By Dylan Clay
The goal when smoking pork butt is to break-down meat collagen and connective tissues until the point the meat quite literally “pulls apart.” In order to accomplish this, you need to smoke pork butt until the collagen melts and the fibers separate.
However, certain cuts of meat like pork butt can reach an internal temperature at which they plateau or “stall” for several hours.
With a pork butt stall, this usually happens at around 150-165F internal; Below I go over why this phenomenon happens and how to go about beating it.
The pork butt stall happens as a result of what’s called “porous bed free expansion cooling” – which is essentially evaporative cooling.
If you’re from the south-western part of the United States, you might be familiar with a “swamp cooler” or “evaporative cooler” which uses moisture to cool the air.
A swamp cooler works by passing the warm outside air through a wet barrier. The water molecules on the surface evaporate which causes the temperature inside the cooler to drop before being exhausted back into the environment by a fan.
In terms of a pork stall, as the meat “sweats” it causes the moisture to evaporate which cools the meat down.
You can equate this concept to Human physiology – we sweat in order to cool our bodies down. However, when the relative humidity is high outside, sweat evaporation slows down, meaning it feels hotter.
As the temperature of the cold meat continues to rise, the evaporation rate increases until the cooling effect balances out the heat input.
The meat will then plateau until all the moisture on the surface is gone.
This is an important realization because most of the bark formation occurs after the pork shoulder stall. Yet, most articles, videos, recipes, etc. will tell you to wrap during or even before this happens.
The Pork butt stall will usually happen at around 150-165F internally.
However, this number is dependent on the size of the pork butt, the pit you’re using, moisture content – even the accuracy of the thermometer matters.
Above I mentioned that most articles tell you to wrap during the stall or even before the stall starts to happen. In my opinion, this is bad practice because you miss out on creating a better bark – which is the best part of pulled pork.
To illustrate:
Below is a boneless pork butt I smoked and here’s the bark after 3 hours and 30 minutes.
The internal temperature of the pork butt above was ~150F.
Most people would mistakenly believe that they should wrap at this stage – especially if following the regurgitated information found in most articles.
Rather, here’s the pork butt after another 2 hours and 24 minutes.
The bark is noticeably darker. There is a more pronounced “split” on the fat cap; Overall, it just looks far better and likely will taste far better.
My best advice would be to wait longer to wrap. By waiting longer you allow the meat to take on more smoke, you render more fat, and the bark tastes better.
The internal temperature in the second photo was 166F; I was happy with the exterior and opted to wrap.
This is really hard to estimate as it really depends on the pork butt you’re using, the smoker, the temperature, etc.
If I were to average it, likely 2-6 hours is how long a pork butt stall will last for. During this time, it’s not unrealistic to see the internal temperature go down.
For this article I used a boneless pork butt that weighed 4.12 lbs.
I smoked the pork butt for 5 hours and 14 minutes before I decided to wrap it; The temperature I wrapped at was 166F (or when I was happy with the exterior of the meat).
Note: During this process of wrapping, I was using this pork butt to write several articles on wrapping. While wrapping and taking various photos the internal temperature went to 171F simply due to carry over cooking.
After wrapping, the temperature dropped from 171.7F to to as low as 159F before increasing in temperature.
The time between this photo (when I wrapped and put the wrapped pan in my electric smoker):
And this photo – which is when the pork butt was wrapped and went from 159F to 172.7F:
Was 1 hour and 50 minutes.
Meaning, my pork stalled for nearly 2 hours and went down in temperature before going back up in temperature.
Both of these processes are completely normal.
The primary way to beat a pork butt stall is by wrapping the meat – commonly called a “Texas Crutch.”
You can learn more about this concept, in this article.
To condense that article: A Texas Crutch simply involves tightly wrapping the meat with aluminum foil.
With pork butt, people tend to introduce liquids like apple juice or apple cider vinegar as these flavors pair nicely with pork.
The general idea behind the added liquids is that it adds flavor. While this is true to an extent, the liquids also help to increase thermal conductivity which speeds the cook time.
Liquids – in general – have a better heat carrying capacity than air (roughly 4.23x more).
Meaning, they’ll transfer heat from the liquid to the meat better.
Wrapping also increases humidity which helps to combat the moisture wicking properties of the meat.
Aside from foil wrapping, some folks also like to use butcher paper, which is porous. The idea being that the material won’t comprise the bark as much due to less steam being trapped – in general, steam softens the bark.
However, if you intend to wrap with a lot of added liquid, butcher paper will leach the liquid as it’s porous.
Aside from these materials, lots of people like to use foil pans. To the pan they’ll similarly add liquids like water, apple juice, apple cider vinegar, even sugar water.
As the pork butt continues to push past the stall it will braise and steam in this liquid.
For pork butt I stick to Aluminum foil or aluminum pans.
The pans are especially useful because you wrap in the pan, rest in the pan, hot hold in the pan, pull the pork in the pan, and serve from the same pan.
While the “pan wrap” is pretty straightforward, I do have my own preferred method.
I go over this method in far more detail in another article, below I simply condense it and break it down without mentioning the “why.”
Essentially, you need:
1. Fill an aluminum pan with enough water to cover the bottom of the pan.
2. Put the oven safe cooling rack in the center.
3. Put the pork butt on top of the cooling rack.
4. Cover the pork butt loosely with butcher paper.
5. Cover the aluminum pan tightly with aluminum foil.
This is my personal preference and I find it takes qualities from all the methods, while also using a pan that makes the process far easier.
Also, here’s the bark after resting:
Wrapping with a pan is by far my favorite method for pork butt and what I’ll do for the rest of my life. Test the above methods to see what you prefer.
Unlike Brisket, probing different parts of the pork butt will have less of a difference in overall internal temperature throughout the muscle.
Brisket is made up of two muscles – the point and the flat. When brisket is stalling, it will give you three different internal temperatures depending on where you probe it. In almost every case the flat will be 10-20F lower than the point.
For this reason, it’s recommended that you probe the thickest part of the flat.
In comparison, the pork butt is comprised of roughly 12 muscles that converge at the shoulder, forming this round, oval of meat. This muscle structure is also heavily marbled, making it one of the easiest meats to smoke in barbecue (the added fat helps to prevent it from drying out).
For this reason, you should probe the thickest part of the meat while avoiding the blade bone.
I have a separate article on this topic but here’s a schematic of what I mean:
The black arrows indicate that you probe until you hit the bone, and then retract a few inches. This way you’re getting an accurate reading of roughly the thermal center.
On an actual pork butt, that looks like this:
Here’s this same concept on a boneless pork butt:
On a pork butt, the only muscle I wouldn’t suggest taking a reading from is the “Money muscle” or pectoralis profundi.
It’s on the outer edge of the pork butt – this fact alone means it will finish faster. However, if you’re taking a “shallow” reading and probe this muscle, you’ll get an inaccurate idea of overall tenderness.
Something that I preach on Barbecue FAQ is that you should be probing meat according to probe tenderness, not internal temperature.
In most cases, a pork butt will “finish” or be probe tender at 190 – 205F.
Here’s a video of me probing pork butt for tenderness:
Meaning, advice like “pull the meat at 195F” is bad practice because no two pork butts are the same; What might be probe tender at 195F for you, might be probe tender to me at 205F+.
Even inversely, what might be probe tender for you at 195F might be overcooked and dry.
Rather the probe should slide in and out of the butt like a probe through a jar of peanut butter or warm butter.
Like Brisket, pork butt is one of those meats that I typically will smoke the day before serving.
The reason for doing this is because it’s a large muscle and it usually takes 11/2 – 2 hours per pound of meat; Meaning an 8 lb pork butt could take 12+ hours to finish.
In terms of a timeline:
So say you wanted to eat at 2 pm, you’d need to have your pork butt on the smoker at around 4 am – that’s assuming all goes to plan too.
Most beginners tend to get stressed out and rather than stressing, I just do everything a day in advance.
Meaning:
I trim and season my pork butt the day before so I can simply take it out of my refrigerator in the morning.
I smoke the pork butt the day before and then hot hold it overnight.
The next day when it’s time to eat, I take it out of the holding oven and pull the muscle and mix in my finishing sauce.
The reason for “hot holding” is because you’re keeping the meat out of the food danger zone (between 40 – 140F); At these temperatures bacteria grow quite rapidly.
There are a couple of different ways to make this happen:
All of these devices are setup to be consistent in terms of operation and temperature.
While you could technically use a gas oven, I’m personally not super comfortable doing so as the pilot could go out and fill your entire house with gas.
What I’ve found with hot holding pork butt is that I like to smoke the pork butt to around 190F and then drop the temperature of the smoker/holding oven to around 165F.
I then put the pork butt in the smoker in the wrap, without resting.
This way through carry over cooking the collagen will continue to render and you’ll maintain moisture within the muscle as it gelatinizes and cools down.
This method is counter to the traditional way where-in you smoke until probe tenderness, rest for 1-2 hours, and then pull.
I’ve personally found that smoking until probe tenderness and then holding results in drier meat than smoking to near probe tenderness (~190F) and then holding.
Test both and see what you prefer.
I also pull the muscle after holding because pulling the muscle and then holding will expose the meat to oxygen which will essentially dry out and discolor the meat.
Rather, by leaving it whole, you minimize oxygen exposure.
Note: After holding at 165F, you don’t need to rest the pork butt in the morning as what you technically did was an extended rest, albeit at an elevated, food-safe temperature.
If you only have a cooler and towels, I’d suggest pre-heating the cooler with hot water.
The reason for the hot water is to pre-heat the cooler as apposed to putting the wrapped meat in a cold cooler and having the cooler wick heat.
Then wrap the wrapped pork butt (foil or butcher paper) with an old towel. Then dump the hot water from the cooler.
Then put the towel wrapped pork butt in the cooler overnight.
Then pull the pork the next day.
Best science and experimentation based description of smoking a pork butt. Thank you for writing this
Cheers Karl – happy to hear it was useful!