🔥 How to Set Up a Big Green Egg for a Low and Slow Boston Butt Cook

Welcome back tightwads. It's a beautiful morning already and we're going to put on a Boston butt about five, I think it's 5.2 pounds that we're going to cook for dinner tonight. So we're going to start getting the egg ready for smoking. I cooked burgers last night and let it do a burnout so you can see it's kind of clean inside the fire ring down there. Just ashes in the bottom. So I'm going to take my shop vac and suck out all of the ashes. That's the easiest way to get them all out clean, easy, and then we'll get started. Remove my grate and go down in the bottom. I haven't smoked or cooked on this much since the last time I cleaned it so I'm not going to remove the whole firebox out to clean behind it. But you could remove this piece right here and this piece right here and get all in behind there. Instead I'm just going to suck it out from the bottom down here. Just open this all the way up and get this in there and suck out whatever I can from in there and call it a day. So now that we've got all the ashes out we're going to put the grate back in the bottom and we'll start putting our lump in. I'm going to find the largest pieces of lump to put on the bottom layer so the small pieces don't get down and clog any of the holes and then we'll gradually get smaller as we go up. We're also going to mix in some applewood chunks for smoke flavor. So now that I've gotten my lump up to cover the vent holes in the bottom I'm going to place in some applewood chunks. I do not soak these. I soak if I'm using chips but when I'm using chunks I don't soak them. Then I'll put another layer of lump on top and then a few more chunks mixed in with the top layer. I'm not going to fill it up all the way to the top of the firing since I'm only doing probably a five or six hour cook today. I don't want a waste lump but also want to make sure I have enough so I'll probably come up a few inches below right in this area. So I have the charcoal set up in the egg now. You can see that it is about two inches from the bottom. If I'm doing a longer cook for a seven or eight pound butt or bigger I'd fill it up all the way. I have some applewood in there and now it's time to light the egg. One thing to think about whenever you light the egg it's going to take almost an hour for the coals to get ready to get all the bad smoke out. So you can go ahead and set your butt out on the counter to bring it up to room temperature. You don't want the butt to drop the temperature of the grill when you first put it on. So everything that's going to be in the egg when the cook starts it's good to go ahead and put it in during the preheating section so that it doesn't drop the temperature dramatically. I'm going to be using the loop lighter today and you just stick it down making contact with the coals and then hold the button down and after about one minute you'll get sparks and then you pull it back away from the coals and it just blows on it for a while and the coals start to build. I'll do this in three sections. It's been on here about 45 seconds. You can see it's starting to smoke and spark and I'll pull it back. You can see the embers below and we'll continue on it for another minute. I think it started good. All right so we actually let our egg in four different places and we're going to let it get ready while I run and pick up some apple juice from the store for my drip pan and we will show you the rest of the setup in about 20 minutes. The smoke coming out of your smoker when you first light it is a smoky white color grayish white and that's what most people consider bad smoke. It has more of a bitter flavor and you don't want that in your meat so that's why you need to let your smoker sit for about an hour getting ready and getting your temperature dialed in before you put your meat on. So make sure that you wait for the white smoke to clear so you don't get any thick white smoking in your meat. So I go ahead and put my cap on and close it down about where I think it's going to need to go so the grill can start getting ready and I turn if you have this kind of cap I always turn my plastic tabs away from the hole so I can see exactly what it is and so that this part doesn't get as hot. Then you come down to the bottom and close it down. I'm going to leave it open about a quarter inch for now but I know that I'm going to be about a quarter width of a coin whenever we start cooking. But I just want to go ahead and get started going good before I close it all the way down. All right first I want to start by explaining there are lots of different opinions on how you should set up your egg for a smoke but I'm going to show you my preferred method the way that's worked for me. I've turned out with some really good cooks. So I use my plate setter. Wrap it in foil. The first time you don't wrap it in foil you'll see why you do. It gets pretty black and crispy on the bottom and on the top just has a lot of residue on it. Some people call it seasoning. I call it crap. So set it in with the feet up. Remember your grill's already hot so make sure you don't touch the sides or anything. I also like to use a drip pan. Some people do some people don't. Typically if you use a plate setter you do want to use a drip pan because you don't want this is going to get hot. The plate setter is and as your drippings fall on it they're just going to burn and fry and it gives your meat a gross taste. So I do use a drip pan. One thing to know if you put a drip pan in directly on this it's going to boil whatever liquid is in here and it's eventually going to boil out on a longer cook. So I have lots of different ways I've done things. You can see I've got all this foil balled up. I put four balls one on each corner of the drip pan today because last time my drip pan actually almost overflowed because it didn't boil out. Today I'm just going to put one ball in the middle and kind of push it around so it keeps the middle of the pan off and then we're going to fill that up with half apple juice half water up to about maybe a inch from the top. You don't want a chance of it boiling over and let me get that done. All right it's been an hour since I first lit the coals and you can see the smoke has turned to a clear blue. You may not be able to pick it up well on the camera but we are ready to put our pour coin on. So we have it here and we have a digital probe. This one I actually picked up from Aldi for nine dollars. If you know anything about probes they're usually around a hundred to anywhere from a hundred to about five hundred dollars for the nice ones that sync remotely. So this is a wireless receiver. We'll see how well it works. I don't anticipate it working great since it was only ten dollars but we'll give it a shot. If you are using a probe it helps to wrap the lead wire with aluminum foil. This keeps it from burning up in the heat of the egg and from where it gets pressed in between the lid and the base. So put some foil on it. It seems to help a little bit but we're ready to get started. So we're going to go and open this up and we're going to put our meat on and I'll show you my setup once I've got the probe in and everything's ready. All right so again there are different methods that people claim are the best for cooking a butt. Since I can do this one low and slow because I have time I'm going to do it low and slow at about 250 for an hour to an hour and a half per pound. I have it fat capped up. I'm just going to put my probe in to the thickest part of the meat. Get it all the way in. I'm going to close my egg and I'm going to monitor my dome temperature and keep it at about 250. Nothing over 300 nothing below about 225 and let it go. I won't open the grill again until it's time to pull the meat off as long as my probe's working correctly. Otherwise I may have to open it up and check it with my electric thermometer beforehand but we'll see how it goes. During the cook you want to monitor your temperature and adjust your vents as necessary. I just put it on so I'm going to go and get where I think it's going to be. The more you cook with your egg the more you'll learn. Mine's usually about a quarter width on the bottom and a little bit maybe two quarters on the top but it's different every time depending on the humidity outside the temperature outside and we will try to get this to maintain right at about 250. So I'll come out here and adjust it later if needed but for now it looks like I'm good to go. I didn't get a chance to video the end of the cook so I'm just going to tell you the rest of the process. So you leave your butt on the egg and check your temperature every 30 minutes to an hour. It maintains temperature pretty well so you really don't even have to check it that often but if you're home it doesn't hurt to make sure you don't have any temperature spikes or drops and once your probe shows that your temperature is at about 190 to 195 you can go ahead and pull the meat off the egg. I like to pull mine off wrap it in foil wrap it in a towel and throw it in a cooler or just leave it on the counter depending on what time we're going to eat. If we're eating within the next hour sometimes I just simply foil it and leave it on the counter until time to eat. When it's time to eat I pull the bone out if your meat's cooked correctly your bone should wiggle straight out of the meat and then I take the green egg meat claws and shred it with that. I don't add sauce to it I do provide sauce to my guests usually just in case they want some sauce on their meat but I do not add it to the meat. I think it tastes great without it. I hope you like the video let me know how your cook goes so in the comment section below feel free to share some ideas tell me what you do differently but please keep it positive. Give me a thumbs up and subscribe for more videos in the future.