Our Family Recipes

Pulled pork is great for sandwiches and tacos and generally just a hearty treat for a cold fall day. It’s also incredibly easy to make in the slow cooker and pork is often a reasonably priced meat. I bought a pork shoulder on special awhile back and I’m always looking for meals that are easy to make for a crowd and the holiday season is coming! This recipe fits that bill. It is an adaptation of Ultimate Slow Cooker Pulled Pork from Inspired Taste (thank you!). The result was melt-in-your-mouth pork (apologies in advance to my vegetarian and vegan friends…please don’t hate me).

Ingredients

• 4-5 lbs pork shoulder
• 2 Tbsp rock salt
• 1 tsp fresh ground black pepper
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 1 tsp chili powder
• 1 tsp smoked paprika
• 2 Tbsp olive oil
• 1 large yellow onion, diced
• 1 bulb garlic, cloves peeled and minced
• 1/4 cup pasata (tomato sauce)
• 1 cup water
• 1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
• 3 Tbsp Worchestershire sauce
• 3 Bay leaves

Method

1. Mix the salt, pepper, cumin, chili powder and paprika. Rub all over the roast and let it sit while you prepare the rest of the ingredients.
2. Saute the diced onion in the oil over medium-low heat until translucent. Add the garlic and let it saute for another minute or until the garlic aroma hits you, then add the tomato sauce and stir well.
3. Add the water, vinegar, Worchestershire and Bay leaves.
4. Let that simmer until it all comes together (a couple minutes will do it).
5. Line the bottom of the slow cooker with a couple ladles full of the sauce (make sure there are lots of onions on the bottom to keep the pork off the bottom of the slow cooker).
6. Place the pork on top, fat side up.
7. Pour the rest of the sauce over the pork.
8. Put the lid on the slow cooker, set it to low and go away for at least 8 hours (I left mine slow cooking for 10 and it was fine).
9. Remove the pork from the slow cooker to cool. Remove the fat layer and the bones and discard.
10. Shred the pork.
11. Skim off as much fat as you can from the sauce remaining in the slow cooker.
12. Add a couple ladle fulls of sauce to the shredded pork to keep it moist. Have a taste, cover and put that in the fridge.
13. Put the rest of the sauce in a jar and pop it in the fridge to cool so you can remove even more of the fat (there will be a lot).
14. You can decide later whether you want to bother making BBQ sauce or just eat it as is. I thought it was pretty good on its own, but I may make up some sweet and sour BBQ sauce to go with sandwichs.
15. Once the sauce is cooled, remove the top layer of fat and pour a cup back into the shredded pork. Use the rest as a base for a BBQ sauce of just as dipping sauce (it’s delicious).

Warm up the pork as you use it in pulled pork sandwichs , tacos or just eat it with rice and some sort of green vegetable (because you really should eat more vegetables).

Note: this is quite salty, so if you don’t like salt, cut the rock salt in the rub back to 1 Tbsp. I haven’t tried it yet but I think this would be awesome with Peruvian green sauce in a corn tortilla.

Feeds 8-10