Results from second attempt: Pork Shoulder

After 11+ hours it came out very tasty and quite smoky - In fact, I think it's maybe a little too smoky, but Susan says she thinks it's awesome. The house quickly fills with the same pungent aroma you get from liquid smoke when I pull the meat from the refrigerator. But still, it couldn't be pulled into stringy meat piles like Alton's video. Clearly the collagen was still mostly intact. I suspect the problem is that I didn't maintain a high enough temperature.

I used both of my thermometers to monitor the temperature, and I thought I did a great job of maintaining a temp of 210-220, according to the instant-read. However, the large smoker thermometer usually hovered around 185 - at the high end of the 'smoking' range on the dial. Furthermore, when I pulled the meat off, it was about 185 degrees - and Alton said that the collagen would melt at about 200 degrees.

This leads me to think I should bring up the temperature according to the smoker thermometer - for 220 degree meat, bring it up to 220. nobody ever mentioned that. That will take my cheap instant-read thermometer off off the scale scale, and my electronic instant read will probably show like 260 - 280. This I learned from attempt 1: tri tip, which got overdone and dry. Other factors were involved though - neglect, for one, and placement of heat source too close to the meat, for another.

Right now, I've pulled of a hunk of it, and i'm roasting it in foil at 300 degrees for 1 hour. I want to see if I can get the collagen to dissolve.