The Ultimate Pulled Pork

Pulled pork is a real treat. There’s nothing better than juicy, smoky strands of pork, covered with a nice dark bark that still has the sweet hints of your own special BBQ rub. And there’s nothing better than making it yourself.

We make this several times each summer.  I promise you, there’s nothing complicated about this recipe, but it does require you to be patient, and to frequently check on your fire so that it doesn’t get too hot or go out before your smoked pork is done (but both problems are fixable).

Here’s how I do this. (The recipe for The Ultimate Pulled Pork follows at the end. You can just pull and eat it as is, but here’s a couple of companion recipes for Pulled Pork Sandwiches with Sweet n’ Heat Coleslaw, and for Pulled Pork Tacos. They are both terrific.)

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 as a pair, then separate them out, wrapping one in plastic wrap and then in foil, and dropping it into the freezer for a later smoke.

The pork butt will have a fat cap on one side–it looks like a long 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 beast.

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!)

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 from the meat. I like to think it’s the pork getting excited for the smoker.

Get your smoker lit. In the below picture, you can see the chimney that I use 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 2/3 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.

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.

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 of the smoker 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.

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.

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.)

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.