Boston Butt

Boston Butt is just about my favorite thing to cook on the Big Green Egg. I would do it more often but it is truly an ordeal. This is my third one and both of my last two cooks were 21+ hours. They say that you do not need to add any additional charcol, but I have had to do that both of the last two times. Either way the result is excellent. I will get right into how I did this one.

First, I started at about noon on Thursday with a 6 lbs, bone-in, Boston Butt. I placed the butt in a tray and applied a coat of regular yellow mustard all over the meat. This is not really for taste, but rather to help the dry rub adhere to the meat. I then used a commercial dry rub (I am still out of Evan's Spice) and coated all sides of the meat.


I then wrapped the butt and the tray and stuck it in the fridge until it was time to put it on the grill. I wanted to have pulled pork sandwiches for when my father-in-law got into town around 6 pm on Friday night. So anticipating a 20 to 21 hour cook, plus time for cool down, I decided on putting the meat on the grill around 8:30 Thursday night.

For this butt, I decided to inject the meat with Canjun Injector's Creole Butter. This was the first butt that I ever injected, and to be honest, I am not sure that it made a ton of difference. The meat is always so moist and juicy when it comes off an egg after about 20 hours that I am not sure injecting makes a huge difference when you are cooking on an egg. Having said that, it was kinda fun and I will probably do it again in the futre because it is not that difficult and I am sure it can only help.


I then placed the butt on the grill fat side down with a drip pan below it filled with apple juice (again, not sure this makes much of a difference either). I think many people do this differently and place it on their fat side up, but you have to know your audience and my wife hates fat (yes, I have told her it is the best part) and so I just can't help but think that if I let that slab of fat melt all the way through the meat (as delicious as that sounds) she will not be as big of a fan.


The next 15 hours or so was easy. I set my BBQ Guru to cook the meat at 220 degrees, until it reached an internal temperature of 200 degrees....and the Guru worked marvelously. I awoke the next morning to find the Egg just chugging along at 220 and the butt coming along nicely. The next part is where I always get in trouble. I left the house for a few hours and came back to check on the meat after it had been on the grill for about 18 hours. I decided to busy myself because it will drive you crazy to sit there and watch the meat hit the various plateaus and see the temperature rise quickly, stay stagnant for hours on end, drop back a little ,and then rise quickly again. I mean sometimes it seems like the meat will never get to 200 degrees.....but I digress. When I checked it after 18 hours, the fire was dying.....the flame was down to 170 degrees (Guru was blowing away to no avail) and the temperature of the meat had actually dropped.

So I had to take the butt out while I added more charcol to get the fire back going. This is always dissapointing to me, because I do not want to open the grill until it is done. From that point forward, which was about 3 more hours, I cooked the meat at 260 degrees becuase I was getting impatient.

Finally, after about 21 hours the Guru told me the food was ready!


The first time I ever cooked a Boston Butt on the egg, I thought I did something terribly wrong and burned the hell out of it. It was then that I let it cool and then pulled some of what I thought was burnt crust off the meat and tried it. What I found was the best tasting "bark" that I had ever eaten. I am not sure I had ever really had any bark before (the smoke charred outer crust that has some real juicy meat/fat attached to it as well), but from that moment on, I was in love.


So we let Butt rest for about an hour and then pulled it and covered it in my home made BBQ sauce and served with baked beans and mac & cheese. It was delicious. And I can already speak from experience, the leftovers are every bit as good!