Pulled Pork

I do love a bit of barbecue. For me, the weather doesn't need to be doing what it's doing right now (blazing, eyeball melting sunshine) to make me want to tear open a bag of charcoal, light it up, and introduce some meat to the resulting heat.

It's not just about sausages and burgers for me; anything you can cook in a normal oven you can cook on a barbecue, it's just about knowing how.

Some food tastes better from a barbecue than it can ever taste done in an oven, and I want to share one of those things here: pulled pork.

It's a long time favourite in the US barbecue belt, and it's becoming very popular in the UK too. I've been doing it for the last couple of years now, it's simple, easy and delicious.

My recipe is adapted from the Weber Complete Barbecue Book, which you should buy if you want to progress from incinerating sausages.

Here we go then.

Ingredients:

The Meat:

1 Pork shoulder joint - a 2.5-3kg one will serve about eight people, generously.

The Rub:

2 tbsp mild chilli powder
2 tbsp paprika
2 tbsp sea salt
4 teaspoons garlic granules
2 teaspoons fresh ground black pepper
2 teaspoons fresh ground celery seeds
1 teaspoon mustard powder

The Sauce:

275ml tomato ketchup
175ml cider vinegar
100ml lemonade (not diet)
50g light brown sugar
2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon of your favourite hot sauce
1 teaspoon sea salt
1/2 teaspoon mustard powder
1/2 teaspoon fresh ground black pepper

Other:

8 big soft white rolls
A big tub of coleslaw, or make your own (I can't usually be bothered...)

How You Do It:

First off, if you don't have a smoker, you can do this in an oven. It won't have the benefit of being smoked, but it will still be tender and lovely. It just won't be quite as lovely, and you can't pretend to be a Good Ol' Boy in North Carolina while you're cooking. Sorry, that's just how it is.

Mix all the ingredients for the rub together in a small resealable tub, like this:

All ready to rub your meat. Fnarr.

You may use all of it, but if you don't, it'll keep until next time (and there will be a next time, this stuff's addictive).

Take your pork shoulder and use a good sharp knife to trim the skin off. You should leave a layer of fat, around a centimetre thick if possible. This will help keep the meat moist while it cooks. I haven't left a layer of fat in a couple of spots on mine, because my knife skills are WEAK.

A big lump of pig. Skinned.

Place the meat in a nice big bowl, with room to move it around. Pour some rub over the top of the meat, like in this amazing action shot:

Then, rub (obviously) the rub into the meat. Don't be shy. You want the rub to coat the meat, but also to penetrate it as much as possible. Really work it in there. Get it into all the nooks and crannies, like this:

Once it's all nicely coated in the rub, cover the bowl in cling film. If you're going to be cooking it in the next few hours, leave it out to come up to room temperature. If not, pop it back in the fridge.

If you have a smoker, the next thing to do is set it up for a twelve hour cook. For my smoker, this means filling the coal basket with Weber briquettes, and filling the chimney starter with them too. I find that 7kg of briquettes will reliably give me twelve hours of heat. Light the coals in the chimney, and when they're ready (a coating of white ash) pour them over the top of the unlit coals in the basket. This is known as the "Minion Method", where the coals light over a long period of time, maintaining an even temperature. Throw a handful of soaked hickory wood onto the coals, to generate the smoke.

Fill the water bowl almost to the top with hot water. Don't use cold, as this means the coals have to heat the water up before the smoker reaches cooking temperature.

You want the smoker to be at a temperature between 200 and 250 fahrenheit for the duration of the cook. If you do it right you can pretty much leave it to do its thing for the whole cook. If it goes a bit wrong you'll need to fiddle with the vents to adjust the temperature and maybe add more coal too. This is a ball ache, especially if you're doing an overnight cook, because you won't know it's gone wrong until the morning, by which point it's too late.

Once the smoker's at temperature, pop the meat in, and go and relax for ten hours (I tend to start the cook at about midnight, and go to bed)

If you're using an oven, set the temperature using your fancy thermostat and wait for it to be ready. Pull a smug face at the people using a barbecue. Pop the meat in the oven, in a roasting tin.

After ten hours, the internal temperature of the meat should be around 190 fahrenheit. Check it with an instant read thermometer, which you can buy for about a tenner. 

It'll look a bit like this:

Take the meat out and wrap it in foil for the last two hours of cooking. 

Combine all the ingredients for the sauce in a saucepan and heat it gently, stirring it to mix it all together. It's supposed to be thin, tart and a bit spicy.

Once the meat's been cooking for twelve hours, leave it to rest in the foil for half an hour, then unwrap it.

You should be able to pull the meat apart easily using your fingers, or use two forks. Remove the layer of fat from the top and pick out any large lumps of fat or sinew.

If you're writing a blog post about the recipe, completely forget to take any pictures of the meat as you tear it apart, ready for serving.

Once you've finished pulling it apart, it will look something like this:

Slice the rolls and chuck a big pile of the pork on them. Add as much or as little sauce as you want. Top it off with some coleslaw. 

Eat it. Then eat some more.

Pulled pork on a roll. Oh yes.

Cool

Right. So I've got this thing I'm going to offer you. You have to decide whether you want it or not. Simple. Here we go.

The thing is like this: a cylinder, maybe eight centimetres long, just under a centimetre diameter, white for most of its length, a little bit of brown at one end. Sounds pretty cool, yes? You have seen NOTHING yet.

In order to use the thing, you must set one end of it on fire. Fire is cool. Everyone knows that. Then, you place the non-firey end IN YOUR MOUTH and suck.

The result is a mouth full of smoke. You know. Smoke. That thing which in fire safety videos they make a big point of telling you how dead it makes you? Yes. That. In your mouth, and lungs. Yummy.

There's nothing really good in the smoke either, the main effect of the smoke is to make you want more of the smoke.

From my description, do you want one?

Of course you don't. You're not an idiot, are you? No. It sounds shit. It sounds like I'm trying to give you fiery, smoky, make you dead things.

Thing is, according to the snazzy infographic dealy below, 340,000 children in the UK will take their first taste of smoke every year. Now, I know, children ARE quite stupid, not like you, you're clever. But surely they're savvy enough to think that maybe, just maybe, inhaling the byproduct of fire into your mouth might be a touch on the silly side. So what's the dealio?

It's probably a bunch of things. Peer pressure's likely to be a big'un. Parents who smoke, that's probably up there too. But as well as those, there's marketing.

The same people who persuade ten year old kids that they ABSOLUTELY MUST own every single item of Pokemon related paraphernalia ever to be spewed forth from a Chinese factory are also responsible for glamming up the fiery, smoky, make you dead things (I'll start calling them cigarettes now, it's easier).

We really, really ought to be doing everything we can to make cigarettes look as shitty and unappealing as possible to children (and, really, everyone else). One way we can do this is by making cigarette manufacturers have to use plain packaging.

Kids like things which are cool. Plain brown things aren't cool, apparently. The Smokefree South West campaign wants all cigarettes to be sold in plain packaging, because then kids won't think they're cool. They'll go out on their Microscooters instead. They're not cool either, but they come in nice packaging. See? See how it works?

Look at the snazzy infographic. Join the campaign. Go on, it's dead easy and will help less children put that first cigarette to their lips. You can do that for me, can't you?

Protect our children. Visit the Plain Packaging Campaign for more information and to pledge your support.