The family is all headed to the beach next week. That’s my parents, brother, two sisters, spouses, most of the grand kids, and even a couple of great-grand kids. Each of the first generation (I’m the oldest) organizes one night’s dinner. For instance, my brother, who lives on the Tar River in Eastern NC, fishes from his dock more days than he doesn’t. So he & his wife do a fish fry every year. One of my sisters, in coordination with my mom, does an Italian night.
Of course, you know I’m doing BBQ. But, I’m not going haul of my equipment and spend my day cooking, so the butts were done last night.
I picked up a pair of 7½ lb. butts at Sam’s and rubbed them down with some Big Dick’s Oink It! And let them hang out while I set up my 26” Weber. Thanks to Sparky for giving me the idea of using the charcoal ring from one of my 22.5” WSM to help with the snake (or fuse, or whatever). It really makes the job a lot easier.
I put the butts on at 6:30 pm (yes, PM). The Weber stayed pretty steady through the course of the night, maintaining a temps in the 265º-275º range except for dip to 240º around midnight.
You can see that I started them off on my “Second Story” because the two half-pans won’t fit insude the charcoal ring. I ended up just using some regular grates in top of the pans because the butts were too close to the inside of the lid.
Here we are about 3 hours into the cook.
I started spritzing, every hour, with a maple/bourbon/apple juice mixture. At 11:30, I flipped them to fat side down so that I could spritz all sides. They were wrapped up down in the pans at 1:30 am.
I pulled the butts to FTC them at 5:00 and toddled off to bed.
Sunday, I pulled the butts and shrink-wrapped them for the beach.
I’ll let you know, next week, how it goes over with the troops.
BD