Smoke and Cold Smoke

Desiree and I smoked an 11-pound pork shoulder roast. The strategy for smoking meat is to cook at low temperatures while infusing smoke flavor. Smoking meat is less cooking than persuasion, a quiet agreement between low heat and drifting smoke. I generally try to operate at 225°F, which can lead to extended cooking times, especially when targeting an internal temperature of 195°F to ensure maximum tenderness.

In this instance, I slipped the roast into the smoker (with an internal temperature of 40°F) at 5:00 in the morning and didn’t pull it out until 9:00 in the evening.

Sixteen hours is a long vigil for a piece of meat, but that is the bargain we struck.

One of the things that extends the cooking time is “the stall.” The stall is the pork roast’s way of hitting the pause button around 150–170°F, when moisture rises to the surface and evaporates, cooling it like a built-in air conditioner while your smoker keeps trying to heat it up. From the outside, it looks like nothing’s happening, but inside, collagen is slowly melting into gelatin and the meat is quietly becoming tender. Eventually, the moisture runs low, the cooling effect fades, and the roast wakes up from its little spa day and starts climbing in temperature again. The temperature of our roast held stubbornly steady for several hours before it began to rise again.

When it was finished, the pork was tender enough to fall apart at a suggestion, wrapped in a dark, lovely bark formed from little more than salt, pepper, and time. I’m sharing photographs of the roast with the requisite Cold Smoke beer alongside.

Before Smoking

Pulling the Roast at 9:00

After Smoking

—Mitchell Hegman