This is the first of several BBQ boston butt recipes that I plan to post. I have several recipes that I developed over the years, each with their own unique flavor and texture profiles. I consider BBQ'ing a sort of an art, and as such, it is a constant experiment.
What is the best brand of butt is best? What qualities do you look for in a boston butt? Brine or not to brine? What ingredients do you use for the dry rub? Whether or not to use a sopping sauce or baste? Do you smoke the meat unwrapped or wrapped in tinfoil or a combination of the two? What kind of wood is best? Does the type of smoker used affect the answer of any of the aforementioned questions, and if so, in what way?
Keeping all that in mind, I have created BBQ recipes using various combinations of techniques, and this is my latest variation. It turned out quite good, with a flavor that hints at Carolina BBQ.
Before I begin the recipe, I want to just define what BBQ is, exactly. BBQ is not a sauce, it is a style of cooking, where meat, usually but not exclusively, is cooked over a long period of time with direct or indirect heat or some combination of the two. Throwing chicken on a Weber charcoal grill, cooking it and putting BBQ sauce on it is NOT BBQ, it is just grilled chicken with BBQ sauce. If you want to BBQ meat, plan on it being is an all day project, a labor of love if you will.
A Carolina Pride Butt was provided to me, and truth be told, it was rather lean. For meats that you are going to cook for hours on end, a lean roast could end up being dry. Luckily, these had just enough fat that they didn't dry out, but they weren't as moist as I would have liked. They had a good flavor, so as far as quality goes, this brand is middle of road.
There is some math involved in this recipe, but please don't let that scare you off. I don't actually make you do the math, because, if you read it, I've worked out all the answers for you, but I wanted to show you a useful technique for figuring out quantities and easily scaling recipes. So, you DO NOT have to do any math to do this recipe, but you might have to read a little.
Note: As I add other Boston Butt recipes, I'll use different brands and review them for quality and flavor.
Note: It is important to realize that these recipes are merely guidelines to follow. They'll taste great as they are, but I encourage you to play with them and make the recipes your own.Note: It is good practice to read the entire recipe, while paying particular attention to the "Notes", before you try to make the dish, as there are often subtleties that can be easily overlooked, which sometimes, can make all the difference in the world for the outcome.
Makes 8-10 large servings (Smoked Butt Freezes well)
Skill Level: Intermediate
Prep time about 30 minutes.
Cook Time about 8-10 hours.
Ingredients:
- 1 Boston butt (Note: The fattier the roast the better!)
- Brown sugar
- Apple juice
- Apple Cider Vinegar
- 6-10 cloves of garlic
- Worcestershire sauce (I use Salsa Inglesa, which is kinda of a watered down version of Worcestershire from Latin America, so you may want to cut back a little on the English version of Worcestershire, adding a little extra water or apple juice)
- Tony Chachere's Creole Spice
- Powdered cumin
- Powdered ginger
- Smoked paprika (not pictured)
- Chef Paul Prudhomme Seasoning Salt
- Chef Paul Prudhomme Redfish Blackening Spice (Not pictured)
- Garlic salt
- Kosher salt
- Peppercorns
Tools Needed:
- Chef's Knife
- Large Stock Pot
- Large metal bowl
- Large Plastic Bowl
- Tin Foil
- Wood chips (Hickory and Jack Daniels Barrel mixed 50/50)
- Smoker (If you don't have one, omit the wood chips and cook in your oven)
Remove Pork Butt from packaging, assuming it is not frozen (Under the Table of Contents on the home page, see "How to Thaw Meat", before proceeding if it is frozen), and place in the stock pot. Use a chef's knife to perforate the meat, to allow the brine to penetrate. Don't over do it, 20-30 cuts is plenty.
Flip the roast and repeat the first step.
Cover roast with a mixture that is 70% apple juice, 30% water, 7% apple cider vinegar, and 3% Worcestershire. Add the garlic cloves and about 30 whole peppercorns.
Note: How to convert to amounts:
Yes, I know what you're thinking, "there's math in cooking?" and "What fresh hell is this?"
Well, it's really easy and straightforward and here's how it goes.
(Note: The amounts used in the recipe are bolded, so don't freak out that you're going to have to do math)
"DON'T PANIC"
:)
Let us establish percentages and their numerical representations:
70% = 0.7
30% = 0.3
7% = 0.07
3% = 0.03
(Note: a percentage is a number between 0 and 1, which is why 70% equals 0.7, or seven tenths of 1)
with * as the multiplication symbol and / as the division symbol.
Now lets use these facts to figure out how much total brine we will need and how much of each ingredient we will need to use.
Suppose you use 1 gallon of Apple juice to cover 1 Boston butt.
Then 70% of the mixture is apple juice, so if we use a little, basic algebra, we can figure out how much brine should be in total, and from there, we can figure out the amount of all the other ingredients.
So, 70% multiplied by (The unknown amount of brine, we shall arbitrarily call x) = 1 gallon of apple juice.
Thus we have
0.7 * x = 1
divide both sides by 0.7 to get x by itself, and we have
(0.7/0.7) * x = 1/0.7
1 * x = 1.42857, which rounds to
x = 1.43 gallons, of total brine.
Now we can use the total amount of brine, 1.43 gallons, to figure out the quantities of all the other ingredients using only basic arithmetic.
So 1.43 * 0.3 = 0.43 of a gallon of water, or 1 and 3/4 quarts of water.
(Note: use http://www.wolframalpha.com/ or a smartphone "unit convertsion" app to make the conversions from gallons to cups, pints, and quarts easy.
Also, round up or down to the nearest standard measure, i.e 1/3 cup, 1 quart, etc, 1 and a 1/2 pints, etc... and don't be intimidated by www.wolframaplha.com. You can use natural language, for example, "convert 0.43 gallons to cups").
Let me break down that first conversion again for clarity.
You have 1.43 gallons of brine. Multiplying 1.43 by 30%, written as,1.43 * 0.3
tells us how much 30% of 1.43 gallons is, namely, 0.43 gallons or 1 and 3/4 quarts water.
Then 1.43 * .07 = 0.1001 gallons of apple cider vinegar, or 1 and 1/3 cups.
Then 1.43 * .03 = 0.043 of a gallon of Worcestershire, or about 3/4 of a cup.
Understanding this little bit of math makes scaling this, or any recipe like this, to any size needed, easy. So, no matter how many butts you have, cover them 70% of the way with apple juice, then use the amount of apple juice you used to figure out the amounts of all the other ingredients. Once you have added them all, your butts will be completely covered by the brine.
Soak the butts in brine overnight. You can put in the refrigerator or, in my humble opinion, leave them covered on the counter. I mean, we are going to be cooking these things for 8 plus hours, so what little baddies that could grow on the meat, in the acidic environment of the brine, will long be bruned away during the cooking process.
Soak your wood chips for at least an hour or two, if you're using a gas smoker like I am, prior to cooking.
Now make the dry rub. The mix is roughly 60% brown sugar, 20% Creole Spice, 5% smoked paprika, 5% Seasoning salt, 4% cumin, 3% ginger, and 3% blackening spice. Mixing with your hands is still the best way to get the spices thoroughly blended.
Note: Use the same conversions above to figure out amounts, based on 2lbs of brown sugar.2lb brown sugar = 4.54 cups,
so 0.6 * x = 4.54
(0.6/0.6) *.x = 4.54/0.6
x = 7.57 cups total mix
60% of mix that is brown sugar is 2lbs
20% of mix that is Creole Spice is 1 and 1/2 cups
5% of the mix that is smoked paprika is just over 1/3 of a cup
4% of the mix that is cumin is just under a 1/3 of a cup
3% of the mix that is ginger is about a 1/4 of a cup
3% of the mix that is blackening spice is about a 1/4 of a cup
Note: Just like the brine, choose an amount of brown sugar that you think will cover most of the butts you have, then from that amount, you can calculate the amounts of all the other ingredients.
The butt should look like this when it comes out of the brine.
Pat the roast dry and rub all sides liberally with the spice mix. You should have enough spice mix to cover 4 butts, so put the remaining spice in a container and keep until you need it again.
The smoker I used is a standard gas upright smoker/cooker. A Lang smoker
http://langbbqsmokers.com/
would be ideal, but you work with what you have.
Note: If your smoker is missing its grease catch or you have your smoker so full of meat, you had to remove the grease catch all together then here is a little trick.
Place a metal ramekin, which can be found at most dollar stores, in the middle.
Then throw some tinfoil over the top. The ramekin creates a high spot in the middle, allowing the grease to run off.
Place the butts directly on the racks.
After about 4 hours of smoking, pull the butts out and double wrap them in tinfoil.
Every other hour until done, pull back the foil and baste the roasts.
After about 8-10 hours, the butts should be falling off the bone. I like to immediately pull the meat off the smoker and put each butt in a gallon Ziploc freezer bag, with its cooking liquor from the foil wrap, with a about 1/2 cup of apple cider vinegar, then place in a beer cooler for about an hour to let the butts stream and self baste, but you can skip this step if you like and serve as is.
Now you can pull or chop, then serve.
It reheats well in the microwave if you heat in short bursts, like 30 seconds to a minute at a time.
Enjoy.
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