Quick Chicken Recipes

Perfect Pulled Pork Recipe

How to make perfect pulled pork.

"Too much of a good thing can be wonderful." - Mae West

About pulled pork

The best pulled pork is made from a hunk of meat that is marbled with fat and connective tissue. When cooked low and slow, it melts between the muscle fibers making it tender, moist, and succulent. Like buttah. With smoke woven through the shards of meat and potent bits of strongly seasoned crust mixed in, pulled pork makes the ultimate Southern sandwich. And the process, which can take 12 hours or so, is the quintessence of smoke cooking. Lazy, slow, easy, fragrant. You set up a lawn chair, sip a cup of coffee as you put the meat on in the morning, as the sun gets high, you switch to cool refreshing beer, mid-day a mint julep refreshes the palate, and as the meat breaks through "the stall" and approaches doneness, with the sun setting, you switch to straight Bourbon (read on for more on "the stall").

Pulled pork is a great place for the beginner to start experimenting with smoke cooking. A big clod of meat is a lot more forgiving than ribs.

In North Carolina there is a controversy, to put it mildly, over what part of the hog to use for pulled pork. In the eastern part or North Carolina, most joints take the whole hog, chop the meat, and mix it together. They feel that the different textures and flavors of the different muscles makes the meat more interesting. They love "pig pickins" where a whole hog is cooked, boned, chopped, doused with sauce, and displayed in its skin on a buffet so folks can pick the meat they want with tongs.

Inland and in the foothills of North Carolina, the preference is for using shoulder meat. Frankly, I'm with them. Pork shoulder is the cut that is best for texture and flavor, and it has the added benefit of being inexpensive, often under $2 per pound.

A full shoulder can weigh 8-20 ponds and has two halves, the picnic and the Boston butt. The picnic, aka picnic ham, runs from the shoulder socket through to the elbow. A picnic ham is not a true ham. Hams come from the rear legs only. The picnic usually weighs from 4-12 pounds. The top half of the shoulder, from the the dorsal of the animal near the spine, is called the Boston butt, pork butt, butt, shoulder butt, shoulder roast, country roast, and the shoulder blade roast. Calling it a butt may seem ironic because it comes from the front of the hog. No ifs and or butts, it makes the best sandwich meat on the hog.

Butts can weigh from 4-14 pounds and the usually have shoulder blade bones in them although some butchers remove the bones and sell boneless butts. They often are tied with string because they fall apart easily. It is not unusual to find partial butts in the 4-5 pound range. These small cuts are especially nice because they cook quickly and there is a lot of the crispy, crusty surface, called bark or Mrs. Brown by aficionados.

Why is it called a butt? Some say that because, when trimmed, the butt is barrel shaped, and barrels were often called butts by English wine merchants. Others say that they are called butts because they were shipped in butts. Others say that the whole shoulder cut is analogous to the cut from the rear end of the hog, and the upper part is similar to the ham, which is the proper name for the butt of the hog. Both explanations sound goofy to me. And one can only speculate why it is called the Boston butt, but my friends in New York have offered some unkind suggestions.

Best of all, pork shoulder is cheap.

Recipe

Yield. 3.5 pounds of meat, enough for 10 generous sandwiches. Make extra. It freezes nicely.
Preparation time. 10 minutes to trim and rub the meat, and up to 24 hours to let it sit
Cooking time. Allow 8-12 hours or 1.5-2 hours per pound
Pulling time. 30 minutes if you do it with your fingers, 10 minutes with Bear Paws

Toolkit
1 grill or smoker with lots of fuel
1 digital meat thermometer with a probe and a cable
1 alarm clock
1 lawn chair
1 good book
6 pack of beer
1 pair of shades
tunes
sun tan lotion

Ingredients
1 pork butt, about 5 pounds
3 tablespoons of cooking oil
1/3 cup Meathead's Magic Dust
1 cup of wood chips, pellets, or chunks
10 kaiser rolls or hamburger buns
1 cup of your favorite barbecue sauce

Do this
1) Trim most of the of fat from the exterior of the meat. Some folks like to leave it on hoping it will melt and baste the meat, but I want the seasonings on the meat, not on the fat, and I want the meat to get a crunchy flavorful, seasoned bark.

Skip the marinade and brine. I love brining pork chops, but to penetrate such a large thick hunk of flesh, you would need to brine the meat for more than a day and even then the penetration would be shallow and uneven. Marinating and brining will not penetrate a big hunk very far, so don't bother. Use a good rub, and let the smoke flavor it.

Option. Some folks like to inject it with an internal marinade. Typically they will mix about 4 tablespoons of their rub with 1 cup of warm apple juice and pump it deep into the meat. I don't bother. I think this cut is moist enough on its own and injecting can mask the flavor of the pork. I am judging, and my meat tastes more like apple juice than pork, I score it down.

Option. Purists will fall out of their chairs when they read this, but a good shortcut is to buy large butts and cut the meat into hunks of about 3-4 pounds. This will give you more surface area with more crunchy, tasty bark, more smoke penetration, and significantly speed the cooking. The tradeoff is that the meat will lose a little moisture. If you do this, use less wood than the recipe calls for above.

2) Rinse and thoroughly dry the meat. Oil the meat with cooking oil, coating all surfaces. This will help the rub adhere and also help dissolve the oil soluble flavors in the rub and carry it into the meat. Rub your butt generously with Meathead's Magic Dust, covering it completely. Wrap it in plastic wrap. Let it sit in the fridge for a few hours or, better still, overnight.

3) Insert a digital probe like the Maverick ET-73 and position the tip right in the center. Fire up the cooker to about 225F and set it up for indirect smoke cooking just as you would cook ribs (cooker setups are described in thetechnique section of this site). Put the meat on, add 1/4 cup of wood chips, pellets, or chunks, and go drink a beer. Go make your sauce, slaw, and beans. Go watch the game. Then cut the lawn. Wash the windows. Smoke a cigar. Make love to your wife. Unfold the lawn chair and read a book with a beer. You've got plenty of time. Just check your cooker every 30 minutes to make sure the fuel is sufficient and you are holding at 225-250F. Add additional doses of wood, 1/4 cup at a time, every 30 minutes for the first two hours. No peeking. No spritzing. No mopping. Opening the lid only screws up the temperature and humidity in the cooker.

Allow 1.5-2 hours per pound but it might take more or less. Each hunk of meat is different, and rain, wind, ambient temp will effect cooking times. The temp will rise steadily to about 140-150F and slow down for a looooonnnng while as moisture moves to the surface and the collagens turn to liquid. It might hold there for an hour or more. This is called "the stall" or "the zone". Don't panic and don't crank the heat. Be patient. Magic is happening. Click here for more about the thermodynamics of cooking meat.

Notice how the colors of these two 5 pound butts differ. They were rubbed the same and cooked simultaneously at the same temperature, 225F with precisely the same amount of wood pellets. The one on the left was cooked on a gas grill set up with a water pan. The other was cooked on a charcoal smoker, a Weber Smokey Mountain, also with a water pan. Both tasted great. The one on the left (gas) had a bit of a sheen and bright pink highlights. It tasted lively, with sexy bacon undertones. The one on the right (charcoal) was dull brown with dark edges. It had a heavier, husky fireplace scent and flavor. I ended up mixing the two together!

4) Is it ready? When it hits 190F, it may be ready, and it may not be ready. But it's time to check.

The exterior will be dark brown or even black, depending on your cooker or rub. Some rubs and cookers will make the meat look black like a meteorite, but it is not burnt and it doesn't taste burnt. There may be glistening bits of melted fat. On a gas cooker it may have some pink. If there is a bone, use a glove or paper towel to protect your fingers and wiggle the bone. If it turns easily and comes out of the meat, the collagens have melted and you are done. If there is no bone, use the "stick a fork in it method". Insert a fork and try to rotate it 180 degrees. If it turns with little resistance, you're done. If it's not done, close the lid and go drink a beer for 30 minutes. If the internal temp hits 190F but the meat is still not tender, reduce the heat in your pit to about 190F and hold it there for as much as another hour. It should then be done. If not, you've just got a tough butt. Wrap it in aluminum foil and let it go for another hour, but don't take it above 200F or else the muscle fibers will start giving up moisture and toughen. If you can't control the temp on your cooker, wrap the meat in heavy duty foil and move it indoors into a 190F oven.

The fast method

After two hours of smoking at about 225F, put the meat into a roasting pan on a roasting rack and pour a cup of water or apple juice into the pan. Cover the meat with foil and fasten the foil tightly to the edges of the pan so the meat is in a nice enclosed environment. Roast in the oven at 350F for another 2-3 hours or until the temp hits 190F and it passes the fork test, above.

5) When it is finally ready, take it out and let it rest for 30-60 minutes. If you are more than an hour from mealtime, you can leave the meat on the cooker or put it in the indoor oven and hold it there by dialing the temp down to about 150F. If you are more than two hours from mealtime, wrap it in foil to keep it from drying out and hold it at 150F. If you are taking the meat to a party, get a plastic beer cooler and fill it with hot water for about 30 minutes to warm it up. Then dump the water and pad the bottom with a few layers of folded towels or a blanket. Leave the probe in the meat, wrap the hunk tightly in foil, wrap the foil with more towels, and put it the whole thing in the cooler. Fill up the cooler with more towels, blankets, or newspaper to keep the meat insulated. Hang the thermometer cord over the lid of the cooler, and close it tightly. Plug the cord into the readout and make sure it never drops below 145F. Just know that this technique will soften the bark and change the texture of the meat very slightly.

6) About 30 minutes before sit down, put the meat into a large pan to catch drippings. Pull the clod apart with Bear Paws, gloved hands, or forks. Discard big chunks of fat. If you wish you can slice it or chop it like they do in North Carolina, but I think you lose less moisture by pulling it apart by hand since the meat separates into bundles of muscle fibers, hence the name pulled pork. Try not to eat all the flavorful crusty bits when you are doing the pulling, and distribute them evenly throughout. Make sure you save any flavorful drippings and pour them over the meat.

Serving

There are so many wonderful ways to serve pulled pork. I like it nekkid on a plate or on a sandwich. Let me knowhow you like it. Here are a few suggestions:

The classic pulled pork sandwich: Mound it high on a nice bun. Top it with a small amount of your favorite sauce. This is where the Carolina vinegar and pepper sauces really shine. They soak in nicely and, if you go easy, really compliment the flavor. Try my Lexington Sauce. I also love the mustard sauces like my South Carolina Sauce but my favorite is my herbaceous Grownup Mustard Sauce. I like to top the sandwich with somesandwich pickles.

In many places in the South folks often crown a pulled pork sandwich with slaw (use my Creamy Deli Slaw). Barbecue champ and instructor Jack Waiboer of Charleston tops his slaw with dill chips and thin sliced Vidalia onions, and calls it the "Carolina Crusher."

Mark Stevens in NJ says he takes "A nice bit of pulled pork, a thin slice of onion, a slice of pepper jack cheese, a good glug of Hoboken Eddies Mean Green Roasted Pepper Sauce" and puts it all on buttered white bread. He then places the sandwich in pie iron, butter side out, and cooks it over a fire until golden brown and the cheese is melted.

Bill Martin in Hawaii likes to cut smoked butt into 1/2" pieces and fry them in a pan with some of the fat that dripped off. When crisp they make wonderful carnitas tacos, he says.

I like my pulled pork with chopped raw onion mixed in. My wife likes her onion grilled and on top. Sometimes we chop up raw apple and mix it in, too.

Sometimes I slice the roast rather than pull it and douse it with a classic Texas sauce, which is thin and more like a brown gravy. It lets the meat flavor come through without masking it. Try the one on my brisket page.

Mound it on a bun and melt cheese on top.

Mound it on a bun with sliced tomato and onion.

Roll it in a tortilla with chopped onions, chopped tomatos, jalapeno pepper, shredded cheese.

Leftovers

Throughout South Caroilina, barbecue restaurants serve hash. The recipe varies from place to place, but it typically is a stew of ground leftover barbecue pork, pork liver, onion, and mustard based barbecue sauce, served over rice. Here, Jackie Hite of Hites Bar B Que in Batesburg is shown with one of his two huge cast iron cauldrons in which he cooks his hash, about 70 gallons.

I always cook up more pulled pork than I'll use. I mix the leftovers with a bit of barbecue sauce, and freeze it in two-serving portions in zipper bags. Pop one in the microwave and you've got a cut above the ordinary emergency meal for two.

In South Carolina, leftover pulled pork is often used in making "hash". Sounds plebian, but I think it's ambrosia. The recipe varies from place to place, but it is typically a stew of pulled pork, pork liver, onion, and mustard sauce, served over white rice.

Another nice rice dish is pulled pork in Louisiana Dirty Rice. Dirty Rice is white rice mixed with cooked chicken livers and giblets and the "holy trinity", which is sauteed green pepper, onion, and celery.

I love to make a killer app with pulled pork: Jalapeno poppers. Split jalapeno peppers in half, scoop out the seeds and hot ribs with a spoon, and chop off the stems. Mix 1 part leftover pork with sauce and 2 parts fresh chevre or another cream cheese, and fill the peppers. Grill over a medium-low heat until the cheese is soft, and the peppers begin to char.

Joe Wells in Arkansas says he puts the leftovers in "Brunswick stew, baked beans, mixed with scrambled eggs, hash, the list goes on and on."

Sandra Aylor of Memphis sez: "With the leftovers, I like BBQ spaghetti or BBQ pizza".

Buzz in Wisconsin sez: "leftovers are made into tacos and enchiladas".

Plop some on top of a baked potato.

Stuff the into One-Eyed Jalapeno Poppers.

Gerry Curry of Nova Scotia sez: "For left-overs I love it hashed for breakfast".

Bill Martin in Hawaii likes to make a hearty breakfast by frying chopped pulled pork, chopped onion, minced chili peppers, and Tater Tots. He then tops this with poached or sunny side up eggs.

I like to add it to nachos (I'm working on my recipe, make sure you subscribe to Smoke Signals so you know when I've got it perfected).

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