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1st Guru Cook: Pulled Pork

If you haven't heard of the BBQ Guru, then man you're missing out!  Go to their website, www.thebbqguru.com , and read all about it.  Basically, they use a small fan and controller with a single feedback loop via thermocouple to maintain a setpoint temperature in your pit.  It's a very simple, elegant design which will allow you to sleep easily at night while your smoker does it's job.

I purchased the "Pit Minder E Temp" model, which has a single thermocouple input and fan/controller.  I use a separate Polder temp probe to monitor the temperature of the meat.  Thus, the Guru keeps my dome temp stable and I watch my Polder to know when to remove the meat.  There are other models which will control the pit temp and monitor the meat temp, and concurrently adjust the pit temp so that in the end the pit temp falls as the meat temp rises and they meet when the meat is done.  This function is good to have if you're not sure whether you'll be arond when the meat is done, but otherwise the Pit Minder will take care of you.

My fisrt cook with the Guru was a 9 lb bone-in boston butt.  I rubbed it with Dizzy Dust and put it on the Egg with an indirect setup.  I clipped the Guru thermocouple to the stem of the Egg temp probe inside the dome, and set the Guru setpoint at 225.  As I will discuss later, this temp was probably too low as a setpoint in the dome.

Here's a pic of the overall setup - looks like some type of science experiment, doesn't it?  


And here's a closeup of the Pit Minder in action:


As you can see, the Guru setpoint temp (225F) and the dome temp are in good agreement:


Now, let's talk about the cook.  One thing that I have learned is that your grid level temp is almost always going to be 25 degrees or so lower than your dome temp during a low n slow indirect cook.  Thus, if I had been measuring the temp just around the meat, I probably would have measured about 200 degrees.  Now, I was shooting for an internal doneness temp of about 195.  It would have been very difficult to achieve 195 internal with a 200 degree ambient temp - or, that is, it would have taken a very long time.  And, well, that's what I discovered . . .

At hour 20, my fire died.  Now, this had nothing to do with the Guru, as it maintained that 225 dome temp rock solid through the night and up to the point where the fire just simply ran out of fuel.  When I finally broke down and opened the Egg to ascertain the situation, I found that probably 95% of my lump was gone.  I should also note here that I had NOT filled my firebox all the way up to the firering as I should have, and I'm not sure why I didn't except that I was in a hurry the night before getting everything going.

Anyway, I threw some fresh lump in the firebox (didn't do any cleanout), lit the fresh lump with my Mapp torch, replaced everything back in the Egg as I had it before, and reset the Guru, this time for 250 dome, which would equate to about 225 cooking level.  Incidentally, my meat temp was at about 172 at this point, and in the midst of taking everything out and rebuilding my fire, I only lost 1 degree of internal temp.

Witb the Guru piping along and my dome temp now at 250, the butt reached 195 three hours later.  So, I took the butt out and put it in a cooler to rest for one hour (if I hadn't been so hungry, I would have let it sit for at least three hours).  After this rest in the cooler, I pulled the pork, and man did it look good.  I didn't take a lot of pics b/c I was so hungry, but here's a pic of the first sandwich I made before it was completely devoured:


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