I smoked a pork butt yesterday to make pulled pork. I expected it would take about 8-10 hours, but it wound up taking 13. In the middle, when I realized I wasn’t going to have my home-smoked pulled pork ready in time for a reasonable dinner hour, I walked a couple blocks to my local pizza place for a calzone to tide me over.

When I left, I caught the smell of delicious smoky barbecue and wondered if someone else in my neighborhood was also wood-firing some meat on a Sunday afternoon. But as I approached my house, I realized that I was the source — the smell of hickory and pecan smoke from my backyard was blanketing at least a four-block radius, I just didn’t smell it on my way to the pizza place because my nostrils had grown accustomed to it. Amazing. I should get some sort of civic honor.

Anyway, turns out the hardest part of smoking a pork butt is finding a suitable pork butt. All the instructions I could find pertained to bone-in pork butt (pause, as they say), but Stew Leonard’s — the place I could find near me selling pork butt — only had the deboned variety. (Also, no vinegar in the whole damn store.) Plus it looks like the butcher cut off a little fat from the top that might have been better left on there:

From there, it’s not terribly hard. Just a bit time consuming. Cover the butt in yellow mustard and spice rub. The mustard helps seal in the juices and gives the rub something to stick to, forming a nice crust when it’s all finished. The rub seals in the juices too, I believe, plus adds a little spice. I wanted the pork to be versatile — I knew there’d be enough of it that I’d ultimately use it in a variety of meals — so I didn’t want to go overboard with flavor in the rub. It was mostly paprika, salt and pepper, then a little bit of a lot of other stuff from the pantry.

Once that’s done, onto the smoker:

I used a mix of hickory and pecan woods. Hickory is sort of the gold-standard, bacony-smelling (I guess technically bacon is hickory-smelling, but whatever) barbecue wood, but I found with baby-back ribs that the flavor could be a bit overpowering. So I cut it with pecan here because pecan smells a bit like hickory and because it’s what I had.

I mopped it with a mix of cranberry juice, olive oil and spice rub a couple times toward the end, to moisten the outside parts and give the crust a little sweetness, a tip I took from a book by Gary Wiviott. But mostly, you just have to do whatever you need to do to the fire to maintain a steady smoke and low heat — around 250-degrees Fahrenheit — until the pork is between 190- and 200-degrees inside, at which point it sort of starts falling apart on its own. Doesn’t look all that appealing, really:

Next comes the really tedious part. Take that 8.5-pound pork butt and pull it into tiny bits:

Then, at 10 p.m., after you’ve been futzing with the fire all day, while you still reek of smoke, with spice rub still under your fingernails, enjoy your damn sandwich already. More on that later in the week.