I've tried making pulled pork before and was a little bit of a disaster. My first attempt was quite dry and didn't have much flavour. This was mostly due to my blind ambition because I just guessed and improvised my way through the recipe, much to the chagrin of my partner. This time however I was going to follow the carefully constructed recipe and conquer my nemesis known as pulled pork.
I bought 4 pound pork shoulder (pork butt) and all the spices (cumin and oregano) and the rest of the ingredients from my local grocery store. None of the ingredient were too difficult to find and could be reused for over recipes so I'm not going to have an ingredient making a long term home on shelf or in my fridge.
One of the first things that the recipe asked me to do was create a rub with brown sugar and my spices and apply it to my pork butt (I just like saying pork butt). I liberally applied the mixture and wrapped the hunk of meat in cellophane and placed it in the fridge to marinate for 24 hours (oh the anticipation).
In my new fancy toy, I created a nice shallow well of liquid with cider vinegar and covered my pork with some store bought BBQ sauce. I lowered my pork butt into the liquid and set the slow cooker to low and I let it cook in its own juices for 8 hours. As my meat cooked it slowly perfumed my home with the sweet sweet smell of BBQ.
When the pork butt was ready to be pulled out of the slow cooker, I needed to skim all the fat from the braising liquid (there was quite a lot of fat, definitely not a diet food). My lovely kitchen assistant at home selflessly volunteered to shred my pork butt, which created quite the lovely meat confetti. After the meat was shredded, I picked a nice pile of meat up and threw it in a hot pan with some of its braising liquid and some more BBQ sauce.
As soon as the meat absorbed all the lovely juices and sauce from the hot pan I surgically placed the meat on some slider buns and topped it with a pickle.
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The end result was quite delicious. The meat was still moist, tangy from the cider vinegar and sweet from the BBQ sauce. Overall I was quite happy with results, which was a giant improvement from my first attempt. This was still a lot of work but I viewed this more of labour of love. I'm definitely going to keep this recipe in mind whenever I do have the hankering for some delicious BBQ, i might even make my own little tweaks next time.
