Smoked Pork Butt – The Time Science & How Long To Cook

​To smoke a pork butt using this recipe, you'll need to following ingredients and tools:

Smoked Pork Butt Recipe

When you've gathered your ingredients, you can then begin work on making the meat with this cooking method.

Step 1: Brine the Pork

First, begin by mixing the water, 1 cup of brown sugar, and 1 cup of salt in a large bucket or container. Mix them together until the solids are dissolved, then place in your meat. Allow your pork to brine for at least four hours but preferably overnight. The brine will be necessary for such a long cooking process, as it will help retain moisture and add extra flavor to your meat.

Step 2: Season the Pork

Once brined, take your pork out of the water and pat it dry with paper towels. Mix together the spices before covering the meat with yellow mustard, then press the spice rub into every part of the meat, applying thoroughly until used up. You can look up the dry rub recipes on the blog, or come up with one on your own! Allow the meat to sit like this while you proceed to step 3 (additionally, if you're using wood chips instead of chunks, begin soaking them in hot water once this is done).

Step 3: Light the Smoker

Pile charcoal into your smoker, then light it and close the lid. Adjust the air vents and allow the fire to burn for around thirty minutes. Once the charcoal has burnt into coals, add on your wood, fill the water tank, and place on your smoker grate. Adjust the air vents once more to try and attain a temperature of around 250 degrees Fahrenheit. Let everything burn for another ten minutes or so to let steam and smoke build up.

Step 4: Smoke the Pork

When your smoker has finished prepping, place your meat onto the roasting rack inside an aluminum baking tray, then and let it smoke. While every piece of meat will be different, the general rule for pork butt is that it will need 90 minutes to smoke for every pound of meat. As such, a 7 pound pork butt like the one in this recipe will take approximately 10 and a half hours to fully cook. Get to the smoking process.

While your meat smokes, you have plenty of time ti fill. Pay attention to coal, wood, and water levels, refilling with more as needed. Additionally, continue to adjust the air vents to help maintain the temperature where you want it. To help preserve moisture and flavor the pork, spray it with apple juice, cider, or apple cider vinegar every hour or so for the duration of the smoke. As a general rule, the longer you smoke the meat, the easier it will be to pull apart afterward, but smoke it too long and it will dry out. Maintaining balance is key.

Start checking for temperature around 8 hours into the smoke. The cooking time isn't that short, but definitely worth it. When the internal temperature reaches the mark around the 170 degrees Fahrenheit, foil the meat to prevent the outside from burning. If it starts to look too browned or blackened before that point, foil it before this. While the ​finishing internal temperature of the meat is generally around 195 degrees Fahrenheit, the best measure of when your roast will be done is to stab it with a fork. If it pulls apart, take it off the heat and place it in a baking tray.

Step 5: Pull the Pork Butt

Once your bone-in ​cut of meat has finished cooking, pull the baking tray off the heat and let it cool to the point it's safe to touch without burning your hands, but not so much that it's gone cold. Remove the rack, then, using two forks, shred the pork into strands using Cave Tools Shredder Rakes and remove the bone from inside it. Mix it with the collected roasting juices that will have come out as the meat cooked and cooled and add in a dash of the apple product you used for spritzing earlier if you like, serve with a bit of bbq sauce​. Check for seasoning and add more salt and pepper if needed.

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