Had a guy call me last month, frantic. Running a 40-top wedding rehearsal dinner, and his briskets had been sitting at 156°F for almost three hours. Wanted to know if his thermometer was broken. It wasn't. His briskets were doing exactly what briskets do.
The stall gets people. Even folks who should know better. I've watched competition cooks with ten years of experience make bad decisions because a piece of meat stopped climbing in temp and they panicked. And panic in a commercial kitchen — or worse, on a catering trailer at some ranch forty miles from your prep kitchen — leads to ruined product.
So let's talk about what's actually happening inside that meat and why understanding it changes how you manage your cooks.
What's Really Going On In There
The stall is evaporative cooling. That's it. Same principle as sweat cooling your body on a hot day.
As collagen breaks down and moisture gets pushed toward the surface of the meat, that moisture evaporates. Evaporation absorbs heat energy. For a while — sometimes a long while — the cooling effect of evaporation exactly balances the heat energy your smoker is putting into the meat. Internal temp flatlines. Sits there. Doesn't move for an hour. Two hours. Sometimes longer on a big packer.
This typically kicks in somewhere around 150°F to 170°F, depending on the cut, the size, and how much surface area is exposed. Brisket stalls hard. Pork shoulder stalls hard. Ribs less so (thinner profile, less mass). A full pork loin — like the kind that guy on the BBQ forum was asking about last week — will stall, but it moves through faster because there's just less meat to work through.
The internal temp isn't dropping. It's not going backward. Your smoker isn't broken. The meat is just in equilibrium between heat input and evaporative heat loss.
Eventually the surface dries out enough that evaporation slows down. Heat wins. Temp climbs again. That's it.
Why Rushing It Usually Backfires
The instinct when you see that flatline is to crank heat. Push more energy into the meat, overpower the evaporative cooling, force the temp up.
And yeah, that works. Technically. You'll break through the stall faster.
But here's what else happens: you start rendering fat too aggressively on the exterior while the interior is still catching up. You get uneven breakdown of collagen. The bark can go from mahogany to burnt while the flat is still stiff.
I've seen cooks bump their pits to 300°F or higher because they're behind schedule, and what comes out is a brisket that looks done — good color, nice crust — but slices like it's got a rubber band running through the middle. The stall exists partly because that slow rendering matters. You're not just hitting a target temp. You're giving collagen time to convert to gelatin.
Now, if you're running consistent 275°F in a Southern Pride rotisserie unit with even heat distribution, you're not going to see the wild temp swings that make people panic. The SP-700's airflow keeps everything stable. But even with perfect equipment, the stall still happens. Physics doesn't care about your smoker brand.
The Wrap Decision
Wrapping — foil or butcher paper — is the standard workaround. It traps moisture close to the surface, reduces evaporation, and lets heat energy win the battle faster.
Foil wraps tighter, holds more moisture, accelerates the push through stall but can soften your bark. Butcher paper breathes more, protects bark better, but doesn't speed things up as dramatically.
I've run both in competition. Won with both. Lost with both.
What I'll tell you is this: if you're wrapping, wrap when the bark is set. Not when you hit a certain temp. Not when you've been cooking for six hours. When the bark looks and feels right. On most briskets that's somewhere around 165°F to 175°F, but I've wrapped at 155°F because the bark was there, and I've pushed past 180°F unwrapped because it wasn't.
For high-volume catering, I usually go butcher paper on briskets and foil on pork shoulders. Pork shoulder is more forgiving — the fat cap and marbling protect it from the braise effect that foil can create. Brisket flat gets punished if you steam it too hard.
And if you're not wrapping at all? That's fine too. We ran unwrapped briskets for years on the competition circuit. Just budget more time. A lot more.
Time Management for Real Operations
This is where the stall kills people in commercial settings.
If you're cooking six briskets for a Saturday dinner service and you've budgeted 12 hours total, the stall can blow your whole schedule. Because it's not consistent. One brisket might stall for 90 minutes. The one right next to it, same weight, stalls for three hours.
The only solution I've found that actually works: cook longer than you think you need. Build a minimum two-hour buffer into every cook. More if you're not wrapping.
"But Earl, what if the meat finishes early?"
Hold it. That's what a good smoker is for.
A Southern Pride unit holds at serving temp without drying out the product because the rotisserie keeps moisture distributed and the sealed cabinet prevents the kind of humidity loss you get in cheaper rigs. I've held finished briskets for four hours in an SP-700 and served them without anyone knowing they'd been resting that long. Try that in a stick burner or one of those thin-walled import smokers and you'll serve jerky.
This is one reason I keep telling restaurant operators: don't size your equipment for ideal conditions. Size it for when everything goes wrong and you still need to get food out. An SP-500 handles most mid-volume operations, but if you're running multiple proteins and need flexibility for long holds, you might want the 700.
Reading the Meat, Not the Thermometer
Temperature is a guide. It's not gospel.
I had a cook working for me a few years back — good kid, detail-oriented — who would not pull a brisket until it hit exactly 203°F internal. Didn't matter what the probe feel was like. Didn't matter if the meat was jiggling when he picked it up. He wanted that number.
Cost us a few briskets before I finally got through to him. Some briskets are done at 197°F. Some need to ride to 208°F. The stall doesn't care about your target temp. What matters is probe tender — that moment when your thermometer slides into the thickest part of the flat like it's going into warm butter.
During the stall, check your meat periodically with a probe. Not to monitor temp. To feel resistance. You're waiting for that resistance to break down. When it does, the stall is usually over or close to it.
Wood and Heat Management Through the Stall
One thing I see operators do wrong: they back off smoke during the stall because they figure the meat isn't absorbing it anyway.
Wrong. The surface is still taking smoke. Might not be penetrating deep, but bark development continues. If you're running a Southern Pride gas-assist like the SL-270, you've got consistent heat whether you're adding wood or not — so your only job is maintaining the smoke profile you want.
I like post oak through the whole cook. Maybe some pecan toward the end if I'm feeling fancy. But I'm not cutting wood supply during the stall. If anything, that's when I want steady smoke because I'm not getting as much bark development from heat.
On that note — and I might ramble here because wood is what I actually care about — there's no substitute for properly seasoned hardwood. I don't care what kind of automated pellet system someone's trying to sell you. Pellets compress the fibers, change the burn characteristics, give you a thinner smoke that reads as hollow on the tongue. (Cookshack folks will argue with me about this until they're blue. That's fine. They can keep their opinions and I'll keep my trophies.)
Good post oak, seasoned at least six months, split to about 3-inch chunks for consistent burn. That's the baseline.
Stop Fighting Physics
The stall happens. Every time. On every brisket, every pork shoulder, every large format cut you put in your smoker.
You can wrap to shorten it. You can run slightly higher temps from the start to reduce its duration (though you sacrifice some smoke penetration). You can hold your finished product afterward to buy yourself flexibility.
What you can't do is skip it. So stop treating it like an emergency when it shows up.
Build your cook schedules around reality, not hope. Use equipment that holds temps rock-steady so you're not adding variables. And remember that the stall is part of what makes the finished product worth eating — that slow collagen breakdown is the difference between tough and tender.
The meat knows what it's doing. Trust the process.
Resources: Southern Pride of Texas | Southern Pride | National Barbecue & Grilling Association
#BBQ #SouthernPrideSmokers #BBQCommunity #CompetitionBBQ #BBQTips #CateringBBQ
Photo by Canary Vista ES on Pexels.
About the Author: Earl has been competing in sanctioned BBQ events since the early 1990s and operates a commercial catering operation in Southeast Texas.