Pulled Pork (Pork Butt/Shoulder) on the Weber Kettle: Recipe and How-to Guide - Barbecue FAQ (2024)

In my opinion, pork butt and/or pulled pork should be the first cut of meat that anyone remotely interested in barbecue should smoke.

Mainly because it’s incredibly hard to mess it up; It’s also cheap and tastes wonderful. Two factors that are hard to come by in barbecue.

Pulled pork is also something I love experimenting with and this article/recipe is no different. Meaning, if you have a new rub you want to test, pork butt works super well; I also include my personal Pork dry rub below too.

Note: This article is long and covers everything you might want to know about making pulled pork; It’s all encompassing and for all experience levels.

What to Look For in Pork Butt

This is one of the reasons pork butt is great, there really isn’t a lot of factors to consider other than weight. Pork butt is a piece of meat that naturally has tons of intramuscular fat.

It’s also more or less a hom*ogeneous oval where-in several muscles collide (around 12).

Rather, there’s only two things to consider:

• Bone-in
• Boneless

In all instances, a bone-in pork butt will weigh more than a boneless pork butt.

Usually a bone-in pork butt will weigh around 6-10 lbs. Where-as a boneless pork butt is typically half this amount, at around 3-5 lbs.

The size of the boneless variety entirely depends on how the Butcher used the meat and which part is being sold/marketed as a “boneless pork butt” or “pork butt roast.”

Here’s a whole pork butt:

A lot of articles on the internet like to tell readers to use the Bone-in variety, simply due to the fact that it helps beginners. This is because you can use the bone to tell when the meat is done, i.e. the bone will cleanly and easily pull away from the meat when it’s tender.

However, this bone isn’t necessary and the boneless variety is quite literally the same meat, only far less of it. Usually if I get a 6-10 lber, I end up freezing half of it. Granted, re-heating it results in pork that tastes the same as when you smoked it.

Even with a 40-50% weight loss after smoking, 3-5 lbs of pulled pork is a lot of meat for say a family of 4.

For this recipe, I used a boneless pork butt from Wild Fork Foods – it weighed 4.12 lbs.

What About the Money Muscle?

So if you’re someone who does competition barbecue, you’re likely familiar the “money muscle.”

If you’re not familiar with it, simply put – it’s what gets barbecue competitors “in the money” ie. they place well in competition.

This muscle is widely considered to be the best on the entire pig.

Granted, there’s also other great muscles in the pork butt/pulled pork to look out for, namely:

• Tubes
• “Bacon”

With pulled pork though, these muscles don’t tend to matter much because they’re all just being pulled together in the final product.

Here’s a bone-in pork butt, top down:

Here’s this pork butt from the side:

As is readily apparent, this muscle (pectoralis profundi) is heavily striated with intramuscular fat, leading to the tenderness of something like a pork tenderloin with the succulence of, well, pulled pork.

Technically, if you’re in a grocery store and you’re picking your pork butt, you could look for a pork butt with a larger “money muscle.”

With that said though, if your intention is just to pull the entire pork butt, it doesn’t really matter that much as you are going to quite literally pull all the muscles and combine them together.

Personally, what I do if I’m smoking pulled pork for a large group of people, is I’ll specifically reserve this portion for myself as sort of a “Pitmaster tax.”

OR you can use it to impress certain guests – those who like barbecue or are new to barbecue.

There’s way more nuance to the money muscle as it relates to competition barbecue. Namely, these folks will isolate this muscle with their boning knives (while leaving it attached due to competition rules), and then serve it up as “medallions” as apposed to pulled meat.

If you’re interested, you can learn more about this muscle in this article.

Pulled Pork Dry Rub

Pork butt is one of my favorite cuts of meat to experiment with because it’s cheap.

Typically if there’s a new rub I hear about I’ll use pork butt as a way to gauge if I’ll like it or not; Or I’ll use it as a way to test a new ingredient/spice.

For this recipe, I used a Rub my buddy Shane gave me – Honey Mustard Rub by The Nutmeg Spice Co.

I’m a big fan of honey mustard and he was kind enough to give it to me (although, I suspect most of the “mustard” flavor will be lost but it’s worthy of a test!).

If you have a favorite dry rub that goes good with pork, use that.

With something like Pork, I typically introduce a sweet ingredient like a mixture of sugars.

I’ve tested: Turbinado sugar, White Sugar, Brown Sugar, Molasses granules, maple sugar, etc. Essentially if you name it, I guarantee I’ve tested it.

Of those, I’m a big fan of Turbinado sugar or a mixture of white sugar/brown sugar in the rub.

My typical pulled pork rub is the following:

• 2 Tablespoons Dark Brown Sugar
• 2 Tablespoons White Sugar
• 1 Tablespoon Burlap and Barrel Sweet Paprika
• 1 Tablespoon Garlic powder
• 1 Tablespoon Table Ground Black Pepper
• 1/2 Tablespoon Onion Powder
• Morton Kosher Salt

A couple notes on my rub:

The white sugar is used because it improves the bark where-as the dark brown sugar is more-so for flavor. If using Turbinado sugar, I’d strongly suggest using a binder like mustard due to the larger granule size.

Most paprika that’s sold in grocery stores does absolutely nothing for flavor; This is especially true for most commercial barbecue rubs. The Burlap and Barrel paprika I use actually contributes to flavor.

I personally do not like freshly cracked peppercorns or 16 mesh black pepper with pulled pork. Rather, I like to use table-ground black pepper. In terms of mesh size that’s anywhere from 18-28.

Kosher salt is applied first/separately to ensure even distribution of the salt. The amount of kosher salt you use will vary simply because pork butts are all different shapes and sizes.

Overall the above is a good basis for sweet and savory. From there you can add your own twist like say spicy ingredients (cayenne, chili powder, red pepper flakes, etc.)

Prepping the Pork Butt

So there really isn’t much trimming you need to do with pork butt.

Honestly, you can take the meat out of the package, put your dry rub on, and then put it on your smoker and you’re set.

However, for folks that like some nuance, there are tons of different options you can test:

• Trim any scraggily pieces
• Cross hatch the fat cap
• Remove the false fat cap
• Debone the pork butt
• etc.

You get the gist.

If I’m using a bone-in pork butt and it has a fat cap and I’m feeling lazy, I’ll just take it out of the package, dry rub it, and throw it on the smoker.

If I’m up for wanting to trim the meat, I’ll remove the false fat cap. If you’re not sure what that means, here’s an example.

On a pork butt you’ll have a fat cap side and a meat side. However, the “fat cap” is also “false or faux” in that there are three layers, they go:

1. False fat cap
2. False lean meat (when smoked, this is often called “bacon”)
3. Fat cap

Here’s what happens when you slice under this false fat cap and you remove the false lean:

Here’s these layers removed:

This is the biggest reason I never really understood why people “cross hatched” because they’ll say things like “the rub penetrates better” – however, is the “cross-hatch” actually hitting the meat or the false lean?

With that said, this cross hatch does create little “cubes” of bark/fat/meat that are appetizing. I do the same thing with smoked bologna and those little cubes are delicious.

When you leave the fat cap on, it’s inevitable that there is some un-rendered fat, which isn’t super appetizing. When I go to pull the pork butt, I’ll pick out larger chunks from the pull so my friends and family don’t have to eat it.

By trimming the false fat cap, you eliminate this problem and get more edible bark.

Seasoning the Pork Butt the Day Before

My personal preference for larger cuts of meat like brisket or pork butt is to season them the night before.

The sole reason for doing this is time – nothing else.

Both brisket and pork butt are large cuts of meat and will likely take 6-12+ hours depending on how big the cut is. Meaning, I like to start early in the morning.

At 6-7 am, I have no interest in being awake, let alone wanting to trim or put dry rub on meat.

With pork butt, you can get very aggressive with dry rub. Overall, the bark is a rather small part of the 3-10 lb cut.

What I do is simply grab a large mixing bowl and put my rub on the bottom.

I then put my pork butt on top.

Here’s the pork butt completely covered in rub, all within the mixing bowl:

After putting the dry rub on the meat, I’ll cover it loosely in butcher paper or plastic wrap and put it on the bottom shelf of my refrigerator.

First, I like to grab a baking pan, line with with aluminum foil, and then use cooling racks to elevate the pork butt off the pan:

Then you pop this into the refrigerator on the bottom rack, covered loosely with either plastic wrap or butcher paper.

That butcher paper I then use in the morning as my firelighter.

Getting the Weber Kettle Ready to Smoke

There are a number of different ways you can smoke on the Weber Kettle. You can read about the various methods in this article.

To name them:

• Two zone fire using the Minion Method
• Charcoal snake
• Slow N’ Sear or Char Baskets

Personally, I use the Slow N’ Sear attachment.

The charcoal setup looks like this inside the grill:

In terms of temperature, I prefer to be at around 225-250F.

The main reason for not wanting to go hot and fast (near 325F+) is because most pork rubs are sugar heavy.

As the sugar approaches these higher temperatures (at around 325F+) it will start to burn which results in a bitter taste.

If you’re a beginner, your Weber Kettle may have a tendency to spike in temperature, which could be fatal to your pork butt’s bark (the best part of pulled pork).

Usually I’ll also include a water pan to function as a heat sink so that I can keep the smoker lower in temperature easier – which is especially useful for pork butt.

Water pans also make getting back to 225-250F easier when you take the lid off. With how a charcoal grill works, when you take the lid off, all the heat escapes.

Since I’m using the Slow N’ Sear, it has it’s own dedicated water pan so I filled that up the night before too.

Putting the Pork Butt on the Weber Kettle

Once the kettle reaches 225F, put the meat in the cool zone and add a chunk of hardwood – I prefer peach with pulled pork.

Pork butt is one of the few meats I actually prefer to probe with a thermometer. The probe thermometer I use is the Thermoworks Smoke X4.

You simply probe the thickest part of the meat. If you’re using a bone-in pork butt, you want to avoid the scapula or blade bone.

Here’s a diagram to see what I mean:

You want to probe where the circle is above.

Here’s me probing the boneless pork butt, at the thickest part of the meat:

I also put the pork butt on the smoker with the fat cap up as I find it renders better. I also put the money muscle away from the fire.

If you’re using a bone-in pork butt, I’d point the blade bone towards the fire. That looks like this:

Checking on the Pork Butt

At this point all you’re doing is adding wood every hour or so.

With how the Weber kettle functions, you want to minimize how often you’re “peaking” at the meat. The adage of “if you’re lookin’ you ain’t cookin'” truly applies here.

With that said, this can be to your benefit. If you notice that your temperature is about to spike, you can open the lid and let the heat out.

If the smoker is running hot you can even remove some lit charcoal before before any of the sugars burn.

All I’m waiting on is until I’m happy with the exterior of the meat. The bark will be set and will have taken on a significant amount of smoke. Another common sign for when it’s time to wrap pork butt is when the fat cap splits/cracks; At about this time the pork butt is ready to be wrapped.

Here’s the pork butt after 3 hours and 30 minutes:

Here’s the pork butt 2 hours and 24 minutes later:

An overall smoke time of 5 hours and 14 minutes.

As I hope is readily apparent from the above photos, while the rub has set after 3 hours and 30 minutes, it can still continue to darken and take on smoke as the surface is still wet and pushing out moisture.

Something I think a lot of people do is wrap too early – if anything most people want more clean smoke vs not tasting smoke at all.

The reason I opted to wrap after 5 hours is because I was happy with how the bark looked in terms of color, the fat cap has split and 5 hours is more than enough peach wood smoke to be tasted.

I’m not big on internal temperature but usually when I wrap the internal is at around 165-170F and this cook was no different.

Wrapping the Pork Butt

Typically all pork cuts I wrap with aluminum foil – like ribs. However, for pork butt, I like to use aluminum pans.

Here’s a pork butt wrapped in foil:

If you’re using aluminum foil or butcher paper, follow the following process:

1. Simply lay out two overlapping sheets of aluminum foil or two sheets of butcher paper.
2. Spritz the sheets with some liquid – like water, apple juice, apple cider vinegar, sugar water, beer, etc. This is especially useful for butcher paper as it makes it more malleable.
3. Then put the pork butt at the top of the sheet and roll the foil over the top and tuck it into the pork butt.
4. Fold your sides and crease the edges.
5. Then roll your pork butt up into the remainder of the aluminum foil or butcher paper.

I’ve smoked lots of pork butt and have wrapped a number of ways and using pans is my preference.

These pans are super useful for pork butt because you can simply add water, wrap the top with a layer of butcher paper and then aluminum foil, and when you’re ready to pull, you can pull the pork butt within the pan.

Here’s what you’ll need:

• Aluminum pans
• Butcher paper
• Aluminum foil
• Oven safe cooling racks
• Water or other liquid

1. Simply place an oven safe cooling rack in the middle of the pan – this will elevate the meat in the pan so that it doesn’t turn the bottom super soggy (which is a con in my opinion).

I then fill the pan with enough liquid (I used water) so that the bottom of the pan is covered and so that it isn’t above the cooling rack.

I then place the pork butt on the cooling rack.

The liquid is there to add humidity and to help combat the stall that will inevitably happen.

2. I then cover it loosely with butcher paper.

The reason for the butcher paper is because aluminum foil has a tendency to “eat” the bark. It will either leave aluminum foil on the meat or remove bark from the meat.

Here’s proof of this from this cook:

This is actually small in comparison to what can happen if you tent with just foil. Feel free to try without butcher paper though and let me know how it goes.

3. I then cover tightly with aluminum foil so that the pan can’t leak the humidity.

Putting the Wrapped Pork Butt Back on the Smoker

So at this point, the meat is wrapped and won’t take on anymore smoke. Meaning, there’s not much utility in putting it back on the Weber Kettle to use more charcoal as fuel.

Rather, BTU is BTU or Heat is Heat.

Meaning, we can put the wrapped meat in the oven at 250F; OR in my case, I put my pork butt in my electric smoker set to 250F.

At the end of the day, electricity is far cheaper than charcoal and our goal is just to reach tenderness. The pork butt also has no idea what it’s being cooked by.

Pork Butt and Stalling

When the meat is at this stage, it’s not unrealistic for it to stay at around the internal temperature you wrapped for quite some time – this is called “the stall.”

Even in the above, I was doing 3 separate articles and wrapped my pork butt at 166F to demonstrate 3 different ways to wrap. While doing this the temperature went from 166F to 171F just from carry over cooking.

Here’s the thermometer when the pork butt went in the electric smoker:

When I wrapped it and walked away, the temperature fell to as low as 159.7F before rising back up.

Here’s the thermometer while I was sitting at my desk working to write this article:

The timeframe between those two photos is 1 hour and 50 minutes.

The reason I wanted to include this is because beginners have a tendency to freak out when this happens.

Stalling is completely normal and eventually the internal temperature will rise – so don’t freak out.

When is Pulled Pork “Done”

So, there are a two options/opinions here in terms of “doneness.” I’ll outline the common suggestions as well as my personal opinions.

You’ll find yourself requiring one of two ways to finish:

• Smoke till tenderness (at around ~190F – 205F) and then rest for 2 hours down to around 150-160F; Then pull the pork.
• Smoke the meat till around 190F, hold overnight at 165F in an oven or electric smoker. Then pull the next day when it’s time to eat.

In my opinion, both of these options work.

Some people will say the latter option results in “juicier” meat but it’s borderline negligible. Both will still produce pork that has spots that are dry; Since we’re pulling the meat it doesn’t tend to matter much, if at all.

All the meat gets pulled and tossed around together – often with a finishing sauce. Meaning, those “dry” sections aren’t really noticeable.

If your goal is to eat this pulled pork the same day, you can take the pork butt up to probe tenderness, rest it for around 1-2 hours, and then pull it.

If you plan to eat this pulled pork the next day, I’d suggest smoking till around 190F internal and then holding the meat overnight at 165F in your oven without a rest.

I’ve tested bringing pork butt to tenderness and then holding overnight and it’s noticeably more dry than 190F; Test for yourself and see what works for you.

For this article, I was pulling the pork the same day so I went to 195F (when I deemed it probe tender).

Again, I hate internal temperature as gauges for doneness. Rather, I like my probe to go in and out of the meat like it’s going into a jar of peanut butter or passing through warm butter.

Here’s a video I recorded to show what I mean:

There were basically no “tight” spots, except for two (on the left side) – which I knew would rectify over the rest.

I also entirely let go of my probe to demonstrate exactly what I mean with regards to “passing through warm butter.”

Note: I checked for doneness at 195F, by the time I brought it in, it had already climbed to 196.6F; Again, carry over cooking is a real thing.

I rested the pork butt for 1 hour and 26 minutes, down to 160F:

Usually it takes around 1-2 hours to go from tenderness temperatures, down to pulling temperatures – aka temperatures your hands can actually handle – you also give the meat time to gelatinize the collagen.

Here’s the pork butt after resting:

Pulling the Pork

To pull, you can use nitrile gloves with cotton liners, you can use “bear claws” or simply two forks.

When pulling, if you opted not to trim the fat cap, look for large pieces of un-rendered fat and remove those from the pull – as nobody likes eating a mouthful of un-rendered fat.

If you left the false cap on, what you can do is actually peel back the top layer of fat cap, and underneath you can separate that false lean meat. It’s some of the most tender on the entire butt as it was cooked between two layers of fat – some folks refer to this as pork butt “bacon.”

If you used a pan, or aluminum foil, you can pour some of the fat and meat drippings on top of the pork. OR even use a fat separator to separate the fat from the jus.

If you followed how I did it, I’d suggest pulling in a separate container; Especially if your pan is huge, as this is too much liquid to mix with.

After pulling too, I’d suggest topping with a sprinkle of your dry rub – especially if you’re using a rub like the one I tested. The taste was definitely there but it was faint, and the added dry rub to the finished product gave a nice pop of honey mustard.

Using a Finishing Sauce?

So a common “table sauce” or “finishing sauce” for pulled pork is as simple as:

• Some form of acid
• Some form of heat

That’s really it.

You get tang from the acid (like vinegar) and you get heat (like hot sauce, or cayenne, red pepper flakes, etc.)

You can check out my finishing sauce recipe by clicking here.

However, other types of finishing sauce are traditional ketchup or molasses-based barbecue sauces; There’s also yellow mustard-based finishing sauces.

For this recipe I just used whatever I had on hand.

At the time of writing this all I had in my refrigerator was some Sweet Baby Rays Honey Barbecue sauce.

What Buns to Use for Pulled Pork?

So I wrote an entire article on this topic and my preference are potato buns.

Most articles would likely tell you to use Brioche buns but in my opinion, potato buns hold up far better to the pulled pork, the finishing sauce, the coleslaw, etc.

They also won’t go stale as fast when sitting out for a backyard barbecue.

Be sure to check out my article where I compared them.

All I had were some Hamburger buns on this day and those suffice too.

Other Toppings?

Personally, I’m not big on coleslaw for pulled pork but if you are, use it. All I like is some finishing sauce like a barbecue sauce or a vinegar-based table sauce.

Other common toppings include:

• Pickles
• Pickled red onions
• Pickled jalapenos
• Pepperoncini

The choice is entirely yours – I’m partial to pickled jalapenos.