How To: Smoked Pulled Pork
That is absolutely the worst part of this process. Totally disgusting. But its all worth it. After the skin is removed (but as much fat as possible is left on top) you get this:
I then brined the shoulder in a mixture of salt and molasses in a filled dutch oven (maybe 1/4 cup of each to a couple quarts of water). This sat in the fridge for 12-18 hrs:
So at this point I had let this thing smoke for about 5-6 hours:
I also soaked a bowl full of hickory wood chucks in water overnight to create the most smoke as possible in the fire, and to help keep the wood from igniting to quickly. Wild Turkey was for sipping, not marinating:
The next day i removed it from the brine, and let it come to room temp while i got the fire started. I then applied my classic bbq rub I mentioned here, though this time i remembered the brown sugar. That sat like this for another 60 minutes or so while the fire got cranking:
I filled the smoker's water pan with 2 quarts of cider, and another 2 quarts of water, and then set the shoulder fat side up (so the fat bastes while it melts). The fire was running hot and I needed to head with the family to OCCS for our weekend breakfast out.... so i decided to close the vents entirely. Bad move. I got back 2 hrs later and the fire was totally smothered. No more heat. So i had to restart the fire, get the temp right, and put the shoulder back on. In total I lost about 2-3 hrs of smoking time which was a real shame. I suppose I could have made everyone wait until midnight to eat, but TK, JK, and OK were visiting for the day and that would have been cruel.
So at this point I had let this thing smoke for about 5-6 hours:
I never had to add more coal (i used Cowboy hardwood coal), but i added a few chunks of the soaked Hickory every couple hours and stirred it up a bit to keep it going. I then made my mop which this time around consisted of a can of beer, a 1/4 cup canola oil, a 1/4 cup cider vinegar, and a 1/4 cup of the rub. I shake this up, and then use a mop-brush to lightly mop it onto the shoulder's top and let is pour down the sides... paying careful attention to not remove the bark that is forming. I did this about every hour for the remaining 3 hours. Ideally this would have smoked for a total of 10-12 hrs, but i had to take it off at 8. Normally at 8 hrs i would wrapped in foil most likely, and continued on. But honestly it was still pretty awesome... there were just a few portions that were harder to pull than they should have been. Though it all tasted wonderfully.
I put the shoulder back in the (cleaned) dutch oven, set the cover on top, and let is rest for about 60 minutes. Then its onto the carving board for pulling with two forks:
I spend careful time here to make sure I'm removing any large pieces of non-rendered fat. Its really amazing to see how little fat there is left over after slow cooking all day. JK and TK sat around while I pulled, nibbling at different chucks of meat as they made their way to the serving bowl (again, the dutch oven). So fun.
At one point during the day i made my vinegar-based red sauce which is the piece I'll keep quiet about here. Its essentially cider vinegar and ketchup, but the few extra ingredients in there help to round out the flavor. But if you made it with 2 parts cider vinegar, 1 part ketchup, and a few spices to add some heat/kick you'd get the general idea. Lori made her classic slaw which to this day I swear there is none better. I don't have the recipe because she's got it all in her head, but its basically red cabbage, carrot, dill, drained yogurt, mustard powder, and horseradish. I'm sure there are some other items in there... but that's the general jist. I tried making my own rolls for these, but they turned out too dense and too small:I was using the French Baguette recipe I'd had great success with, but adjusted the temperature for roll-sized balls of dough as suggested by Bittman in HTCE. It just didn't work for me... oven temp might have been a touch low as that oven is impossible to gauge. When they came out of the oven I started thinking the idea of Pulled Pork Sliders was appealing, but this is such a "pile it on" sandwich that its tough to not have a lot of surface area. And the denseness of the roll just killed it for me. Despite that, in the end this was a really solid pulled pork event:
I wrote up a final review of the meal for my pork-a-thon thread, and we served with fridge pickles, collard greens, and a snap pea & arugula salad (provided by the infamous More Please herself, of course) on the side. But this is one of my favorite pics of the nite:
