Their diets are supplemented with non-GMO feed. Nathan Phelps is a writer, ethical foodie, and outdoors-aficionado hailing from Nashville, TN. He splits his time between helping sustainable businesses find new customers and managing his ever-increasing list of hobbies, which include playing guitar, baking bread, and creating board games.
Search suggestions. The Wellness Blog. What is pulled pork? What is the best cut of meat for pulled pork? Choose meat from healthy pigs.
Make your own rub, and go heavy on the application. Trim the fat cap and other parts of the shoulder as needed. Consider injecting larger cuts of meat with a marinade instead of a soak. Consider layering your rubs for optimal texture. Use oil to give the meat some color and help the rub stick before smoking. Double wrap the meat in aluminum foil mid-way through cooking.
Let your pork shoulder rest or not? Our favorite pulled pork recipes And finally, here are a few of our favorite recipes. Sous Vide BBQ Pork Shoulder This recipe uses a sous vide to get the internal temperature perfect before forming a bark in an oven or on the grill. Oven-Roasted Pulled Pork This sear-first recipe is a good way to go if you are a bit short on kitchen equipment, although it does recommend a dutch oven for the sear.
Next steps for perfect pulled pork After you choose the right pork shoulder, all you have to do is get to cooking. Search Our Blog. Search Our Recipes. Make sure to remove the pork from the fridge early enough so it will come to room temperature before you place it in the smoker—cold meat will burn on the outside. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content.
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Read More. Your Privacy Rights. To change or withdraw your consent choices for thespruceeats. At any time, you can update your settings through the "EU Privacy" link at the bottom of any page. These choices will be signaled globally to our partners and will not affect browsing data. In Britain it takes some effort to find the good stuff, but as Neil Rankin, formerly head chef at Pitt Cue Co , the South Bank's beloved-barbecue-van-made-good, instructs me, "a lot rests on the quality of the meat itself.
I do try one recipe with boneless shoulder — Rachael Wass's pulled pork roll , winner of the Observer Food Monthly's reader recipe of , doesn't specify bone in or bone out — but I find it the meat dries out more quickly off the bone: fatal for pulled pork.
Jelly jugglers Bompas and Parr live up to their billing as "easily the most provocative players on the global food scene" by using belly in the recipe for pulled pork in their latest book Feasting — indeed, they brazenly claim that it's "the proper cut for this one". God help them if they ever try to enter the United States. Anyway, blasphemy aside, it's actually an excellent alternative to shoulder — not quite as meaty, but far quicker to cook, beautifully easy to pull and not as greasy as I'd feared.
So, if belly's all you can find, you could do an awful lot worse. Just don't tell the good ol' boys. Like anything to do with barbecue, pulled pork comes liberally sauced with division and contradiction — some swear by brining or rubbing the meat before cooking, for others, its integrity is sacrosanct. Rankin falls into the latter camp — the pork stands alone until it's been in the oven for six hours, and frankly, it's so beautifully juicy I'm seriously considering giving up on my quest and just cooking five more in exactly the same way and throwing a pork party, but in the interests of research, I press on.
Bompas and Parr lightly rub their pork belly joint in a cure of equal parts sugar and salt and leave it to cure in the fridge for a few hours before cooking.
This draws off a quite considerable amount of moisture, which I'm not sure is entirely desirable here — pork belly has enough fat that it's in no danger of being dry, but the meat itself is slightly stringy, despite its superlative flavour.
America's Test Kitchen brines the pork butt in a mixture of salt, sugar and liquid smoke — one of those ingredients scorned by real barbecue aficionados, but which certainly does the trick at providing that elusive whiff of charred wood. My testers are all fooled, and it's undeniable that, without a barbecue to hand, this potion does indeed give the pork a gorgeous deep, smoky tang, although I'm not convinced the meat itself is any juicier after its bath.
Both Wass and Alan Paton, award-winning head chef at Essex's Stoke-by-Nayland hotel, pour a North Carolina-style "vinegar mop" or sauce over the top of the meat before cooking. I like Paton's cider vinegar, dark brown sugar, salt and chilli sauce in particular, but, after eating a decade's worth of pulled pork in a week, I feel qualified to suggest it's better to add it to taste, rather than baking the tangy flavour into the meat itself — it makes the contrast between the rich pork and the piquant dressing more satisfying.
I don't have much success with cooking the pork at a straight C as Wass suggests: indeed, it resists all efforts to pull it apart after the specified 2 hours.
The heat needs to come down if it's going to fall off the bone, but, then, of course, the all-important browning flavours are sacrificed. A successful compromise, then is an initial blast of heat to brown the fat, followed by long, slow cooking — Paton and Rankin have the right idea.
All right, so I have to stay up until 1am waiting for the thermometer to reach the specified 89C, but the results are well worth it — and I'm not allowed to scoff it straight away in any case, so all I lose out on is sleep. In fact, after pulling and seasoning the pork, it has to rest for a day in the fridge, to "relax and soak up the juices and flavour" before reheating. The experiment is a success — by the time I serve it up, it's greedily absorbed all the cooking liquid, adding considerably to its deliciousness.
A good tip I get from a very helpful amateur barbecue enthusiast by the name of Jonathan Dale is to "'tent' the pork in foil at the end as it rests, as this helps steam and soften it a bit, to help ensure it pulls".
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