First Go At Pulled Pork

Well, I've finally been able to cross something off of my cooking bucket list. Yes, I've been wanting to make pulled pork, and today I finally found a recipe that did not call for you to cook the meat in the oven for 12 or 14 hours (something I was not prepared to do). So I found this recipe that works in the crock pot and luckily enough it didn't call for any tomato paste/ketchup in the sauce like so many seem to do. (One person who will be eating this can't eat tomatoes. Not that there is many tomatoes in ketchup.) A lot of the spices that the original recipe called for, can't be tolerated either and so I substituted for ones that could be. So I get the sauce all made and I'm pouring it over the large roast and I have this awful realization. This recipe calls for worcestershire sauce, something that I have never actually read the label on to check if it contains any dairy for any reason. So I scramble to grab the bottle and with a hint of relief I read that their is no dairy in it. Unfortunately though, in my excitement to make pulled pork finally, I never considered that worcestershire sauce contains soy sauce. Something else that can't be eaten. (You see now why pulled pork was on the bucket list, it's because of all the obstacles that would have to be overcome.) Well, it was too late for this poor roast though as it was by now coated in this stuff. So I go and pull out the two different types of packaged BBQ sauce we always use, just to see if they contain worcestershire sauce, so at least I could wave them around and say 'see, you eat it in this.' Much to my disappointment though, neither of them did. But, they both contained tomatoes in some form, and one even contained milk. Hmm, interesting. The two things I was consciously trying to avoid putting in this sauce.

Another oops on my part was that I made the rub up and the sauce without really realizing how large of a roast I had to work with. So, as I'm staring at my measly little bowl of liquid and a huge roast, I realized that I had made a blunder. So I made another batch of sauce, and doubled it this time. So what you see in this recipe is a tripled batch of sauce. The take home message, look at the size of your roast before making any decisions on how much sauce you'll need.

For my second go at making the sauce I ran out of apple cider vinegar and so I mixed about 2:1 white vinegar to apple juice (just because...hey, they both say vinegar and apple right?).

You know what I'm just realizing now as I type this? I never actually tripled the rub. Oh well, I don't think I'd bother with the rub anyways next time. Even if I did, I'm not sure that I would triple it though. With the quantities I have listed here, it still covered the entire roast, albeit lightly.

The original recipe was from Eat Cake for Dinner. In the end though, I really just used her recipe as a guide line. Most of the ingredients she used were substituted out for something else and so this recipe will bear little resemblance to the original. But I still am going to credit her, because I honestly would have had no idea where to start, without her recipe. Besides changing ingredients, I also didn't let the roast sit overnight with the rub on it. I just applied it and let it sit while I made the sauce. It was kind of a last minute decision to make this, this morning.

Ingredients

5-6 lb Pork Loin

1 Onion, sliced

6 Cloves of Garlic

Rub:

1/4 C. Brown Sugar

1 Tsp. Paprika

1 Tsp. Chili Powder

2 Tsp. Montreal Steak Spice

Salt

Pepper

Sauce:

3 C. Apple Cider Vinegar (or use 2 C. White Vinegar, 1 C. Apple Juice like I ended up doing.)

3/4 C. Worchestershire Sauce

2 Tbsp. Sugar

1/2 Tbsp. Dry Mustard Powder

2 Tsp. Montreal Steak Spice

1 Tsp. Paprika

1 Tsp. Chili Powder

6 Cloves of Garlic, minced

2 C. Water

2-3 C. BBQ Sauce (depending on how saucy you like it / how much the meat absorbs / how runny your sauce is)

Directions

~Mix together rub ingredients and then rub onto roast (I did this step and I'm not entirely convinced I would do it again, as I used almost the same ingredients in the sauce that I cooked the meat in). Let roast sit (I only did this for maybe 20 minutes, but you could do it overnight if you are better at planning ahead than I am).

~Slice onion and prepare garlic (I just crushed each garlic clove)

~Put meat into crock pot

~Top meat with the garlic and onion. 

~Combine all the sauce ingredients together in a bowl and stir to combine. 

~Pour 2/3 of the sauce over the roast, reserving the remaining sauce for when the meat is cooked (place in a jar in fridge)

~Add the water to the crock pot.

~Cook meat until internal temperature reads 160 F. (Took me 6-7 hours on a mix of high and low settings.)

~When meat is done, pull roast out and place on a cookie sheet (or baking dish if you used a smaller roast. You just want a dish with an edge) and pull it. (We used a mix of forks and serrated knifes because it was too hot to touch.)

~Discard juices and onions from crock pot.

~Place pulled pork back into the empty crock pot.

~In a microwavable dish, combine reserved sauce from earlier and about 2 C. of BBQ Sauce. Mix to combine and place into microwave to heat until just warmed through.

~Pour sauce over meat in crock pot.

~Stir to coat meat in sauce.

~If mixture looks too dry, add in additional sauce to your liking.

~Turn crock pot on low to warm mixture through.

~Serve on buttered buns or just eat straight from the crock pot (If you can't wait to try it!)

Enjoy

Oh, one last thing. Four large eaters consumed half of this in one night. (I admit, I did have to go back for seconds.) So I'd say this would feed about 8 people with a little extra to spare.