Pork Shoulder - lbs to hours question

[Dare]

The situation is:

My son wants pulled pork for his 21st Birthday in two weeks.  He's thinking of having 30 of his closest friends over.

The questions are:

I have a 12 lb shoulder from costco, is this enough or should I get another?  I'm thinking I need two.

I have a 4 rack digital, is it better to divide the shoulders up to  6lb pieces, 1 a rack (what most recipes seem to call for) or leave them whole?

The standard seems to be about 1 hour per 1.5 lbs.  Do I use one shoulder(largest) as the gauge or figure the more meat the more time? I know about internal temp but I need to estimate a start time.

Thanks for the input.

Dare

[FLBentRider]

The situation is:

My son wants pulled pork for his 21st Birthday in two weeks.  He's thinking of having 30 of his closest friends over.

The questions are:

I have a 12 lb shoulder from costco, is this enough or should I get another?  I'm thinking I need two.

I have a 4 rack digital, is it better to divide the shoulders up to  6lb pieces, 1 a rack (what most recipes seem to call for) or leave them whole?

The standard seems to be about 1 hour per 1.5 lbs.  Do I use one shoulder(largest) as the gauge or figure the more meat the more time? I know about internal temp but I need to estimate a start time.

If they eat like my kids, I would plan on at least a half a pound per, and you have ~50% loss from raw to cooked, so you need ~30Lb of raw pork.

I would leave them whole.

It seems to take me roughly 18 hours regardless of the quantity.

My normal procedure:

Brine butts 24 hours.
Rub butts - rest 24 hours.
start the evening before - I start around 9pm. apply four hours of smoke.
from here you can

A. Leave them in the smoker until the desired IT (I use 190-200F)

or

B. Take them out of the smoker, wrap in foil, and place in a 200F oven until the desired IT (I use 190-200F)

They are usually ready around 3-4 pm the next day, and I FTC them until time to serve.

I pull them out of FTC, open the foil, let them rest 10 minutes (so I don't burn my fingers)

Pull.

Eat.

[Mr Walleye]

Dare

I just did pulled pork last weekend for 30 people. I did do 10 racks of back ribs too. I did 2 butts, one weighed 12 lbs and the other 11 lbs, both bone in. Because I did the ribs as well I ended up with an entire butt left. (not a bad thing) Also a number of people in my crowd were older people, the young guys can really pack the food away! I would suggest picking up another one similar size and going with 2. Oh ya... don't cut them in half, they will be fine. Just position them on the rack in such a fashion that they are not touching any of the side walls, especially the back wall.

As far as time... it's a little hit and miss here. The butts I did were in the smoker from 4pm one day to 12 noon the next day. I ran the tower temp at 220 with 4 hours of apple smoke. I also did a couple of rack rotations whenever I noticed the lower butt's IT was Higher than the top one. The IT was about 180 to 185 when I took them out to transport them. Because I had to transport them about 45 minutes away, I put them in tin foil pans, gave them a shot of AJ, covered with foil and into a cooler for the trip. Once I arrived I put the foil covered pans into the oven at 200 degrees until close to serving time (around 5 pm) at which time I pulled them. I never did take the IT of them after sitting in the oven for a few hours at 200 degrees but I suspect the IT would have been around the 195 mark. They turned out fantastic and got rave reviews.

I think you should allow about 24 hours for them to get to your desired IT, then also allow 3 or so hours for FTC. The FTC time can be used for a buffer in case they are done earlier or later. You can FTC for up to 6 hours.

Mike

[Caneyscud]

It is hard to guesstimate the amount of barbecue a group will eat.  Depends on gender, how long it has been since they last ate, age, number of sides and what you will serve - but at 21 or near, they are sure to have good appetites.

Rules of thumb
Pulled sandwich = 1/4 pound is one sandwich and one serving
Sliced pork = 1/3 pound is one serving.  Too big for grandma or the brown-rice-and-yogurt-touchy-feely-70s-Zen-hippie group, but too small for guys like me.

Boneless Butts will lose approximately 40% when cooking.

Other variables, would be when you are serving, and what else you are serving.  If you do a lot of appetizers - ABT's, Moinkballs, fatties, etc.. they won't be as hungry.  So take your number of servings (guests X 1.25 or up to 1.5 - guess of how many will want seconds), multiply what your serving size will will be (say 1/3 lb) then multiply that by 1.67 to get your raw weight of pork butt needed.

For 1/2 pound servings (recommended for this crowd - unless it is just all skinny girlfriends)  Using 35 to include family, but adjust if needed
(35 x 1.5) x 1/2 (.5) x 1.67 = 44 lbs. raw pork.  That would be for healthy eaters (50 % seconds and 1/2 lb portions on the plate)

For 1/3 pound servings
(35 x 1.5) x 1/3 (.33) x 1.67 = 29 lbs. raw pork.  That would be for healthy eaters (50 % seconds and 1/3 lb portions on the plate)

For 1/4 pound servings
(35 x 1.5) x 1/4 (.25) x 1.67 = 22 lbs. raw pork.  That would be for healthy eaters (50% seconds and 1/4 lb servings on sammies)

I only did this to show that multiple butts will be needed with possibly more than one smoker and oven session over possibly two days time.  With the 1/2# scenario, to be one smoke would require 3 - 12 pound butts and an eight pounder.  This number of this size butts could very easily take over 20 hours or more to cook.  With this much meat - the rule of thumb will be closer to 2 hours per pound of meat.   And to guage the time use the heaviest piece of meat - 12 pounds x 2 hours = 24 hours.  The smaller butts would probably come out earlier.  If it finishes early FTC until pulling and serving time.  

The 1/3# route with 50% seconds might be the route to go unless you want a lot of leftovers or everybody is big eaters.

You might have a lot left over (not a real problem - leftovers are great, tasty, and versatile) or like my latest -  almost none left over.

FLBR has you great advice for cooking (although I don't brine my butts) as well as Mr. Walleye or you can check out this thread about cooking multiple butts.
http://forum.bradleysmoker.com/index.php?topic=10335.0

[NePaSmoKer]

Last weekend we had around 40 people at a party. I had 2 butts done and went through all but about 1.5 lbs.

nepas

[Dare]

Thanks, everybody.

Great advice and too the point.  I'm going to print them out and stick them in my smoke and spice book.

I think I'm going to need to start a binder for all the great stuff I find here and print out one of these days.

Kudos and smoke 'em if you got em.

Dare

[duncanshannon]

The situation is:

I would leave them whole.

It seems to take me roughly 18 hours regardless of the quantity.

My normal procedure:

Brine butts 24 hours.
Rub butts - rest 24 hours.
start the evening before - I start around 9pm. apply four hours of smoke.
from here you can

A. Leave them in the smoker until the desired IT (I use 190-200F)

or

B. Take them out of the smoker, wrap in foil, and place in a 200F oven until the desired IT (I use 190-200F)

They are usually ready around 3-4 pm the next day, and I FTC them until time to serve.

I pull them out of FTC, open the foil, let them rest 10 minutes (so I don't burn my fingers)

Pull.

Eat.

As silly as it may seem, this high level overview is what helped me get going on my first pork.  There are lots of recipies, but I feel like i needed this 50,000' foot view to get the process framed up in my head. It was helpful in that it answered some of the basic questions w/o too much detail that would have gotten in the way!  thx.

I linked to this post in my write up, which you can find here:

http://www.unfoodie.com/2010/01/smoking-my-first-pork-shoulder/