For years I have read about Pulled Pork in American food blogs and seen it on cooking shows. I have always been inrrigued by the idea. It always looked and sounded delicious. One thing that stopped me, however, was that I was never sure about preparing that amount of pork. I mean, what if I didn’t actually like it! I live alone and have a small family so if I ended up with tonnes of pork no one liked it was going to be rather a large waste of time and money.
Then, I came across a small pork shoulder in Tesco that seemed perfect for my purposes. Small enough to fit in the small slow cooker and small enough that it would do as a meal for 4 not 5000! I immediately grabbed it and proceeded to research the best recipe online. I’m pretty happy with the recipe I pulled together from here and there. Some places simply suggested chucking a bottle of your favourite BBQ sauce in with the pork and cooking it that way but I don’t have a favourite BBQ sauce and that seemed like cheating a little bit! I wanted something I could tweak the spices for as I saw fit. This is the recipe I came up with.
I love that you can actually put this on in the morning and come back after work to find your house smelling of BBQ and dinner all but taken care of. That is my idea of a true slow cooker recipe! So often with recipes with cooking times of 3 hours or so I’ll be out at work when it would need to go on and I may as well just cook the thing the traditional way when I get home. This is so convenient and more than worth the lack of time and effort it takes!
Serves 4 (8 breadbuns)
1 small boneless pork shoulder (~400g)
1 chopped onion
1/2 cup ketchup
1/3 cup red wine vinegar
1/4 cup dark muscovado sugar
1/4 cup tomato purée
2 tbsp paprika
2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
2 tbsp Dijon mustard
1 tsp salt
1 tsp ground pepper
– Put all of the ingredients except the pork in the slow cooker and give a little mix.
– Add the pork and nestle it in the sauce so it’s covered.
– Turn the slow cooker on to Low and cook for 8 hrs.
– Remove the pork from the slow cooker and put it in a bowl. Take 2 forks and ‘pull’ the meat apart with them until its all broken up.
– Turn the slow cooker up to high and add the meat back in.
– Leave it for another 30 minutes then serve in bread buns with crisps and pickles!
Anna in the kitchen 