For the love of BBQ
The grill with 15 pounds of pork inside
It’s the morning of the block party, and I’m sitting in the driveway, tending to the grill. I love to BBQ. I did not like BBQ sauce or much of anything as a kid, and being raised in Columbus, it’s not like I grew up on the stuff. But I just love it.
I think it’s simply the length of time it takes. That may sound odd, but in a world where most of my time is spent in quick decisions and projects that were due “yesterday”, smoking a pork shoulder all day is extremely relaxing.
Today’s adventure is a whole pork shoulder roast – more than 15 pounds in all. It started 2 days ago with splitting the shoulder in two, and putting on the first coat of dry rub – fresh ground pepper, turbinado sugar, paprika, some kosher salt and a little dry mustard. The grill was fired up late last night, and the pork was placed on the grill at 11:30 PM.
My daughter tried staying up with me to tend to the grill to make sure I hold a steady temperature between 200 and 225 degrees Farenheit. We passed time playing Guitar Hero 80’s edition in cooperative mode, trying to get 5 stars on every song in expert mode. We got pretty far along until she could no longer stay awake – around 1:30 AM. I made it until around 4 AM, then resorted to setting the alarm to go off hourly to monitor the grill.
Fire in the Firebox
I’ve got a couple temperature probes running right now – one to measure the temperature inside the grill, and the other monitoring the temperature of the meat. I just dropped below 200 on the air temp, so I threw another piece of wood in the firebox.. The temperature is up to 210 now, but climbing quickly – telling me I’ve got fire and not smoldering wood. Time to close down the vents a little to choke the fire out and get a good steady temperature going. Leveling out now at 222 now. Perfect. Internal temperature of the pork is at 154 and it’s 11:30 AM now. Looking right on target for serving at 6 PM tonight.
While I’ve got 2 thermocouples going right now, I’d love to have 4: one monitoring air temperature coming out of the firebox, one around the meat, one monitoring exit air temperature, and one monitoring the meat temperature. I guess that’s just the techie in me wanting to collect all that data. I found this site that sells a system with 3 thermocouples and a built in web server – very cool, but too expensive for this hobby. GeekWithFire.com – now that looks promising, except it only runs on Windows, and every computer in my house runs Linux. Perhaps I’ll just have to build my own.
Boston Butt and Picnic cuts from a single pork shoulder
One last check on the temperatures: air temp is at 224, meat temp 157, at 11:53 AM. And it’s a beautiful day to be sitting outside BBQ’ing!
01 August 2009, 1:00 pm
Tom, It was good to see your tweet, and even better to read your post. Sometimes life is spinning way to fast. I too love to grill, it is a great pass time for sure.
That looks like a pretty cool smoker, enjoy teh party tonight, the brews will taste all the better!