Pork

I got a 7-lb Boston butt from the Virginia farm that raises forest-fed pigs ("Babes in the Woods"). I'd been wanting to try pulled pork in the Big Green Egg since I got it, but the 10+ hours of cooking it was a daunting prospect. So Labor Day became the big day to try it.

As always, I used my barbecue bible, the Jamisons' book, using their rub of paprika, pepper and other ingredients and their mop of vinegar, leftover rub and more pepper. I applied the rub the night before and another coating in the morning when I took the butt out of the fridge. I lit the fire at 7 and got the pork in at 8 at about 220 degrees. I mopped it every 45 to 60 minutes and in the afternoon inserted my newly acquired digital thermometer probe into the meat. It was at about 120 degrees and needed to go to 180 according to Jamisons. Other recipes had put the internal temperature at 160 to 180, so I was willing to accept the lower end of the range. The new probe, for what it's worth, registered the "oven" temperature about 20 degrees lower than the Egg's own thermometer. I pulled it out at 6:30 at 160 degrees and wrapped it in foil for half an hour.

The pork was delicious and was a big hit with the family members who came over for the holiday, but it was different than I anticipated. I thought I would have a tender, fibrous, gray pork that would shred at a touch to turn into those piles of pulled pork we had on our road trip last summer. I had prepared the vinegar sauce to go on this pulled pork. What became evident as I sliced through the crust to the pink meat underneath was, as Henry said, "I don't think this is the shredding kind of pork." It was in fact, as Henry also observed, much more like ham, though with more of a smokey, porky flavor than you usually get with ham. It was very tender and pretty moist, but firm and I carved thin slices for the platter. The vinegar sauce was still delicious on it.

Clearly there's some things I don't understand about barbecuing. Was this more of a picnic cut, so that I got smoked pork shoulder, rather than a real butt with the marbling that would yield the shreddy texture I anticipated? Are these forest-fed pigs, which have great flavor, simply too muscular to get that kind of marbling? (There was plenty of fat, but as a slab along one side of the cut.) Is the Egg simply not going to yield the kind of result that a real smoker would?

Don't get me wrong -- it was a great meal and a very successful recipe. But I would like to have a better idea of what I'm doing. Everybody brought great sides and Andrea did her delicious corn sticks. I also grilled some wings (about three dozen) and sopped them in a "Basque" sauce from Thrill of the Grill (this was very good and will prompt me to try more recipes from there) and in Frank's Louisiana sauce, said to be the sauce of the original Buffalo wings.