Pork butt

As you know, we have a Big Green Egg which is supposed to be a master at slow cooking. But I'd only used it for a high-heat grill -- which it is awesome at -- but it seems wrong to not use it for its best purpose. (Another best purpose is supposed to be for pizza but I'm not there yet.)

So on the last day of our Turkey week vacation, we defrosted a pork butt from the chest freezer (and I have no idea where it's from) and I prepared to slow roast it.

I went through several of our grill books and ended up with a recipe from Steven Raichlen with a North Carolina spin, since that is what Josh likes. Of course, I didn't find the recipe soon enough, so with only a couple hours before I planned to start it, I saw that the pork is better if it can marinate overnight. Oopsy.

So I mixed up a generous amount of the rub (I have a big container in a glass jar in the cabinet now) and mixed it all over my pork butt. Now, the recipe I had called for a bone-in pork butt and I had a boneless, so I extra rubbed it all over and then wrapped it in foil to keep it together even though the recipe seemed to call for putting it straight onto the rack. I've watched Mike make pork shoulder plenty of times and he always wraps it. Of course, what I learned is that next time, I'll also do a pan. I didn't this time because I was afraid the smoke would go around it, but that's a silly thought, isn't it?

Josh got the Egg at a nice temperature and I whipped up both the mop and the sauce, both of which called for a whole lot of crushed red pepper. I went a little less on the sauce, which was a not-picturesque brown. But I bet you can picture it in your head.

So here is a large amount of mop -- and I didn't even need half of this -- which has lots of things like onion, jalapenos, cider vinegar, crushed red pepper, black pepper.

Every hour, you are supposed to take the meat out, mop it, and put it back. Since my piece of pork was about half what the recipe called for, I checked it every 45 minutes.

When I pulled it out finally, it looked like this. It was super easy to pull apart, though we only really pulled apart what we were going to eat. I was happy that it was pretty easy to reheat and pull.

So here it is shredded. We had buns, but sadly they molded because I put them out and not in the fridge. But the meat with the vinegary sauce was pretty good for a first try. Can't wait to try again, really. But it's a lot of meat that it makes.