It has been a crazy couple of weeks and I am just getting to post an update to the meat I smoked for my party. I took everyone's advice and started the two 10lb pork butts Thursday evening. I smoked them at 225 and they took around 21 hours in total. I pulled them at 205 and wrapped them and put them in the cooler for two hours before shredding them and putting them in ziplocs for the party. When shredding, the bone pulled out super easy! I did find the meat was super juicy Friday when I shredded it, but was a little dry on Saturday when re-heating it for the party. But, it still had a great flavor! As for the 16lb turkey, I put it on around 5am Saturday morning and let it smoke wide open. It took about 7 hours to smoke. I wrapped it and put it in the cooler, too. It was so flavorful and juicy, too! My family is now requesting smoked turkey for dinner one night again in the next few weeks. The only thing that could have made the entire smoking experience better was if someone would come clean the smoker for me after I was done. That thing is so hard to get clean afterwards! lol
I wanted to say thank you to all for your kind words and advice! It definitely eased my mind cooking that much meat for that many people. I can't wait to try something else to smoke. Here are pictures of what was smoked.
Glad to hear it went well! Yeah smoked turkey is amazing.
Also once the the pork but is tender you can pull it. It is tender when you can stab all over with something like a wooden kabob skewer and it goes in with like no resistance. At that point it's done.
The cooler may have kept it too hot for too long making it more dry. Therefore when you reheated again it got even dryer. A very good possibility.
If you pull those butts the moment they probe tender, double wrap in foil and then just set them on the counter to rest you will be fine. You have no reason to hold them if you are just going to shred and bag and reheat the next day.
Finally, you will check for tenderness when the pork butt is around 200F internal temp and if it doesn't probe tender you let the Internal Temp (IT) raise another couple degrees and test for tenderness.
As for the turkey, yeah man when you nail smoked turkey it is amazing!
There is a whole other level to it when you cure one and smoke it. So you have plenty of turkey smoking fun ahead of you, it's a wonderful journey :D.
Ryan,
Thank you! I will definitely try that! The first time I tried smoking pork butts, I was doing some research and somewhere else I saw said not to smoke pork butts higher than 225. I did think that seemed awefully low. Taking less time would be awesome!
A lot of the "smoke at 225F" information is simply regurgitated legend and often a little lack of understanding.
Plenty of meats like chicken, turkey, pork butts, pork ribs, brisket, chucks, and beef ribs do not care what temp you smoke them at as long as you are not burning them so crank that heat up hot! Hell chicken and turkey skin want to be cooked hot or else they come out rubbery instead of edible.
The one caveat is that if you have sugar in your rub I believe you don't want to go over 250F smoker temp or you can burn the sugar. I don't put sugar in my rub/seasonings so it's not an issue for me. If i wanted sweetness I would just rub on some bbq sauce or something sweet at the end of the smoke instead of having it on the whole time. This way you could still crank up the heat and get the sweet without burning any sugars.
