What Happens if Your Meat Temperature Stalls?

As a beginner smoker, finally mastering temperature control and getting that perfect-colored smoke just right feels like a major victory. But then it happens – your once steadily rising meat temperatures grind to a halt, stuck in limbo for hours. What happened? Did something go wrong? Did something go right?

You’re experiencing the stall, and just so you know, it will be okay.

What Is “The Stall” When Smoking Meats?

The stall, sometimes called the plateau or the zone, refers to a prolonged period when larger barbecue cuts get hung up at a particular internal temperature band for a prolonged period of time. This temperature stall typically strikes between 150°F-170°F internally and can last anywhere between 4-6 hours before finally pushing through.

Smaller smoked meats like chicken quarters or ribs don’t experience this pause quite as intensely. But when smoking pork butts, beef briskets, whole chickens, and other bigger pieces low-and-slow, the stall becomes an unavoidable rite of passage.

Why Does the Stall Happen?

As meat slowly cooks over extended periods of smoky, indirect heat, the muscle fibers gradually contract, rendering out moisture. This process forces humidity from the center of the meat towards the exterior and outer bark.

Once that pivotal 150°F-170°F range is reached internally, this humid air and surface moisture gets pushed out from the meat onto the outer surface. This creates an evaporative cooling effect, similar to how sweat helps cool you down on a hot day as it evaporates off your skin.

The stall occurs because all this built-up exterior moisture ends up preventing any further internal temperature rise until it finally gets reabsorbed or dissipated away into the smoker environment.

How to Avoid The Stall When Smoking

While hitting the stall can be extremely frustrating after carefully nursing your fire for hours, don’t panic! Here are some tips:

• Wrap in Foil or Butcher Paper

• • The most tried-and-true method is the infamous “Texas Crutch” where the stalled meat is completely wrapped tightly in either heavy-duty aluminum foil or double layers of peach butcher paper. This traps in any surface moisture and smoke so it can’t evaporate away.
  • Wrapping effectively turns your smoker into more of an oven environment to power through the stall point. Be cautious about wrapping too early though, as you’ll miss out on that flavorful, crunchy bark development.

• Spritz the Surface

• • Another tactic is keeping the exterior of the meat consistently moist by periodically spritzing it with liquid like apple juice, hot sauce, beer or beef broth. Introducing this extra surface humidity overcomes the evaporative cooling behind the stall.

• Add More Smoking Wood

• • Throwing a few fresh wood chunks, chips or pellets onto the smoker’s main heat source can help reintroduce cleaner, thicker smoke to cut through the stall. The extra smoke helps impart more flavor while overriding the humidity blocking temperature rises.

• Stay Calm and Patient

• • In some cases, after doing everything right to manage temperature and smoke, you simply have to exercise Zen-like patience. Resist any urge to crank up the heat. Instead, maintain those steady low-and-slow pit temps around 225°F-250°F by refueling as needed until those glorious visual cues – a darkening, cracking bark and wafting smoke aromas – finally indicate you’re pushing past the plateau.

The stall is practically a right of passage and a good learning moment for anyone new to smoking meats low and slow. With experience managing variables like surface moisture, smoke output, and being able to read those telltale stall signals, you’ll get better at executing techniques to power through.

So keep practicing, keep learning the stall’s patterns, and integrate wrapping, spritzing, humidity adjustments, and other tricks to overcome meat temperature plateaus. With each brisket, butt, or bird you successfully break out of a stall, you level up your pitmaster skills. Before long, the stall won’t phase you at all.

You’ve got this.