The Ultimate Pulled Pork
 
 
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Ingredients
  • 1 approximately 10 pound pork butt (pork shoulder)
  • 1 cup rib rub (I use my Spoocial Rub)
  • 1 smoker, kept at 225 degrees for about 13-15 hours
Instructions
  1. Buy yourself a nice pork butt (also called pork shoulder), about 10 pounds in weight. My grocery store sells them individually, and the big box stores sell them in pairs. Down here in the South, we can get them for somewhere between $2 and $3 per pound, on a summer sale, you can get them for even less. I'll often buy them in two, then separate them out, wrapping one in plastic wrap and then in foil, and dropping it into the freezer.
  2. The pork butt will have a fat cap on one side--it looks like a long which white piece of fat across the whole side. I make that the bottom, and don't trim that at all. So turn it over, fat cap side down, and trim the large fat pieces off of the top of the pork butt. Now it's time to rub this.
  3. Spread the rub all over in a nice even pattern. I like to get all the sides too, but I don't do the bottom fat cap. That will just sit on the smoker grate and will likely end up sticking to it when you pull the pork off of the smoker in the end. So no use in seasoning it. (And you can always add fresh rub when you pull the pork!)
  4. Let the rub sit on the pork butt while you get your fire going. It will get all glisteny like in the picture above. That's the salt in the rub pulling out water in the meat. I like to think it's the pork getting excited for the smoker.
  5. Get your smoker lit. I use a chimney to light the coals. To light the chimney, turn it over and make three coils from three full-sized pieces of newspaper. Then turn it right side up and fill it ⅔ of the way with coals. Light the newspaper from the bottom using long matches or your grill lighter and wait about 10 minutes. Once the coals inside are white hot, you are ready to smoke.
  6. In your smoker, place a couple baseball-sized chunks of apple wood on top of unlit coals. If you follow the instructions in my How to Smoke Real BBQ ribs recipe, you'll see that I call that method the coal donut with wood sprinkles method. When the coals are white hot, add them to the unlit coals, restack your smoker, and get the pork on the smoker.
  7. Smoke the pork for about 9 hours, keeping the temperature right around 225 degrees. After about 9 hours, my smoker needed new fuel, so I separated the top from the bottom, and added fresh coals using the above method. I also put more unlit coals in the bottom of the smoker, but did not add any new wood--the meat was plenty smoked in color, as you can see below.
  8. After about 4 more hours, the meat temperature hit 195 degrees and it was time to pull off. It looked so good I wanted to eat it right away.
  9. However, it needs to sit for about an hour to let all the juice work itself back into the meat. I like to wrap it in foil and drop it into my Yeti cooler. It will still be piping hot when you pull it out an hour later, so be careful when you pull the meat! Here's a shot of the bark and smoke ring. You can see how juicy it is after an hour of sitting. (If you skip the rest, all that juice will run off onto your counter instead.)
  10. Pull the pork into a large sheet pan or bowl, so that you can mix together the bark and meat. I like to cut it into two portions, and immediately freeze one portion to have a couple weeks later.
Recipe by WooPigFoodie at https://www.woopigfoodie.com/the-ultimate-pulled-pork/