How Long to Smoke a Pork Butt

Two butts do not take twice as long

Time is set by thickness, not by how much meat is on the grate. Two eight pound butts finish in about the same time as one, as long as the pit holds temperature and air can move around them. What changes is recovery time when you open the lid, and how hard the fire has to work.

The stall

Somewhere between 150 and 170°F the temperature stops climbing and sits there, sometimes for four hours. That is evaporative cooling — moisture leaving the surface faster than the fire can push heat in. Nothing is wrong, and nothing needs rushing.

You can wait her out, or wrap her up and push through. Wrapping in butcher paper cuts two to three hours and keeps most of the bark. Foil is faster still and costs you the crust.

All Night Long, Worked Backward

For pulled pork on the table at 6 p.m., with an 8 pound butt at 250°F:

Fat Cap Up or Down: Which Way She Likes It

On an offset, where the heat comes from the side and rises over the top, cap up. The fat melts down over the shoulder for the first six hours and keeps the bare muscle from drying out while the bark sets underneath.

On a vertical smoker or a kettle, where heat comes from below, put her cap down so the fat takes the heat instead of the meat.

How long to smoke a pork butt at 225?

Closer to two to two and a half hours a pound, so an eight pound butt runs sixteen to twenty hours instead of twelve to sixteen. That is the trade: 225 buys you a deeper smoke ring and a longer, gentler render, and it costs you most of a working day.

The honest case for 225 on a pork butt is weaker than it is on brisket. A butt is so forgiving and so well marbled that it turns out beautifully at 250, and the extra four hours mostly buy you more time awake with it. If you are cooking overnight and want to wake up to it rather than sit with it, 225 is the reason to.

How long to smoke a 10 pound pork butt? And a 5 pound one?

At 250°F, a ten pound butt runs fifteen to twenty hours and a five pound butt seven and a half to ten. Both plus the rest. The per-pound figure holds across the range because a pork butt is roughly the same shape whatever it weighs — it is a thick block, not a thin one, and thickness is what sets cooking time.

What does change is the stall. A bigger butt holds more water, so it sits in the stall longer and the spread between the low and high estimate widens. Plan for it to go long, and be pleased if it finishes early. A butt that finishes three hours ahead of schedule holds perfectly well; one that finishes three hours late ruins an afternoon.

Do you wrap a pork butt?

Most people do, in foil, once the bark has set and the color is where they want it — usually around 160 to 170°F. Wrapping pushes you through the stall and can take two or three hours off the back end. The cost is bark: foil steams the crust soft, and a butt that went in wrapped at 155 comes out with no real bark at all.

Tuck it in once it has some color in its cheeks, and it gives for you sooner.

Butcher paper is the compromise and it is a smaller compromise on pork than on brisket, because pulled pork gets tossed and the bark ends up distributed through it anyway. Unwrapped is the purist route and it works; it just adds hours and asks you to hold your nerve through the stall.

How many people does a pork butt feed?

An eight pound bone-in butt gives you a little over four pounds of pulled pork, which is about eleven adult plates at six ounces or roughly thirteen sandwiches. That is the USDA buying yield doing the work: a pound of bone-in Boston butt as purchased comes back as 0.52 pounds of cooked meat once the bone and the fat are gone.

Buying for a crowd rather than a family, the meat calculator works it out from the same yields. The short version is about three quarters of a pound of raw bone-in butt per adult.