special thanks to the ridge wallet for sponsoring this video hey welcome back to the barbecue lab my name is david gafford and today i'm going to answer a question i've been getting all week this week which is how do i cook a bone-in boston butt or how do i actually make a pork shoulder that's what we're going to tackle today and we're going to tackle what i would consider the beginner's recipe if you've never smoked anything before and you're saying i want to get into barbecue this is the absolute first recipe that i suggest you trying so if you know someone who's new to barbecue this is a perfect share for them and i'm going to walk you through it every step of the way coming up [Music] so this is a boston butt or this is a port shoulder the question is what's the difference between the two well they're kind of synonymous in barbecue we're really talking about the shoulder of the pig and this has a bone inside you can actually see and feel the bone if i put this right here you can kind of see it for this camera put it down here there's a bone right there this is a boston butt with a bone inside now you can do this with a boneless boston butt but the problem you run into is that as you cut through and get that bone out you have little pieces of the pork butt that are going to kind of hang off you have to tie it up so that the little parts don't fall off and dry out as you go through a bone in butt is the way to go so that's what we're going to start with here now i picked this up our local gordon food services you can get this sam's club you can get these at your local grocery store they're very prevalent but this is one of the easiest cuts of meat to make in barbecue and so today i want to show you how i recommend people do it when they're just starting out so the prep for this is actually super super simple all we need to do is we need to take this butt out of the bag we need to go ahead and once we get it out of the bag we're not going to wash it off we're not going to clean it off we're not going to do anything to it we're going to check for anything that we need to go ahead and trim off in case there's any things that are hanging off or really really massive amounts of fat on the outside but we're pretty much going to let this thing run as it is and for our rub we're going to use a simple salt and pepper recipe and it's going to be delicious it's going to look fantastic and i know you're going to love it so we're using the simplest recipe that i love to use and even though it's simple it's still one of the most delicious so don't let the simplicity of just three ingredients throw you on this this is an absolute winner and i want you to try it so all we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and take equal parts of salt and pepper now you can use different meshes of ground ground pepper there's 16 mesh there's all different types of how finely ground you can get your pepper but this right here we're just using a bottle that we got at our local sam's club or gordon's food service of ground pepper so we're going to use ground pepper and here we have salt there's multiple different types of salt there's kosher salt there's fine sea salt there's pink himalayan salt today we're just using your garden variety kosher salt so all we're going to do is mix those in a bottle of a shaker now this is just a spice bottle that i have left over from a spice that i finished up it doesn't matter what you it doesn't matter what kind of bottle you have but my suggestion is you get one that has this a little bit of a lid that's going to help you shake this out instead of pour this out so you can use any bottle for this you can even just use your hand dip it in and sprinkle it on i like this because i feel like i get a more even coat as we're putting it on so i'm just going to go ahead and take our pepper and our salt and i'm gonna awkwardly put it in here because i know this is not gonna go as smooth as i would hope but let's go ahead and give it a shot all right pepper i promised awkwardly and i delivered there we go so i'm gonna go ahead and put the shaker lid on top get that on put the lid on and we'll shake that up and there we have a 50 50 salt and pepper blend so that's our seasoning for today all we need to do now is go ahead and take this butt out of the packaging now if you look at this butt here this is about a nine pound pork butt pick this up for about 1.99 a pound at our local gordon's you know you could probably find him in the midwest for on sale as low as 99 cents a pound or all the way up to 250 299 a pound uh this was about a buck 99 a pound for what we picked up here and is going to produce probably five to six pounds of pulled pork when it's all said and done by the time we pull any of the extra cartilage bone and fat out of the final meat now one of the things i really recommend when you're going to take a butt out of a package and you're going to start working with raw meat is i really like nitrile gloves nitrile gloves are food safe but these are the kind of gloves that you might see someone like a mechanic use you might see someone in the food service industry use them i will be sure to put a link in the in the description below for you but i like nitrile gloves because it can keep my hands clean and i'm not spreading uh raw pork juice on every surface that i touch for the next uh you know five minutes after i'm done and all i'm gonna do is i'm gonna go ahead and cut open the package i'm trying to get it open without taking all of the liquid out and pouring it all over my cutting board so the way i like to do that is i'll keep the liquid here in the bottom and i'll just take the pork butt kind of shimmy it out like that there i have my liquid and juice goes in the garbage can all right so this is your pork butt or your pork shoulder or your boston butt this is what we're talking about here so if you look on the outside you're gonna see some things like there's some fat we probably don't need that the rest of this looks looking pretty good this is called our fat cap on top of the boston butt this fat cap is just the exterior layer of fat in between the muscle and the skin now the skin's been taken off of this this is just the fat cap on the top and you can trim this fat cap down if you want to you can take your knife and just very slowly start shaving away and take that fat cap off something like this and you could just shave that fat cap down if you want to now today i told you that we're going to do an easy boston butt or a boston butt for beginners and my whole thing would be don't worry about trimming your boston butt this is going to be totally fine you're going to be able to cook this any of this that won't render you'll just pull aside when you pull this don't even worry about that fat cap if you turn this over and you start looking at it we have to see if there's anything that's kind of hanging off that might not survive a cook this right here is kind of hanging off so i might just go ahead and go in here trim that out same thing here this is kind of hanging off so i'm going to trim this out and you might ask what kind of knife am i using this is just a boning knife this happens to be a wusthof boning knife we've got a wusthof collection that we've been building for about 18 years in the kitchen and this is what i have today so i'm gonna go ahead and trim off any of these little pieces that are just going to burn up and not be good but that is what i'm looking for is an even surface across the top with nothing kind of hanging out or sticking up so i hardly trimmed anything off this is all that we trimmed off of this entire nine pound pork butt all we need to do now is put on our spice blend now you might see a lot of people who say oh yeah we need to put a binder on here let's use mustard or let's use hot sauce or worcestershire sauce or worcestershire worcestershire sauce worcestershire worcestershire worcestershire sauce but you could use any type of binder that you want this pork butt has enough moisture in it that i don't need a binder to be able to put my rub on and have it stick so i have my 50 50 blend of salt and pepper here i'm just gonna take the lid off and all i want to do is put a good heavy coat remember this is nine pounds of pork think about how much seasoning you need to season nine pounds of pork if it wasn't in just a big roast like this i like to go a little higher with my shaker than the pork roast because i don't like to go ahead and shake down here it gets it too fine it gets it too concentrated i like to shake above and give myself a little bit of a rainfall of seasoning here like this so if you look i'm giving myself probably what four five six inches in between and i'm just going to go ahead and get one side i'll go ahead and get the other side and we want to get seasoning on all of this pork all the way around okay last side okay now we're talking about the fat cap and the meat side now there's a lot of people who ask the question do you cook a pork butt fat cap up or fat cap down well it really depends on what you're going for when you're cooking if you think about it the fat cap is really an insulated layer that's going to give you a layer of protection between your meat and the fire so if your fire is coming from below you might want to consider having your fat cap on the bottom to insulate it and to keep it protected from that fire that's coming below so you don't nuke the meat that's on the bottom another way of looking at it is if you put your fat cap on the top the fire is going to come from below and any of that fat cap that's going to render is going to lubricate and moisturize the meat as it runs down the meat on the sides now all of this fat cap is not going to render though some of it will not all of it will because this is pretty hard fat so the question is really up to you are you going to run it fat side up or fat side down today we're going to run this on a pellet grill because pellet grills are becoming super prevalent in the outdoor cooking world and there's a lot of people who have one on their back porch and they're saying i want to learn how to use that today we're going to show you how we run a pork butt in our outdoor kitchen but we're actually doing it as a part of a test where we're testing the top five pellet grills under 599 dollars here in the united states so as a part of that test we're cooking five pork butts with this exact same recipe on five different cooking units that you see behind me if you want to check out that video we'll put it right up here in the card or we'll leave it in the description so we're going to go ahead and put the fat cap down for this cook because pellet grills there's a burn cup in the bottom and the fire's coming up from below we're going to use the fat cap to protect our meat on this cook so let's go ahead and finish with the salt and pepper on the fat cap here and you can see we're getting a pretty even coverage of that salt and pepper then we're going to go ahead and go to the side that we're going to put up on the grill and this is going to be our presentation side so this is the side everybody's going to look at and see we want to get a good healthy layer here and with that good layer we have a seasoned pork butt that's ready for the grill now a lot of people might ask okay well how come this isn't going to look like a barbecue pork butt or why is this going to have the red color i'm used to seeing it's going to have that color but it's going to come from just salt and pepper and it's really fantastic so i can't wait to show you what this looks like so let's go ahead and get our grill fired up and we'll put this on the grill and show you what this is gonna do over the next eight to ten hours while we cook it at 250 degrees all right here we are this is the life smart 2000 b pellet grill it's one of the ones that we're testing as a part of this test we're going to take our pork butt and we're going to put it center grate with the fat cap down just like this and i'm going to go ahead and take my thermometer from the life smart grill i'm gonna go ahead and put it in the meat i'm gonna go ahead and take my thermoworks signals thermometer i'm gonna stick that in the meat as well have a great temp probe here we should be able to monitor how this meat is doing all the way through the cook all we have to do now is shut the lid and let this thing do its magic and we're going to let it run at 250 degrees for probably the first three hours before we even touch it or even check it this thing's going to go it's going to be delicious with father's day fast approaching here's a gift idea that i know i would love it's called the ridge wallet and it comes in over 30 styles and colors including this black damascus version which looks just like my favorite kitchen knives with this beautiful wave pattern in the metal they even have the coolest bolt action pins like this one in gun metal now if you're struggling to find the perfect gift for dad use the code bbqlab at ridge.com and get 15 off your purchase total and make sure that your dad is going to be thrilled when he opens your gift this year you can even let dad test drive one of the wallets for 45 days and if he's not fully in love with it you can send it back for a full refund it holds up to 12 cards plus cash so get him the gift that you know he's going to love all right here we are at the three hour mark with this pork butt and so we haven't touched it for three hours it's gone into the grill it's just sat there and taken on smoke for three hours we haven't opened the lid i haven't done anything but monitor the temperature of the grill to make sure it's staying at 250. so really all i want to do now is i want to open the lid and i want to see if the outside of the pork butt is starting to dry out if it looks like it needs a little bit of moisture and if it does i have this nice little pressure sprayer that i just have water in all it is is water you could mix it with apple cider vinegar you could mix it with all different types of things but this is a simple pork butt we're just going to use water it's going to do all that we need so we're going to spray the outside but we're first going to see if the bark is adhered to the meat yet so we're going to use a simple rub test on our finger to see if the bark comes off and other than that we're going to make sure it's moisturized put back on the pit close the door and let it go for another hour all right there's our pork butt let's see how the rub is see it's not really coming off on my finger maybe just a smidge but it's starting to dry out here on the top so i want to go ahead and give that a little hit of moisture and all i'm going to do is spray it down a little bit of water make sure i get all the sides then i'm gonna take the lid put it back down and we're gonna let that go and that's all we have to do so remember this is after three hours you could go three three and a half hours no big deal but now i'm gonna start checking in on it about once every 45 minutes to an hour but i'm not going to open the door except for when i check to see if it's dry if it needs another spray so we're going to check in here at about one more hour and we'll see how the outside of the pork butt is doing and whether it needs any more moisture before we get ready to wrap this pork butt to accelerate the process all right so our pork butts our pork shoulders have been on the grill for about four and a half hours we have opened the grill to spritz them after three hours and after four hours and it's time to go ahead and start taking them off of the grill and putting them in the wrap all right we're gonna wrap these butts up in aluminum foil now why aluminum foil why not butcher paper well because if this is your first time smoking you want to go ahead and wrap and foil this is the most foolproof method i know that's going to help you make sure you get these butts done and to the table in time for you to eat now the whole point of wrapping these in foil is to go ahead and help that collagen break down inside the butt and go ahead and help that fat to render what we're going to do is we're going to expedite the process of getting from 150 degrees to just over 200 degrees because what we want to do is we want to try to hit right between 200 and 203 with this pork butt that's usually almost the perfect pulling temperature we're going to verify that a little bit but that's what the goal is that we're going to achieve here so before i go grab that pork shoulder off of the grill first thing i need is some hand protection i need to make sure that my hand can take a hot pork butt off the grill and transfer it to something there's a couple different ways to do that my favorite way is with a glove that is an insulating glove it's just a cotton glove liner and a nitrile glove and they look like this when you have them on the whole point is i have the insulation from the cotton glove liner and i have the nitrile protection so that when i'm done handling pork butts and working with this i just take the nitrile off and i don't have to wash my hands or anything fantastic solution so if you're interested in either of these i'll put links in the description below so you can find them but we buy our nitriles by the 100 in a box and we buy our cotton glove liners by you know say 10 or 12 packs to make sure we have them everywhere we're barbecuing or cooking outside so i'm gonna go ahead and put these on and then we will see you over at the grill as we pull one of the butts off to put it in foil let's show you what the pork butt looks like inside the grill when we hit 150 internal and then we can get a chance to get it out and get it wrapped [Music] now remember this is just salt and pepper on the outside of this pork butt so that color is coming from the smoke the salt and the pepper and that is it i'm gonna go ahead and take this temperature probe out that goes with the life smart this temperature probe here that goes with the thermal work signals i'm going to take the butt out set it in there now we can take this over and wrap it all right so we have our pork butt ready to go into the wrap what i want to do is i want to put this close to the edge of the wrap here so we can bring the sides in fold them over and then roll the pork butt into a nice little package so we're gonna go ahead and start with the pork butt here pull it out get the microphone cable out of the way and i'm going to bring in these sheets of aluminum foil up around the side like so and bring this side up around the side like so then i'm going to go ahead and take this back part and i'm going to fold it up just like this and now that we have this bent over so it's actually the way we want it to go all i have to do is take this and fold it all the way over now one other thing is see this that is liquid gold right there so i don't want to skip on that i want to make sure i put that in the in the wrap because that is liquid love make sure we got that and i'm going to go ahead and take this bend it over right here let the wrap come around outside and there we go nice little wrapped pork butt ready to go back on the pit so that's really what it takes to get that thing wrapped up we're going to take it put it right back on the pit stick our probes back in so we can monitor the temperature and when this thing gets to about 200 degrees or so that's when we're gonna go ahead and start probing it with a thermoworks thermapen or an instant read thermometer to see if it's done and ready to rest so that's what's next let's get this back on the pit [Music] all right here we are we are at 204 degrees internal for this pork butt 203 degrees is what our target was but it took us time to get outside get back in front of the camera we went up another degrees but 203 is our point where we want to check the internal on this pork butt so i'm going to open this grill and you're gonna notice this pork butt has multiplied because we're running that test of five different pork butts once they actually got to the wrap point it didn't matter if we kept the ball on or not so they're all on one grill now but you can see that this one right here is running 204 and so we're gonna go ahead and check it out come on in [Music] so here are our pork butts the one that is connected to this one is right here i'm gonna pull out the probe and i'm gonna take this and i'm gonna put it right into this cooler and see if i can do it without breaking through the outside of the foil losing all my juice got a little bit of juice coming out there all right there we go now what we want to do is we want to get inside here and see how this probes so we're gonna check with an instant read thermometer if it probes tender or not so i have my thermopin right here and we're gonna go ahead and check this to see how it probes it should probe super super easy with very little resistance if we get in here through the aluminum foil that goes in and out really easily look at that just hardly any resistance at all let's try another area hardly any resistance at all now i could go ahead and unwrap this completely and i could go through and i could check it not through the foil i can check it without that but i know through after doing hundreds of pork butts that this one's done if you're second guessing yourself and you're thinking man i want to make sure this is done go ahead and unwrap it and then take your probe stick it in make sure it's nice and tender and then we want to let it rest as soon as we know that it's done the whole thing that we've done all of this work for is we want to let it rest and we want that meat to reabsorb some of those juices back into the meat as opposed to staying outside of the meat the rest time is going to do that that's why i put it in this cooler now this cooler is perfect because i want to go ahead and eliminate drafts and wind i want to just have a nice place for it to settle down and gain that moisture back into the meat so i'm going to put the top on this cooler and i'm going to let it rest for a minimum of 60 minutes now some of you are thinking that i'm absolutely crazy 60 minutes yeah we want at least 60 minutes for those juices to go back into that pork butt now if i if i have the time i'll even go two hours i'll go 120 minutes and it's even better now you might be thinking well what about the pork won't be too cool won't it be cold i guarantee when you open this package after two hours it's still gonna be steaming hot okay now if you're gonna hold it for a long time you don't want it to continue to cook you can let all the steam off of this by opening up the package letting it cool down for three or four or five minutes and then putting it in the cooler that way you can guarantee it's not gonna continue to cook i'm okay with it being fully wrapped like this putting it in the cooler i know it's just gonna reabsorb those juices it's gonna be delicious so that's what we're gonna do that's what's next we're gonna let this thing rest and then we'll come back and show you the payoff when it's completely done all right so we have rested this pork only about an hour i'd love to get two hours in today we can't we have friends coming over for dinner and they are already here so it's time to get going on this but here we have the party cooler that is resting our pork butt so what i want to do is show you what a rest in a cooler looks like if i take this off and you look here at the pork butt itself it's just rested pork butt it's just sitting here resting in this cooler that's about it but what i want to do now is i want to go ahead and get this unwrapped find the end pull that up and for those of you who are wondering like will it still be hot check out that steam can you see that steam there that's after an hour resting with no no heat added to it it's still hotter than hot so take a check at that pork butt there now remember this rub is just salt pepper and smoke that's the color we get from salt pepper and smoke on this no sugars no paprika none of the other colorants that you might see in the popular barbecue rubs that are on the market this is just salt pepper and smoke guys it's a great color so i highly encourage you to use something just as super simple as salt and pepper if you really want to know if your pork butt is done all you need to do is pull out the built-in thermometer malcolm reed from how to barbecue right brilliant guy he says you just check the thermometer on those things they come with a thermometer and he's 100 right so you just grab this pork you just grab this bone right here and you pull the bone out that bone comes out clean that means your pork butt is done now there's 45 different ways you can pull a pork butt i've seen people throw it in a paint bucket and use a paint stirrer to pull the whole thing in about five seconds me i like to be a little bit more selective on how i pull a pork butt but really what it comes down to is just getting in there and grabbing a hunk of meat off and saying i want this and there's some fat in here i'll pull that out before i serve it but look at that pork butt that thing is as tender as can be juicy tender there's that piece of the bark on it it's going to be so good that's the piece i want to try right there so bark piece melt in your mouth tender that's so good so if you look here you can even see the smoke ring on this piece of pork you can see that pink smoke ring on the outside so we even do have a nice smoke ring from a pellet grill of all of all sources so can you pull pork on your own can you make a pork butt that is super tender and fall apart just like this yes you can 100 is it hot absolutely i've got to put it back down it's too hot so dynamite pork butt super super easy if you try this leave us comment down below and let us know how it went if there's some question that you're saying man i really wish you would answer this question put it down below in the comments i'd be happy to answer for you because our whole goal here is we want to equip you as backyard chefs so that you feel confident and comfortable in your own backyard using the equipment that you have to invite others over to be able to make sure that you are entertaining others because i firmly believe so does melissa we're 100 better together even though kovan wants us to be apart we're even two years past covet now it's still around but i think we've kind of got it ingrained in our psyches that maybe we need to be apart from each other i completely disagree i would love to see us get together get together around food so if you enjoy having people over and you enjoy outdoor cooking this is the channel for you make sure you hit that subscribe button before you take off we'd love to have you around for the new recipes gear 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