoon, it went on the grill and looked like this:

I kept my eye on the temperature gauge throughout the day. It held pretty steady, which was awesome. I also put some apple wood chips on the coals a couple of times. There was a steady drop in the temps as the midnight hour approached, so I restocked the lump charcoal and added more wood chips. This gave me a chance to snap this photo of the pork shoulder after 11 hours on the grill:

It took me until about 1:30 am to feel like I had the heat adjusted back to the right mark of 200F. I got up just before 6:30 am this morning and found that it had dropped to about 150F. That's not terrible, and I opened up the air vents and stabilized it again for the rest of the morning.

I pulled the pork butt off the grill at noon (23 hours of cooking!) and it smelled incredible:

I know it looks rough with that dark caramelized bark on there. Let me just assure you that the taste was more than sufficient to compensate for its appearance. I think those in charge of Cyprus's care this week while I'm gone will be glad that I put the kamado to the test even though I wouldn't get to benefit much from its inaugural run.