Another BIG Day!!!!

10 pork butts coming right up.....but not really & for 2 reasons; they take about 10 hours to cook not to mention a day or two to let the dry rub soak in. Interesting that they are not butts at all but in fact pork shoulders and I don't really know why they are call butts when they are clearly shoulders but I seem to remember reading something about the folks in Boston and salt pork however the memories are sketchy.

An interesting fact I learned on this go around is that 10 butts will nicely fit in the large Coleman cooler. How you might wonder did I find this out..... well let me tell you. I don't have a fridge large enough to hold 10 butts for the 24 to 36 hours the dry rub settles in so I arrange to keep them in the cooler at our parish kitchen.

(Actual start time shown.) Now since the cooking needs to commence at 5 am I couldn't really go to the church to get the meat that early.........




so I figured I would bring them home the evening before and keep them in the coolers we normally take camping. As it turns I only needed the larger of the 2 coolers like the one pictured....so that's how I found out how many butts fit in this size cooler.



Oh yeah that's another thing that takes some time ahead of time if that makes sense and that is the Mop.

I mentioned it in the post The Big Day the list of the ingredients for the mop...as apple cider, white vinegar, oregano, granulated garlic, black pepper, cayenne pepper mixture. But this time I used malt vinegar and not apple cider. I could say that this was an experiment to analyze the difference between these 2 vinegars but I would be lying. When I bought the ingredients for the malt for some reason I thought I had used malt vinegar...............one of my brain synapse must have gotten connected wrong. Other than the start time being earlier the sequence of events was pretty much the same. 1/2 hour checks on the temperature and shuffling of the 2 end pieces, with the addition of some foil under the relocated end pieces after the first couple hours. The less you open the cooking chamber the more the temperature remains steady and that make even cooking easier.

The mop was applied liberally every 1/2 hour for the last 5 or so hours and like the last post The Big Day, I forgot to take a photo of the finished goods. It's sort of a real flurry of activity in the final 1 or 2 hours after the decisions is made that things are done cooking. 10 pork butts take up quite a lot of space, a little less than when they are raw, due to shrinkage. I read that the weight may reduce as much as 20% but have never done the weight before and after cooking. Getting these very hot, very tender chunks of pork from my place to the church required 2 large pans and several yards of aluminum foil. Luckily I had many good helpers waiting to assist, hands on, to pull the meat from the bones and in to bite size mouth watering morsels of smokey goodness.