Smoke 'em if you got 'em: Pork butt!

I love when Damian cooks, because things like this happen:

Yeah.  That's four pork butts.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

We are fortunate enough to have a great big chest freezer, which we keep stocked with tasty food for us to eat.  Also a lot of dog food.  Our dog eats chicken backs, and you do not want to get the people food and dog food mixed up.  But I digress.

One of the varieties of tasty food we like to keep in the freezer is smoked pork butt.  It can be thawed out quickly, and it is a lot easier to resist ordering a pizza on those too-lazy-to-cook days when you know you can have a pile of pulled pork without much effort or cost. 

Anyway, we ate the last one about a month ago, so it was time to smoke another.  We usually cut one in half, eat half, and freeze half.  But really, if you're going to fire up the smoker, why not load it up?

The first step (after procuring your pork, of course), is to build your brine and get those butts soaking!  Damian uses Alton Brown's recipe, and it is fantastic.  These guys get to hang out in the drink overnight.

The next day, you fish your butts out of the brine, apply your rub, and plop them in the smoker.  We are total cheaters and have an electric smoker with an integrated probe thermometer.  It even has a remote control.  If you are hungry, this is going to be a very long day.  I was out planting garlic after eating what turned out to be a rather unsatisfactory lunch, and it took some self control to not rip the smoker open and grab a hunk of meat.  What I'm trying to say is that it smells like heaven, if heaven happens to smell like smoking pork products.

At the end of the day, this is what you've got.  So pretty.  And it's cheaper than hamburger.  At this point, you can either do what we did and cool it down completely before cutting each butt in half and wrapping them (in a layer of cling wrap followed by two layers of heavy duty aluminum foil) to freeze, or you can start pulling and dig in!  A cool time-saving trick we've learned for pulling pork is to remove the bone and fat cap, then toss the meat into the bowl of our stand mixer.  Use the dough hook on a low speed to pull the pork.  You might not get the perfectly uniform little bits that pulling with a few forks would give you, but it only takes about 30 seconds, and you are much less likely to burn yourself.  You can either eat these in pulled pork sandwich form, or do what I love to do:

Potachos!  That's right.  Potato chips, pulled pork, barbecue sauce, and queso.  So bad, but oh so good.  (Please don't judge me too harshly.)