Pulled Pork

I received a smoker for Christmas. I had never smoked anything, so I was anxious to use it. After doing some research I decided to make pulled pork. It turned out great so I thought I would share the steps I went through to get the great end result.

On Tuesday I picked up a bone in Boston Butt Roast that weighed a little over 9 pounds. That’s a lot of meat but it was the smallest one that Wal-mart had. I placed the roast in a Giant Lasagna Pan, it was the only thing I saw that looked big enough for the roast and marinade. I had been told to marinate the roast for 24 hours in beer, but since we don’t drink I decided to use Dr. Pepper.

I covered it and put it in the fridge to marinate for about 24 hours.

The next step was to apply the rub. Chuck, a member of the Texas Fishing Forum, recommended that I use a rub called Hoochie Mamma. It is made by a local company and can be found on their website http://www.sucklebusters.com or in some specialty shops. I was able to find it at Rally House Gifts in the Arlington Highlands. Thanks to Chuck for this suggestion. Check out his cooking blog at http://cookinwithchuck.blogspot.com

I applied a pretty heavy coating of the rub, recovered, and let that sit in the fridge for about 18 hours.

Thursday morning it was finally time to cook. I got my smoker going with charcoal and got it up to about 215 then added some chunks of pecan wood. Those were burning up pretty quick so I added a piece of well seasoned oak that wouldn’t burn up so quickly. I discovered that a cold windy day is not a good day to try to smoke something. I was constantly fighting to keep the temperature in the 200-225 range. After five hours of smoking it was looking really good.

At this point, I was getting tired of fighting to keep a constant temperature. So I pulled it off the smoker, wrapped it in foil and put it in the oven at 200. I kept it in the oven for another 8 hour, trying to get the internal temperature up to 200. It never actually made it past 195 and it was getting late, so I decided to go ahead and pull it out. After removing from the oven I let it rest for about an hour.

It was the time to pull it. The bone pulled right out, so I knew it was going to be really tender. It pretty much just fell apart. I did use forks to speed up the process, but it was so tender I easily could have done it by hand. So here’s the final product.