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How to Cook Pulled Pork in Advance

May 17th, 2011

Recently, one of our customers asked for advice on how to handle pulled pork cooked in advance since Boston butts can take all day to cook. He’s cooking on a Meadow Creek TS120 BBQ Smoker with a BBQ42 Chicken Cooker added to the front. Here are some tips for cooking Boston butts for crowds.

Pulled PorkIn catering, most of the time it will be very impractical to serve pulled pork fresh off the smoker. Not only would you need to be on-site extremely early, but also you would need to guess how long it will take and try to meet deadlines, which can be terribly stressful with Boston butts.

You can smoke your meat the day before. Pull it, put it into foil pans, and cover it with foil. Make absolutely sure you cool the meat correctly. Then pull your smoker out to the party the next day for show and use it to heat the pork in the foil pans. You can also use your smoker to cook chicken or meats that get done in a few hours if needed.

If you don’t want to use your BBQ smoker to heat the pulled pork, you can heat it at the party in an electric roaster.

You could also experiment with smoking the butts the day before and refrigerating them overnight. The next day put them back on the smoker at the party to heat them and after they reach temp, pull them on-site at the party. This is just a idea. You need to experiment with it before doing it large scale. With this you need to make sure you cool these large chunks of meat properly. I think it could easily be done if you have adequate refrigeration.

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3 Responses to “How to Cook Pulled Pork in Advance”

  1. George Dunphy Says:

    I have had real good success with taking the butts off about an hour early then freezing them.Then reheating them either on the smoker or on the grill inderect heat. I would not leave them in the freezer more than 3 weeks,the freezer will dry them out. This has produced some real good meat still nice and juicy,again not as good as fresh off the smoker.
    Thanks for all the advice
    Eagerly saving for Black Beauty!!
    George

  2. nik Says:

    I have had some really good results with cooking pork shoulders and butts in advance. I smoke mine for 10-12 hours at 220 then put them in disposable aluminum pans covered in heavy duty foil. Before I cover it I add a bottle of good beer to each pan, then its back it the smoker at 220 (no smoke just heat – you can also do this part in an oven if you want) until the remote thermometer reads 200. When you take the foil off you’ll see that the pork has released a lot of juices into the pan. We call that elixir “Piggy Goodness”. Pour it off into a container and cool to separate the fat (but not all of it!) and then pull the pork. The pulled pork is then loaded into large disposable pans and some of the Piggy Goodness is added (use a free hand don’t worry you can’t add too much). The pan is then covered in a layer of heavy duty plastic wrap topped with one of those special pan covers you can buy at a restaurant supply place. Be sure to follow proper food safety guidelines when cooling the meat. These freeze very well (up to 6 mo) and when you want to use it all you do is defrost it in the refrigerator and then pop it in an oven at 300 to re-heat (make sure to remove the plastic wrap!). I also use a flat top griddle to reheat 3 pans at once during large parties. The liquid you put back into the pulled meat helps to keep it from drying out during the reheat. Cooking the pork ahead of time lets me interact more with my customers making their experience a better one. Finally, everyone always raves about my pork so I must be doing something right!

  3. Lavern Says:

    Thanks for the tips, Nik!

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