I did all that in a covered roasting pan in an oven.
But even on a grill, if have the internal temperature at 165-170 F, an air temperature on a grill of 170 F will, bingo, keep the meat internal temperature at 165-170 F.
Never heard of a "circulator".
I have no smoker or cooking source that generates smoke from wood products.
I have no interest in entering BBQ competitions -- Myhrvold already did that and wrote lots of documentation on what he did in cooking.
My main goal in cooking is just food good on some balance of nutrition, flavor, preparation time, and cost. In that, for my time, etc., a pork shoulder on a rack in a covered granite roaster in a good electric oven in a good kitchen stove is a good option.
Sure, elements of flavor include salt, pepper, vinegar, lemon juice, smoke, caramelization, Maillard browning, umami, often carried by fats, etc.
But to simplify things to save me time, my working hypothesis is that, if in the end I want good flavors from smoke, sugar, lemon, vinegar, apple juice, tomato, brown sugar, molasses, capsaicin, etc., then I will add those just before eating. For Malliard browning, sugar caramelization, the coveted burned crisps, those are only for the external surface and, thus, just a small part of the total volume which to me means that, due to the time and effort required to get them, I can do without them.
If I want something better than the BBQ I've been getting, then I will turn to other directions from America, France, Italy, Austria, etc.
E.g., one path to a good sauce is some good beef stock (or just a can of Campbell's Beef Consomme), heavy cream, Dijon mustard, Worcestershire sauce, salt, and pepper, with some Mailliard browning from deglazing a pan fried steak with the beef stock.
Astounding things can be done with good Kirschwasser, heavy cream, cherries, and chocolate!
American cherry pie with a lard crust is tough to beat. Similarly for apple.
My family recipe for Thanksgiving turkey with stuffing in the turkey is terrific: The recipe was intended to make lean, wild turkeys moist; on current grocery store domesticated turkeys the recipe is magnificent overkill!
I like BBQ pork, but the notes I gave here are about a far as I care to go with the subject.
Are you on amphetamines, or do you just have so much time and inclination to sit down and write all you do? Frankly, I am in awe at the quality of your posts.
Teach me your ways. Please. What tricks to living a good, dignified, and alive life have you found?
What do you do to stave away the soul-killingness of the world? How do you keep your morale up so high?
Dear god, man where do you get the mental energy? Are you akin to Kant's 40 cups of coffee a day eccentricity?
Illegal drugs? NEVER. Caffeine? Not anymore.
Not everyone likes my writing at HN, Disqus, or anywhere else. I have no interest in getting paid for writing, and that is good because my audience would be tiny.
For your other questions, early on I looked for sources of information I could count on and settled on math, physics, and parts of the rest of science. From that I guessed that in principle things have rational explanations; later I concluded that in much of life finding such explanations is too difficult. In particular, if get very far away from math and mathematical physics, then rational explanations get difficult to find.
But difficult to find does not mean the explanations don't exist. So, knowing that there is a rational explanation, even if can't find it, can help filter out some really sick explanations as look for an effective, even if expedient, response.
So, for another source of security, I settled on some of the common US business explanations of the role money: In practice in life in the US, if can make some money, then many other issues of security and rationality become less crucial. How to make money? There are lots of lessons here on HN.
For a "dignified" life, I concluded that somehow there is a lot of junk out there, in two words, pop culture. So, I try to avoid it. We can avoid pop culture -- there is a lot of just terrific stuff out there, back to Newton, Bach, etc.
A lot of really terrific, historic stuff has happened in just the last few decades:
So, one day I heard about quasars -- the explanations sound about right and are astounding. It appears that the super massive black holes needed for quasars formed quite early, earlier than we can explain so far.
Similarly for the 3 K background radiation -- wild stuff that we can see that far back.
Then there was Guth's inflation -- more amazing stuff.
Kolmogorov's foundation of probability and the resulting theorems -- astounding.
Atomic clocks that can detect the effect of general relativity from moving a clock from the floor to a tabletop -- more amazing.
Then we got DNA as the source of genetics -- how come we were so lucky to uncover that? Then how amazing it is -- essentially all of life on earth is from just DNA; there are no alternatives. Amazing.
Then we got the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) -- again, how could we be so lucky?
Then we got the Human Genome Project that from some clever cutting into pieces and the PCR mapped the whole human genome. And now we can do that quickly and routinely.
So, when Covid was sequenced, one pharma firm had a vaccine three days later -- we've risen several levels above the apes.
Gravitational waves? You must be kidding. Or, were until we detected them from colliding neutron stars, black holes, etc. And what could be done with an array of space based gravitational wave detectors is mind bending -- as in how could any such thing be true?
Then along came digital computing. Each new machine looked like a step up in technology. A decade or so of such steps looked like a step up in civilization, The Ascent of Man(kind), etc. For $100 I bought an AMD FX-8350 processor, 64 bit addressing, 4.0 GHz standard clock speed, 8 cores, and about 35 times faster than all six of the IBM mainframes we had for general purpose use at IBM's Watson lab.
Digital communications was at about 110 characters a second, but at that time some Bell Labs people were developing tiny solid state lasers -- amazing little chips. Now we can bring 1 Gbps data rates to individual desktops.
Computing and communications may be the new steel and steam or better.
We have a dichotomy: (1) With what we know about the standard model of physics, astronomy, and cosmology, it all looks very rational and solid, from a lab on earth to some electron finding a proton 13 billion years ago and 13 billion light years away. (2) When we get past the standard model of physics and the associated mathematical physics to human life and civilization, rationality is tough to find. The standard model of physics is a case of exquisite perfection; human life and civilization are fraught with irrationality, little in science, frustrations, massive disasters, and riddled with imperfections. An incongruous juxtaposition.
But, we are at a special time -- where we can understand the physical universe via the standard model from the present back 13.8 billion years, back nearly to the beginning. Amazing.
Your post was like a poem -- advertently or inadvertently -- singing to my soul.
I can now find peace with this reminder of what must be done.
Thank you.
I'd say that if you like East Tennessee pulled, you will also like West Tennessee chopped at least nearly as much -- there really isn't a lot of difference.
For me, its that thinner tangy vinegar based Carolina style for pulled pork. For brisket, I prefer the Memphis style sauce. I will say I have recently had some of the Alabama white sauce on chicken and found it more compelling than I would have expected. Not my favorite, but sort of interesting. My goto though is still Carolina style.
By the way, the first time I had pulled pork was southwest of Jackson near the border, so it is not just in the east.
[0] https://www.tasteofhome.com/collection/regional-barbecue-sau...
=== Qualifications
From age 5 to 22, I was in Memphis. I was there again from age 30 to 32.
At ballpark 8 ounces of pork BBQ a month, that would be
(1/2) * 12 * 20 = 120
pounds of pork BBQ consumed.
Dad often took me to the annual Winchester-Western gun show with fantastic shooting by Herb Parsons. Also featured was pork BBQ -- paper plates piled high with it, with coleslaw, potato salad, and some bread -- cooked overnight on racks over a temporary dug pit maybe 2 feet deep, 4 feet wide, and 50 yards long with smoldering wood, likely hickory.
With the BBQ contest Memphis in May, Memphis has some claims to significant, competitive pork BBQ expertise.
The Nathan Myhrvold winning efforts at Memphis in May contribute to the level of expertise.
Now I'm in East Tennessee, another area for serious pork BBQ.
And I've cooked my own versions of pork BBQ off and on for over 20 years.
=== Theory
From various readings, there is a theory of "low and slow" meat cooking including BBQ:
Part of the theory is that the meat fibers themselves are always tender. When meat is tough, the cause is collagen. So, to make tough meat tender, melt the collagen, and can do that at 165 F, a temperature that is also commonly regarded as high enough for food safety.
If get the meat fibers much above, say, 180 F for too long, then the fibers will shrink, expel their water, and become dry and brittle, that is, not succulent.
Generally, 212 F for very long is too darned hot. In practice often can get by with cooking meat at 212 F, that is, boiling it, if (A) the meat is quite tender and (B) don't have the meat at 212 F for very long.
So, my best guess is that BBQ is from cooking "low and slow", and the "low" is about 165-170 F, and the "slow" is several hours, until the meat is still juicy and quite tender, i.e., succulent.
=== Most Recent Trial
This HN OP is timely: On
Saturday, April 3rd, 2021
I bought a fresh "boneless pork butt" of 8.9 pounds, $21.72. That piece is also called Boston Butt. It is the shoulder of the hog.
I have a rack of stainless steel wires that can be adjusted to the shape of a V and a rectangular covered granite toasting pan
19.5 x 12.88 x 7"
=== Cooking
So, I put the pork on the V rack in the bottom of the roaster, inserted a meat thermometer into the pork, put on the top of the roaster, and placed the whole assembly into a pre-heated 225 F oven.
At 2.5 hours later the meat thermometer read 165 F. Then I reduced the oven temperature to 170 F and cooked for another 8 hours.
Then it appeared that the meat was quite tender and the fat, collagen, and water were in the bottom of the roasting pan.
=== Chopping
East Tennessee pork shoulder BBQ is pulled pork as mentioned in the OP. Here the fibers of the pork are separated via pulling with, say, two forks.
In West Tennessee, e.g., Memphis when I was there, the pork is coarsely chopped.
So, with a cooking fork and a cooking spoon, I moved the chunks of the pork one at a time to my cutting board and used a French chef's knife with a 12" long blade to coarsely chop the pork and used a spatula to shovel it into two covered plastic containers, each with 2 quarts of volume.
=== Yield
The weight of the final BBQ was
2,205 grams
and the volume, loosely packed, was about 4 quarts.
The raw weight of the pork was
8.09 * 16 * 28.3495 = 3,670 grams
so that the yield was
100 * 2,205 / 3,670 = 60.1%
which is surprisingly high.
The bottom of the roasting pan had about 1.5 quarts of liquid with about 5 fluid ounces of fat. Chilled, the fat did not become solid, and the liquid did not gel.
=== Cost per Serving
A generous serving of the BBQ is 8 ounces or
8 * 28.3495 = 227 grams
so that the total cooked weight of
2,205 grams
has
2,205 / 227 = 9.7
servings for
21.72 / 9.7 = $2.24
per serving.
=== Serving
In the cooking I added no salt, pepper, BBQ rubs, or other seasonings.
For serving, I warm in a microwave oven and add some bottle BBQ sauce and some bottled hot sauce.
=== Changes
(1) The boneless pork butt -- from the cutting to remove the bone -- had the meat falling apart in several pieces. In the future, I will buy only the bone-in version and cook it with the bone in.
(2) The 8 hours at 170 F may be too long -- shorter cooking might yield meat that is just as tender but more succulent, i.e., more moist.
(3) Generally I prefer to do pork BBQ cooking with a picnic pork shoulder. That cut is really from a front arm, has the elbow joint inside, and is usually sold with some of the skin still attached. With this cut, the meat may remain more moist as it melts out its collagen.
=== Extras
I have plans to do beef stew starting, NOT with relatively tender and expensive beef chuck roast but, with, say, beef bottom round roast. And I hope to save money by stepping down from USDA Prime and Choice to USDA Select or Cutters and Canners.
Retired dairy cows might be a good source, and once I called around to some packing houses and asked what happens to such cows. The short answer was "think fast food". The offer was to buy boxes of 50 pounds at a time! Maybe someday I will and have beef stew for family and friends for months!
A. Escoffier has a remark that the beef from older animals has better flavor. So, US fast food is getting the beef with the better flavor!
So, right, I intend to cook the beef at 165-170 F and NEVER let the stewing liquid boil (as long as the beef is in that liquid -- boiling later to reduce the volume to concentrate and strengthen flavors, sure).
Put the pot of stew in an oven at 350 F, or 225 F? Let the meat "simmer"? NOT a chance! Instead, 165-170 F and NO MORE.
Pork BBQ is often served with coleslaw. My recipe is to shred a head of green cabbage and then soak the result to desired wetness with just bottled Ranch salad dressing.