If you’ve ever smoked a pork butt or a brisket and watched the internal temperature climb steadily to around 150°F and then just stop moving for two or three hours, you’ve met “the stall.” It’s one of the most argued-about phenomena in barbecue, and for years it was blamed on everything from collagen breaking down to fat rendering. The explanation that actually holds up under testing comes from Meathead Goldwyn, founder of AmazingRibs.com, working with physicist Dr. Greg Blonder. Their findings are laid out on AmazingRibs.com in “What Causes The BBQ Stall: It’s Not What You Think.”
What’s Actually Happening
The stall is evaporative cooling, the same mechanism that cools your skin when sweat evaporates off it. As meat heats up in a smoker, moisture works its way to the surface and evaporates. Evaporation is an energy-consuming process — it pulls heat out of the meat to convert surface water into water vapor. At low cooking temperatures, typically in the 225-250°F range most low-and-slow barbecue is done at, the rate of heat being pulled out by evaporation can roughly match the rate of heat coming in from the smoker. When those two rates are close to equal, the internal temperature simply stops climbing until the surface finally dries out enough that evaporation slows down and the balance tips back in favor of heating.
Dr. Blonder tested this directly rather than just theorizing about it. He compared how a block of pure beef fat cooked (fat holds very little water, so there was no meaningful stall) against how a water-soaked sponge cooked (which stalled hard, since it was essentially all evaporable moisture). The pattern matched what happens with real meat closely enough to confirm evaporative cooling as the mechanism, not collagen conversion or rendering fat, both of which had been the popular explanations before his work.
When and Why It Varies
The stall typically starts somewhere around 150°F internal and its length depends on a handful of variables: the size and shape of the cut, how humid the air inside your cooker is, how much airflow is moving across the meat’s surface, and the cooking temperature itself. A big, moist cut like a whole packer brisket or an untrimmed pork butt will generally stall longer than a smaller, leaner one. Cooking at a higher temperature — say 275°F instead of 225°F — narrows the gap between heat coming in and heat leaving through evaporation, so the stall is shorter or sometimes barely noticeable.
Pushing Through It: The Texas Crutch
The practical fix, widely known as the “Texas crutch,” is to wrap the meat in aluminum foil (or butcher paper, which behaves a bit differently by letting some moisture and smoke through) once it hits somewhere around 150-160°F internal. Wrapping stops surface evaporation from cooling the meat, and it turns the cook into something closer to braising inside the foil, which speeds things up considerably — AmazingRibs.com estimates it can cut total stall-related time roughly in half. The tradeoff is that foil-wrapped meat also softens the bark that’s built up to that point, since it’s now sitting in its own steam; butcher paper is the common compromise pitmasters use to get some of the speed benefit while keeping more bark texture than foil allows.
If you wrap, the general advice is to keep going until the meat reaches your actual target internal temperature — commonly cited as around 203°F for brisket flat and pork butt, though “probe tender” (a thermometer sliding in with little resistance) matters more than hitting an exact number — before unwrapping. Unwrap too early and you’re back to surface evaporation slowing the last stretch of the cook down again.
Foil vs. Butcher Paper
The choice between foil and paper is really a choice about which side effect you’d rather live with. Foil is fully sealed, so it gives you the fastest push through the stall and the most moisture retention, but the bark sits in trapped steam and softens noticeably by the time you unwrap. Pink butcher paper is porous enough to let some moisture and smoke pass through, so it speeds up the cook less dramatically than foil but keeps the bark closer to how it was going in. This is the version Austin pitmaster Aaron Franklin of Franklin Barbecue uses on his brisket — wrapping once the bark has set and the stall hits, in wide sheets of unlined pink butcher paper, a technique he’s described in detail in his own MasterClass instruction on wrapping brisket. Competition cooks who need maximum bark, like the foil-boat glazing step common in rib cooks, will sometimes skip a full wrap entirely and accept a longer stall in exchange for a firmer crust.
The Bottom Line
The stall isn’t a sign anything’s gone wrong with your cook, and it isn’t something you can season or rub your way around. It’s basic physics: wet surface plus low cooking temperature equals evaporative cooling that temporarily outpaces the heat coming from your fire. Understanding that is really the main benefit — it stops you from panicking and cranking your smoker’s temperature erratically, or assuming your thermometer is broken, when a brisket sits at 155°F for two hours. Either plan for the extra time, or wrap partway through if you want to speed things along.