Butts cooked for 20hours at 275 and still not done
Date: 2007/09/04 10:36
By: Smokin' Bill
Status: Visitor
Eric,You really want to cook butts in two phases. Start them off at 225-250 and leave them there for 14-16 hours. You will see the temperature of the butts move up gradually for the first 10-12 hours and then stop moving once they hit somewhere around 175-180. (This known as the plateau and drives first-time butt smokers absolutely nuts.) At that point, the collagen in the butt will start melting down. This will take around 4 hours. Once the collagen has broken down, the internal temperature of the butt will start moving up again. At that point, crank up the dome temperature to ~325 and shoot for an internal butt temperature of ~200-205.Once you've gotten to that point, pull the butts off the smoker, let them rest for a bit (to reabsorb the juices into the cells as they cool down) and pull that butt.
