Boston Butt also known as pork shoulder is the top portion of the front leg of the hog. The terminology for pork shoulder can vary widely depending on the region. However, the upper part of the shoulder, commonly known as Boston Butt, or just Butt, comes from the area near the loin and contains the shoulder blade bone. The lower part of the leg is most commonly called the Arm Picnic, or simply Picnic.
Buying Your Butt
Butt comes packaged many different ways. If you buy it at a supermarket or a big box store, you’ll most likely see it vacuum wrapped, called cryowrapping.
Look at the packaging carefully, often cryowrapped pork comes with an injected preservative liquid, sometimes labeled as “Enhanced”. This essentially triples its shelf life in the store.This is something to watch out for, check the dates very carefully before you buy. You may have heard of “Wet-Aging” beef in vacuum pack. Pork DOES NOT dry age, it simply goes bad, by which I mean it will smell bad and the liquids will become gooey. This is undesirable and unacceptable. If you have no choice but to buy one like this, I would recommend that you carry a sharp pocket knife with you. After you have paid for the meat, BEFORE you have left the cashier, cut the plastic open and smell the pork. It should smell fresh, if it doesn’t, have them replace it. There is no down side to this. You can tape it shut when you get home, place it in a two gallon zip-lock bag and freeze it, or cook it.
The ideal, of course, is to find a meat market that sells fresh butt that has no injected liquid, no brine and no preservatives. Ask for it untrimmed (Packer), bone in, you can do the trimming at home and it’ll cost less.
Rub, Brine, Inject or Mop????
There are a dozen different ways to approach enhancing the flavor of this already flavorful cut. I’ll address a few more popular here so you’ll be familiar with them and maybe do your own experimenting with them later.
Aye, that’s the Rub
This is a very popular way to get flavor into the meat. I’ve included the recipe for my Butt Rub here because I’ve had great results with it.
Brining the Beast
Brining was originally developed to preserve meats when there was no refrigeration. Corned Beef and Pastrami are two meats that started out life as Brisket and became very different flavors after preservation. This led over time to experimenting with brining to change or enhance the flavor of a meat. Flavor Brining meats has become all the rage these days, however pork butt is not commonly brined because of its naturally high fat content, yet there are some recipes that do so. One of the common complaints about brine pork butt is that it now just tastes like ham. You’ve brined away all the natural sweetness of the butt when you brined it.
This Won’t Hurt A Bit
Injection is commonly used to add moisture and flavor into meats that may tend to become dry during the long, slow cooking process. Injections can be as simple as apple juice to as complex as any marinade you can dream up. Pork but does not normally need to be injected, but when it is, it’s usually injected with apple juice. This results in a super moist pork that has a bit of sweetness from the sugars in the apple juice.
Cleanup On Aisle 3, Bring The Mop!!
Mopping is another method commonly used to add flavor and moisture. Once again, a pork butt generally doesn’t need to be mopped with anything unless you’re just doing it to add flavor. The big drawback to mopping is that you have to open your smoking compartment to mop. Every time you open it, you extend the cooking time by 5 to 10 minutes because you lose a lot of your heat.
OK, let’s get your butt in the smoker!!
You need a 7 to 8 lb Boston Butt – Bone In and about 8 to 16 hours…. so plan ahead!
Matt’s Butt Rub
Ingredients
- 1 cup turbinado sugar (sold as Sugar in the Raw)
- 1 cup smoked paprika (or regular if you don’t have smoked)
- 2/3 cup dark brown sugar
- 2/3 cup powdered or granulated garlic
- 2/3 cup kosher salt
- 2 tablespoon ancho chili powder
- 3 teaspoons ground oregano leaves
- 3 teaspoon ground cumin
- 2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
- 2 teaspoon black pepper
Directions
Pour all the ingredients into a Ziploc bag, seal it and massage and shake to mix.
Trimming And Preparation
The butt is the one piece of meat you need to trim the least. Trim virtually all the fat off the fat side of the butt. There is quite a lot of internal fat in the but, so there shouldn’t be an issue with moistness. Removing the fat exposes more meat to the rub and creates more crunchy crust.
After trimming the fat, Lightly oil the pork butt with canola oil, apply rub liberally and pat/massage into the surface. Some BBQ cooks say that you should use mustard, but a lot of the herbs and spices are soluble in oil and penetrate the surface of the meat better with oil than with mustard, Besides, after 10 to 12 hours in the cooker (for a typical 8 lb butt), there’s absolutely nothing left of the mustard.
Most recipes say to leave the pork butt in the refrigerator overnight to let the rub sink in. Tests have shown that even in 48 hours the rub still only gets in about 1/4″. I generally apply the rub after the butt has been out of the fridge for an hour or so. This lets the meat warm up a bit so the smoker doesn’t have a huge thermal deficit to overcome.
Rule of Thumb is No More Than 4 hours Over 40º
The colder the center is, the longer it will take to reach 190º. (Warming up the core faster could be one benefit to injecting room temperature apple juice.)
When ready to smoke, get your fire going and let the smoker come up to temperature and stabilize before you put the meat in.
This cook started with a couple ounces of pecan wood, after 1 hour I added about 2 ounces of apple wood, then after a third hour passed I added 2 ounces of cherry wood. Once the cherry was gone I did not add any more smoking wood.
If It Were Up To Me…
The best way to get wonderfully tender and juicy butt is:
- run the smoker at 225 degrees Fahrenheit
- keep the smoke going for the first 4 hours and then just monitor the cooking temperature
- don’t open the smoke compartment until your instant meat thermometer tells you the butt is at 190ºF degrees inside. If yer lookin’, ye ain’t cookin’!!
How Long Do I Cook It???
Truthful answer… UNTIL IT’S DONE! It’s very difficult to predict exact cooking times. There are so many variables…. How cold is it outside? Is it raining? Is your smoker insulated, or is it thin steel and a victim of temperature changes? How cold was your butt when you put it in the smoker? Have you opened the smoke cabinet to “peek” at your wonderful creation? (Remember? If yer lookin’, ye ain’t cookin’!!) Have you successfully maintained the temperature at 225ºF? All these come into play.
My best advice is start two hours earlier on your first butt. If it’s done before your guests arrive, double wrap it in heavy aluminum foil, wrap several layers of bath towels around it and close it up in an ice chest (no ice) until the guests arrive. Believe me, that butt will stay hot for quite a long time this way.
The Finish Line
After the butt reaches 190 take the butt out, double wrap it in heavy aluminum foil, wrap several layers of bath towels around it and close it up in an ice chest (no ice).
When you unwrap it, be careful to catch any juices in the baking dish. You can pour these juices over your pork after it’s been pulled, chopped or sliced.
For Sliced Pork Butt
If you want to slice the pork butt instead of pulling or chopping, take it out at 185ºF, and wrap it like above.
Serving Suggestions
Serve with Matt’s North Carolina BBQ Sauce or Matt’s Sweet & Spicy BBQ Sauce