Ultimate Smoked Pork Butt Recipe

Ultimate Smoked Pork Butt Recipe – Pulled Pork

Ultimate – as in “Southern Living Ultimate Book of BBQ – The Complete Year-Round Guide to Grilling & Smoking” Pulled Pork Recipe from Pitmaster Christopher Prieto – Ultimate!

As promised, I cooked and am currently devouring one of the many amazing recipes from this cookbook I just recently reviewed. I could have chosen an easier recipe to try, well I actually did when I made the “Mango Salsa recipe” previously, but I was looking at a big cut of meat (Pork Butt) recipe to try and jumping right to the end, skipping 13 hours of cooking and prep, I am super happy that I did try this recipe!

The process for this recipe is rather simple: trim, season, inject, smoke, wrap, cook and enjoy but the time parameters are what prevents everyone from tackling these large cuts of meat. The whole process from start to finish is extremely easy for anyone to accomplish and if you have the “Southern Living Ultimate Book of BBQ”, you will have step-by-step directions very similar to mine below. It's the cooking time that can be detrimental to your life as mine was finishing up at 1:15 am! My fault for getting such a late start but worth every bit of lost sleep to get these results.

Let's start at the beginning …

Here I have a 6 lb Bone-in Pork Butt with 2 cups of Season All Rub.

You can purchase a boneless Pork Butt if you choose but I personally believe the bone-in adds more flavor.

Trim as much of the fat and silver skin as possible, leaving a small fat cap if you desire as I did here.

Coat the Pork Butt with oil (Peanut or Canola) and very generously coat with the Season All Rub.

Season All Rub Recipe

3/4 cup paprika

1/2 cup turbinado sugar

1/4 cup seasoned salt

1/4 cup black pepper

2 tbsp. granulated sugar

1 tbsp granulated onion

1 tbsp dried oregano

2 tsp chipotle powder

Recipe from Christopher Prieto

Prepare your pork brine and inject throughout the Pork Butt getting as much brine injected inside as possible.

Pork Brine Injection

2 cups apple juice

1/4 cup white vinegar

1 1/8 cups sugar

1/4 cups kosher salt

1 tsp hot sauce

1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce

2 tbsp Season All Rub

Recipe from Southern Living Ultimate Book of BBQ

Let sit for several hours to marinade.

Smoking your Pork Butt will vary depending on the equipment you use.

I am using my Grill Dome with Best of the West Natural Oak Lump Charcoal and Oak Smoking Chunks.

Temp set to 225° F with a drip pan under the Pork Butt.

Remote temperature probe is a iGrill bluetooth wireless thermometer.

Smoke your Pork Butt until it reaches an internal temperature of 165° F, misting every hour with apple juice and adding wood smoking chunks as needed.

When the Pork Butt has reached 165° F you can wrap it up with a couple of sheets of heavy duty aluminum foil.

This is the point where we don't need to cook it with smoke, just heat, so there is no reason to add wood smoking chunks any longer.

At 195° F your pork butt is ready to come of the smoker!

This can take several hours depending on how big your Pork Butt is. My overall cook time was 13 hours!

Take a peak, let the steam escape, then wrap it back up and let it sit for a couple of hours.

Note: My Pork Butt stalled at 159° F for 4 hours during the cook. This is normal on large cuts of meat, so there is no need to raise the temp, add more fuel or panic. This is a natural cooking process and eventually you will see the temp start to climb back up.