My Top Tips for the best Hickory Pulled Pork

Hey, I'm Matt with Meat Church. Let me show you a major tip to making the best pulled pork. Welcome back to the channel. If you're new here and don't know Meat Church, we're kind of about two things. We make what I think are some of the best craft barbecue seasoning in the world. They are definitely the freshest. And then myself, Matt Pittman, I teach outdoor cooking and kind of do really cool catering for some folks that you might've heard of from time to time. But we've got quite a few pork butt or pulled pork recipes on this channel. We've got a very, very popular Mexican pulled pork. There's a savory pulled pork. We've got several sweet pulled porks, but I'm from the Southeast. If you said barbecue to me as a kid, it was either pulled pork or it was ribs. We're kind of coming into the prime of barbecue season. You can always barbecue here in Texas, but for the rest of the country, a lot of people are just now kind of pulling their smokers out and getting at it. Pork butt is a great way to start. There's so many different ways you can take it. We have so many different seasonings, even in our arsenal. And we thought we'd use a new one with you guys here today. So let's jump right into it. So this is a 10 and a half pound pork butt that we bought at our local grocery store. It's what I call a commodity pork butt. Nothing special about it. Nothing crazy, 25 bucks. Anatomy of a pork butt. You've got your money muscle right here. A lot of the great pulled meat comes from this. You get some really great meat around the bone and then underneath the fat cap, like right underneath there's can actually see exposed here. This is what's known as the bacon on a pork butt. That's probably the best. And there's lots of different ways to cook this. You can cook it meat side up. You can cook it fat side up. What we're going to do today is we're going to go fat up. They both work great. There's not a huge difference, but what we're going to do today is I'm going to take a knife and I'm going to score this fat cap to kind of make a diamond look in the end. And that will open up this fat, give us some more surface area per season, give us a nice visual appearance. And it's something I like to do if I'm cooking fat up. So I'm going to take my fillet knife and just kind of come diagonally, getting all the way through the fat cap. And I'm going to do that about every inch and a half or so, both directions can turn it around and do the exact same thing. The complete opposite direction. Great thing about this. It's inexpensive and it feeds a ton of people. So if you're operating on a budget, this is great for a barbecue because like I said, it doesn't cost a whole lot. It's honestly like really hard to screw up. We're going to give you just a couple key tips here today that if you follow those tips, you can't screw this up. Makes great leftovers. My family loves it. We're going to slather today. So I'm going to put gloves on just so that I don't have to run over to the sink. First thing I'm going to do is slather. So slathers act as a binder for your seasoning. They not only help the seasoning when you apply it, but they help the seasoning stay on during the cook process. And if you have an aversion to mustard, I always say this, it's not a big deal. You're not going to taste this. So don't sweat it. I do the same thing on briskets. I didn't do a whole lot to this. In fact, you saw that I didn't cut any excess fat off of it. There wasn't a whole lot on here. You can, if you want to. Let's talk about seasoning. I'm going to use our hickory all purpose. So this came out last year and we have never done a pork butt video with this. We've done ribs with it. It has a gorgeous color, much like our gospel seasoning, which we say is the best color in barbecue. I'm going to apply this very liberally, by the way, because this is a big piece of meat. You're not going to hurt it. Just kind of pat it in here. But the hickory has just an insane taste with the hickory flavor. This seasoning is an Ace Hardware exclusive. They are our biggest customer and we don't normally do exclusives all over. We've done just one. You can get it at an Ace Hardware or you can also get it at MeatChurch.com. But as I always say, you guys can use any seasoning you want, but this is delicious on pork. So now we've got that side really good. I'm going to go ahead and do the fat side and I'm going to just move my hands all in these little cracks I've created. I make sure to cut deep enough through the fat cap to open it up. So just use your hand, just kind of work in there, open it up, get the seasoning applied. And then generally speaking, I would let this sit here at least 15 minutes. But I always tell folks, though, if you're making barbecue on the weekends, do this the evening before. It's no problem to put all of this on here and then let it sit on the counter for 15 minutes so it looks nice and wet. That's the seasoning pulling the moisture out of the meat. And then put it in a pan covered with foil and throw it in your fridge. That way, early in the morning, when you get up to cook, like today, it's bright and early here. And this would have been fantastic if I did this last night. If I was cooking by myself, there's nothing worse than getting up early in the morning and having to do all this prep work. You're like, man, I don't want to get to bed and do that. So just go ahead and do it on Friday night. If you're cooking on Saturday, let the seasoning sit on here all night. You're going to be good to go. So let's talk about cooking. This is just going to be a simple two-step process. Today, I'm cooking on a Traeger Ironwood at 250 degrees with meat church pellets. That is oak and hickory. When I cook pork, I love that mix. I love hickory. I love pecan. Again, coming from the southeast, hickory was kind of big there. I live in Texas now where post oak is how central Texas barbecue is made. And so I put the two together. But if you don't have that, I love hickory, love pecan. Like I said, the two-step process is we're going to put this in the smoker, 250 degrees, fat side up, and I'm going to smoke it until I've got a beautiful bright red color starting to turn dark, generally in the 170s internal temperature. And that's when we're going to wrap it up. And when we wrap it, we're going to put some of this delicious goodness in it. So we're going in the Traeger and that's probably going to be somewhere between, depending on the size of your pork butt and the temperature you're cooking at, somewhere between six and eight hours. And we'll see you at the wrap stage. Well, it's been about seven hours after I put the pork butt in. I left and went to the office, came back. I've been checking the temperature a little bit along the way and we're approaching 170 last time I checked. So it's time to wrap it. Got my instant read thermometer, number one tool in cooking. Kind of go right in the heart of things, 169. But cooking is visual and you're looking for this beautiful color. You can see the starting to pop open. There's where that bald spot was. It's shrunk down quite a bit. I mean, with a pork butt, you only get 50% of yield out of it when you're done. But, you know, 170 degrees, we've only got another 30, 35 degrees to go until it's done and it's looking really good. So I've got beautiful color and I'm ready to add a little bit to this. So what are we going to do? Get that glove off. All right. So some things that I like to add, I'm going sweet pulled pork this time. So a little bit of brown sugar. I'm going to throw in some pats of butter. I usually put about a stick in. So this is going to melt down. It's going to add nice richness, but then the pork is going to be cooking in this. So, you know, cooking in fat like this is not going to be bad. I put a little more seasoning generally across the top. Something I've always done since my competition days. Sometimes I mix it up here. In this case, I'm just going hickory. Then I want a little bit of braising liquid. I don't need a lot. So this is Welch's white peach grape. This is something that way back to my comp days, we would wrap ribs with. And I'm just going to pour a little bit of this down in the pan if you want a braising liquid. Now, pork butt, a lot of fat in it. It's going to kick out a ton of fat. So that's optional, but this is actually delicious and let's wrap it up. All right. So we're going to wrap it tight and we're going back in the Traeger. Now here, this is where I tell people, pull your head out of the recipe and let's cook the second step of this to meet your lifestyle. If you leave this at 250, it's probably a couple hours at the most to go those last few degrees. You can increase the temperature if you're in a hurry, go 275, 300, 325. If you need to hold this for later today, say this is lunchtime for you and you don't want to eat it till supper, you can drop this down and cook it, you know, 200 for a while, do whatever you want. But we're going to stay nice and simple here. We're going to continue at 250 and throw this in the smoker and we'll come back when it's probe tender. Well, it's not been quite two hours and let's check in on the pork butt. I think it's ready to go. The key with pork butt, it needs to be probe tender. So it doesn't matter what the number says on here. You want to open this up. Actually, I'm going to open it in a minute. You just want to fill in here. Look, there's, that's like putting, that's like putting a pot knife in butter, like no resistance. I know. Oh, look at that, man. I know we're good. Bring that over here. Take a look. She's heavy. Big reveal. Oh yeah. Nice and steamy. And so you can see the bones protruded here. You know, it's done. I mean, there's just like nothing there. It's like, boom, the thing with a pork butt, unlike a brisket, you don't have to rest it like you do a brisket because with this method, because I'm actually going to pull this in a lot of its juices. The first thing I'm going to do is grab the bone. And when you get a clean bone pool like that, look at all that steam. You know, you're in good shape. I told you that meat around the bones, that stuff is so good. So I'm going to, I'm going to make a mess here. I've got insulated gloves on. I'm not Superman. I'm going to put this over here in this big pan. Man, it's kind of hard. Probably should have done this before I took the bone out. Now I've got a fat separator. I'm going to pour a bunch of this au jus in here. Here comes my dog right on cue. Yeah, some good stuff right there. So we're going to, we're going to let the fat separator sit there. And then what it's going to do is the fat's going to separate. And technically these are for pancakes. I didn't know that for years, but you can already see it starting to separate. So the good juice is going to be down at the bottom. We'll come back to that here in just a little bit. So when it comes to pulled pork, remember you've got all that fat cap you had right on top. Fats flavor, but in moderation. So I'm going to kind of peel this really carefully off here and expose that meat layer that was right underneath. Cause that is great meat. I told you earlier, that was called the bacon. Let me show you a little cube off there. Look at this, that meat right there. Good God. It's going to be hot and I don't care. So good. So I'm going to carefully peel some of this fat off is my first step. And I'm going to set aside. I may want some of it, but I don't want all of it. I'd never want the entire fat cap in my pork bun. That's just a little, little too much fat. So you see, I'm still leaving a little fat here. If you're careful, it'll just come right off, leaving a little fat, but leaving that beautiful layer of meat underneath. Beautiful smoke. Basically what I'm going to do, I like to peel in kind of two phases, but here's that beautiful bacon meat right there. I'm going to peel kind of in big pieces and then I'm going to start adding the jus. I'm going to add some sauce and some seasoning as we pull it together. That's probably one of my biggest tips I could ever give on pork butt. Look at that right there. God, that's good meat. A lot of people just season their pork butt and they just pull it and they eat it like that. You're missing out on a ton of opportunity to add some flavor. So that's what we're going to do. So we're going to kind of break out these big sections like this and start to pull it into kind of big pieces. It'll start to cool, and then I will break that down into smaller, fine pieces. I'm not trying to pull it into completely fine pieces like this at the very beginning. I'm just trying to go bigger pieces at first. Now I've kind of moved into taking those bigger pieces and just pulling this down to the nice, fine pieces. And as I pull these big pieces, put the finer pieces down here at the end and know that I'm done and just keep working the pan that way. You can see, even though I pulled that fat cap off, there's plenty of fat in here like this. We'll give it lots of flavor. Plus, we're about to add a lot of juice back to it. All right, that is nice and pulled. So it's time to move on to adding stuff back. It already tastes amazing as is. Let's make it even better. I call this step adding raw seasoning back in. Very, very important. So you only season the outside of the piece of meat, much like when you cook the prime rib. Big piece of meat, just seasoning on the outside. So let's add some seasoning back in here. It's really going to wake it up and give it a pop. Competition, they put seasoning on the end of everything and call it finishing dust. And add a little bit, taste after you've added things, and you can always add more to it so you kind of get it where you want it to be. Now here comes the sexy part. Remember that fat separator? So that's kind of the bad stuff up top. And the good juice at the bottom. And there's a hole at the bottom of this. What we're going to do is we're going to add some back in and mix it up. You just kind of work that with your hands. Now if you don't use a fat separator, you're going to be adding all the fat back in here. It just kind of makes it, you know, fatty and slick. And so I like to put the better juice in here. And a pork butt makes a ton of this. The butter's in there, like it's so good. Yeah, it's looking really good. So I'm going to give it a little taste test. I ain't mad at it. So juicy. We've served this at a people's choice like this, and people think it's got barbecue sauce on it. It doesn't, but it's about to. Going to use my favorite barbecue sauce in the world, Meat Mitch Womp. My friend Mitch Benjamin developed this, and good God, it's good. So I'm not going to go too heavy. And again, this is add some, mix it up, taste, continue till you get it where you want it. So I'm not trying to make it overly saucy. I just want, I mean, it's, guys, it's plenty wet now. Look at that. But this sauce is delicious. Use whatever sauce you want. But my thing at Meat Church, what I teach are things that I know work. Take this recipe and change it to however you want. I don't care if you never cook my recipe, just use this for a guide. I'm just here to give you tips, mainly to encourage you to get outside and to cook, but make it your own. Pick your flavors, pick your seasoning, pick your sauce, whatever you want to do. I just know this one is delicious. Now it's nice and mixed up. We'll give it a little sample. I'm going to go just a little more because, you know, Texas is not a barbecue sauce state, but barbecue sauce is my favorite condiment, and it works great in something like this. But I feel good after this. Now this is nice and mixed up. We're going to call this good. We're going to figure out, are we making pulled pork sandwiches or tacos? What are you? Are you team pulled pork sandwich or team pulled pork taco? I gotta go get some brioche buns. We're going pulled pork sandwich today. All right, I'm gonna go big handful is what I'm gonna do. Good Lord. Sir, while I build these sandwiches, I'll tell you, make this ask me anything. You guys have questions, get in the comments. If you comment within the first day, I will answer you, unless you're a troll. And then you're just going to get ignored. I can tell you based on my taste test here, I don't need to add any more sauce. But if you would like, if you like it really saucy, you certainly could pour sauce right across the top of these. That's what you want to do. And I'm a simple man. So here we go. That's so good. Fresh bread, just with that wet sauce. Man is hickory is a winner on pulled pork. That's what I grew up on right there. Pulled pork for sure. It gets no better. And like I said, I mean, my family loves this. So this is a great meal for us. It's my wife's favorite barbecue that we make. So be sure you're adding some seasoning, separate the fat, put some sauce in. This is a way better product than just pulling your pork and pouring barbecue sauce across the top. Guys like what we're doing, like and subscribe, but check out our hardcore barbecue playlist. Every year we have a series where we do what we call hardcore barbecue, which we are now in our fourth season. So this will be episode one. And that's where we do the classic. So we've got beef ribs, we've got briskets, we've got pork ribs, we've got beef back ribs. If you want to make barbecue, we have a video on it in our hardcore barbecue playlist. Be sure to check that out. The very end of this video cards going to pop up showing you that again, like, and subscribe. Thank y'all for being here. Get out and cook something, tag us on social media, let us know what you're doing. See you guys next week.