Pork Shoulder "Pulled Pork"

Friday June 13th, 72 degrees and sunny

This Q'ing session was for a company work party.  I also cooked ribs for this party.  You can take a look at that procedure here.  As usual, I did not write down my recipe for my dry rub but it contains the usual ingredients of salt, brown sugar, chili powder, garlic powder, cayenne powder, and cumin.  Sometimes I even add a little crushed mustard seed.  For more information on dry rubs and many other areas of Q'ing, you can check the BBQ FAQ.

Click on any of the thumbnails for larger pictures

Preparation

Ordered an  8lb pork shoulder from the butcher (left the bone in and cut into two 4lbs) with a very nice marbling of fat.  The bottom side had roughly 1/8" to 1/4" of fat.

Slather it with plain yellow mustard so the dry rub will adhere to the pork.  Also, you can see the bone running through each piece.

Coat the shoulders with the dry rub on ALL sides, press it into the meat and place in a 2 gallon Zip Lock bag for an overnight delight in the fridge.

Take out the pork about 1 to 2 hours prior to smoking, so it has time to warm up to room temperature.

While the meat was warming up to room temp., I decided to get the good ole Weber silver bullet working.  I like to use the minion method because it creates for long smoking times between refueling. 

You can check the pictures on the Ribs page for the smoker setup because I try to keep the setup the same for timing references.

With the smoker assembled and the water pan full of water, I put the shoulders on and setup my Taylor thermometer.  Some people stick the thermo... thru a potato but I just use folded aluminum foil.

I started the shoulders around 5:00 and let them smoke until 11:00.  At that time I put them in a 250 degree oven overnight and pulled them out around 8:00 when they reached 190 degrees internally. 

Unfortunately, I messed up something in my digital camera and lost the finished product pics.   Not really a big deal but sort of stinks.  Anyways, looked pretty much like the picnic below in regards to the "bark" coverage.

This ends another tail of pulled pork.  If you read this far, you must be REALLY bored!!!