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Received my Americue and seasoned Thursday. Friday I cooked a Turkey and a chicken and they turned out great. Today is Butt day.

Went to Costco and got a 2 pack of boneless Boston butts at 5.5 lbs. each. Rubbed and let set for 24 hrs. At 10:30 PM Friday I put them in the smoker at 180F. at 5:30 AM bumped temperature to 225F.

After a lot of reading on this great site I was aware of possible temerature variations, so I have been tracking the temperatures.

One Butt has the built in probe, the other a wirless probe. At 8:00 AM both Butts were at 165F. Then one Butt started going backwards down to 161. It took 3 hours to recover back to 165. It then started back up but was about 10F below other Butt.

At 12:00 I opened the smoker to add a pan of baked beans. At this time I moved the probe for the slow Butt and closed it up. I then checked the temperatures and the slow Butt was 6F higher and within 2F of the other one.

Obviously probe placement makes a difference.

Does anyone have suggestions for proper placement?

1:00 PM and still cooking.
Thanks Jim.
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Bruce, I like to put the probe right in center of the butt, that way it'll be a little underdone in the thicker part and a little overdone in the thinner part. One important thing is to not get it against bone or in fat. Against bone is easy to avoid cause you'll feel the probe hit. In fat it's impossible to tell so you'll just have to jab and hope. Usually I just wait until it's reached my target temperature then use an instant read to check several other places and correct as necessary.

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