Salt & Pepper Pulled Pork

Directions

1. Start by placing the pork butt fat-cap-side down on your work surface. Locate the natural crevice near the blade bone and begin separating it by hand, then follow the bone with your knife, cutting down until you can see the pink of the fat cap on the opposite side — that tells you you've gone far enough. Work your knife under the surface tissue and trim away anything you won't want to eat. If your knife is digging into meat, adjust your angle rather than forcing it.
   
2. With the crevice cleaned out, flip the pork over and look at the fat cap. You'll leave the fat cap on — it's an important part of this cook — but you need to score it. First, round out any hard fat around the money muscle and knock down any sharp corners or edges on the outside of the shoulder. Sharp edges will catch bark and punch through your foil during the wrap, which means lost juice. Take a minute to round them out now and you'll thank yourself later.
   
3. For the score, press your knife down through the surface fat and the false cap beneath it, going all the way down to the bottom layer of fat — about a quarter-inch deep. Make your cuts fairly small and tight, then go back across from the opposite direction so they separate into a grid. When the fat renders during the cook, those little squares will melt down into golden pockets of fat distributed throughout the pulled pork. As a bonus, the grid opens up space for seasoning to work down into the meat.
   
4. Now to season. You'll start on the non-fat-cap side since you'll be cooking fat-cap-up first. Apply a good coat of Kozlik's Market Mustard — not just as a binder, but for the tang it brings to the final product. Work it into the crevice you just cleaned out, then coat the sides. Apply Cattleman's Grill Lone Star Brisket Rub generously. This rub runs salt and pepper as its main components, with roasted garlic and celery seed in support — it's a solid, versatile flavor base that won't pull the pork in any particular direction but tastes fantastic on its own. Be liberal with the seasoning; there's a lot of meat here and it all gets mixed together at the end.
   
5. Preheat your Yoder Smokers YS640s Pellet Grill to 200°F. Place the pork butt fat-cap-side up on the second shelf and let it smoke overnight. At 200°F, it will never overcook — the temperature is simply too low for that — but it will slowly develop an incredible bark. You're looking at 8 to 12 hours depending on your specific shoulder. When you check in the morning, look at the color first: you want a dark, rich mahogany bark on the surface. Use the internal temperature as a reference — somewhere around 170°F signals it's time to wrap.
   
6. Remove the pork from the grill and flip it fat-cap-down into a nest of foil. Pour a third to a half cup of Cattleman's Grill Pit Fire Hot Sauce over the top. This is not a spicy hot sauce — it's built on aged cayenne peppers and vinegar, so what it contributes is tang and basting action as the pork braises. As the cook continues, the sauce will melt down, mix with the rendered fat and meat juices in the bottom of the foil, and baste the underside of the shoulder continuously. Wrap the pork tight in several layers of heavy-duty foil, going soft on the corners — those edges are the most likely spots for the bark to poke through.
   
7. Raise the grill temperature to 300°F and return the wrapped pork to cook for several more hours. The target internal temperature is 205°F, but don't pull it on temperature alone. The real signal is the blade bone: when you can grab it and slide it out cleanly with little resistance, the pork is done. Let it rest briefly — the juice isn't going anywhere since it's all staying in the foil — then pour that liquid back over the meat as you shred. You'll have peppery bark pieces, juicy interior meat, and those rendered fat squares all working together. Mix them through and you're set.