Braising and Slow Cooking

I've decided that this week is the Chris Bond Semi-Annual Week of Braising and Slow Cooking.

A strange decision perhaps, but I'm of the opinion that next week's theme (National Uncommon Fowl Week) is even stranger.

My friend Adam and I kicked off the week yesterday with a down home pulled pork barbeque sandwich. This was Adam's recipe, and I give him all the credit for the ideas, as well as most of the work, but I did help tear the pork up into tiny, itsy bitsy little pieces. So I get a little bit of credit.

The meat of choice for this recipe was (and, presumably still is) a pork shoulder. The best part of this, maybe even better than the fact that it tastes so good, is that an absolutely huge piece of meat (pigs are big, and so are their shoulders) only runs about three dollars and fifty cents. Our whole meal, in fact, which could have easily fed five or six people, only cost about six bucks.

We bought the meat just down the street, which was a good thing, because the damn thing weighed a ton. After lugging it home, we cut off the skin, trimmed a bit of excess fat, heated the oven to about 300 degrees, and stuck it in the oven. We then sat down and watched a movie.



Three or four hours later, we got to work on the sauce. Now, a good pulled pork should be saucy, but not dripping--at least that's what I say (standing tall atop the soapbox of my extensive experience-- which involves two sandwiches). The sauce we made was basically a homemade barbeque sauce. We first started with a preliminary mix that contained the following ingredients:

vinegar (1/4 cup)
brown sugar (handful)
A1-type sauce (couple of 'dashes')
chili powder (some shakes)
cayenne pepper (some shakes)
Tabasco (some 'dashes')
mustard (about a tsp)

Next, using a couple of tablespoons of olive oil (apparently it's better with bacon fat), Adam cooked up some finely-diced onion and garlic. To this heating mixture, he added a can of tomato puree (none of that nasty pre-spiced crap) and the vinegary-mixture.

Obviously, one must play with this, adjusting spices, etc, and making sure to put in any ingredients that I've forgotten to list. That, in particular, is quite important.

Now, the best part comes next. We pulled the shoulder out of the oven and delicious smell filled the air. Our next priority was to rip the hell out of the thing, tearing the meat off of the bone (a pig shoulder is much like our's--ball and socket) and getting down to the shredding and pulling. Which, I've now learned, is why it's called "pulled pork".



After we got all the pork pulled (and I got over my own lame double entendres and punning), all that was left was to mix up the sauce and meat, cut some nice, thick slices of crusty Italian bread, and get down to the eating of the sandwich. Unfortunately, I was too hungry at the time to remember to take a photograph, but I did take one today of some of the leftovers, just to give an idea of what it looked like in the end. Granted, it sort of looks like dog food, but I think pulled pork is supposed to look a bit like dog food, and it certainly tasted good. No sir, not a bit like dog food.