Pulled Pork Pleasure
May 18, 2012
The Grilling.com team is deep in the heart of pork country today, as countless teams get fired up for the annual Memphis in May barbecue contest on the banks of the Mississippi. In celebration of this swine-tastic event, we’ve got VIP blogger Curt McAdams of LiveFireOnline.com with a simple, yet outstandingly delicious, pulled pork recipe.
It’s easy to get caught up in trying new things on the smoker, but there’s still something about simple pulled pork. Even barbecuers can get caught up in what little thing to add to their rub to make it a secret recipe, or what special ingredient that no one else is allowed to know about that’s in their secret barbecue sauce.
I made pulled pork with a quick and simple rub that people seemed to really like. It has just a few ingredients:
1 cup ground Italian roast coffee
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup ground ancho chile
2 tablespoons kosher salt
1 tablespoon black pepper
That’s all there was to it. A couple Boston butt roasts got rubbed with the mixture and put on my ceramic cooker at about 250 F, smoked with pecan wood to 195 F, and then off and rested for a while.
The pulled pork was actually for the next day, so I had to decide between pulling the pork then refrigerating or leaving them whole and refrigerating. I find that the meat stays moist better if it’s left whole, so I put the whole roasts in the fridge. The next morning, the pork went into the oven at about 300 degrees F for about 40 minutes, then 180 until it was time to go to the cookout. The pork pulled easily and was good and moist.
I took my standard Liquid Livefire sauce and added about 3 cups of brewed coffee to the same amount of sauce and let that cook down a bit. The sauce ended up thin, but the flavor was really good! This can be done with about any standard sauce to give it a different twist.
There was plenty of meat for the get-together, so we had leftovers, which is a good thing with pulled pork. That’s what brought me to try pushing the standard sandwich without ruining it…
The next morning, breakfast was a pulled pork sandwich with a local farm egg, over-easy, right on top. Breakfast should always be so tasty!
Saturday morning, the wife and I went to Findlay Market in Cincinnati to pick up a few things. it’s a long drive just to do, and it was nutso busy, but one of the items I picked up at the farmers’ market was a local product by Fabulous Ferments whose kraut I also used for my recent Cincy dog. Findlay Market is in an area of Cincy called Over-The-Rhine, and Fabulous Ferments uses ingredients grown right in the same area of town. They make raw cultured and ferment batches for three to five weeks. I picked up their Spicy Dill, which is cabbage, dill and other good stuff, and it sounded like it would be great on pulled pork, so I tried it!
The pulled pork is all gone now. I like trying new things on the cooker, but a good, simple pulled pork, slow smoked, is just hard to beat!
