The Most Correct Smoked Pork I Ever Made . . .

I just did the most correct smoked pork I’ve ever made. It went something like this . . .

1) Started early: The first time I tried a butt or whatnot I began early in the morning for a late afternoon/evening party, which was not enough time. People say to expect 1.5 hours a pound. I think it takes even longer. The past couple of times I had the thing in the smoker for four or five hours, which apparently is as long as you need to get it smoked up (the idea being that anything longer doesn’t really add anything further), then put it in the oven for the remainder of time. The last time I did it I started around 8 p.m., kept it in smoke until 12 or 1, then put it in the oven under foil at 225 degrees. It basically wasn’t ready by the time I needed it (noon), which brings me to . . .

2) The oven temperature: By the way, I’m convinced, and it didn’t take much convincing, that there’s no reason to keep it on the grill for 16 hours or so. It’s an asinine proposition, in fact. Not only does it not need it — i.e., smoke doesn’t do anything after four or five hours — but what in God’s name would you want to stay up all night stoking a grill with charcoal every half hour when you could put the thing in an oven with a constant temperature? And the right temperature, I now know, is 250 degrees. I got nervous last night and turned it down to 225 while I was sleeping (2 something a.m. to 6:45 or so) but I shouldn’t have — I turned it back up after waking up and it still took a while — until 12:45, which was OK this time.

3) The wood: I used hickory before and this time I tried apple wood — there was a ridiculous sale on Amazon for wood so I got a bunch. Apple wood smells super nice when it’s burning. This tasted good is all.

FYI: I took it out of the oven at 200 degrees, which I’ve never attained before — usually I’m in a pinch because the whole thing is taking too long so it comes out at 190 or something. This took forever to creep up there — 188 to 200 must have taken two or three hours — but it makes a difference. So the thing was about eight pounds. It went on at 8:15 p.m., came out of the smoker at 1 a.m. or so and then didn’t get out of the oven until 12:45 p.m. So way longer than 1.5 hours a pound. Crazy. But it didn’t matter because people weren’t here until later, so whatever. I actually think our stove turned itself off because it assumed we forgot, probably around the 11 hour mark.

Also, this was not the butt or what I usually get — the guy at the butcher store asked if I wanted the skin and I shrugged and said sure. I’m googling and I *think* it was part of the shoulder but I’m not sure how. Whatever. It was still good. This is roughly the rub I used; it was late and I did the first thing I googled.

Oh, and putting “pork shoulder vs pork butt” into the Yahoo image search engine first yields a warning that there may be unsafe-for-mixed-company pictures included and then actually includes unsafe-for-mixed-company images. Fucking morons. Seriously, was it “pork” or “butt” that did it? You guys are ridiculous.