BBQ Adventures 2: Pulled pork.

So. I've now got two grills, and, in terms of barbecue (not grilling, which we've done loads), one piece of brisket under my belt (literally and figuratively). I also bought my first BBQ cook book, Steve Raichlen's The Barbecue! Bible.

For the next barbecue attempt, we decided to try pulled pork. I've made it before in a crock pot, but I wanted to try smoking it. Plus, it's easy to get hold of pork shoulder. I haven't yet started exploring the various butchers in our area, and until I do, I can only use the cuts of meat I can find in a supermarket over here (and a lot of the cuts go by different names over here than in the States, so sometimes I'm not sure what I'm looking at in the meat section. I keep meaning to bring in my cow and pork "maps" from Joy of Cooking so I can ask the in-store butcher to translate for me.)

I followed the Carolina Pulled Pork recipe. I used pecan wood chips, because I didn't have any hickory (traditional for Carolina pulled pork, apparently); Mr. Raichlen says that pecan wood tastes like hickory, but is milder.

I set everything up as I did with the brisket, but this time had a better idea of how to manage the heat using the vents (you can see my chimney starter sitting on the ground to the right. Plus my sort of sad looking tomato plants in the background).


The thing that I didn't work out is that when you're adding charcoal, especially briquettes, you really need to light them first separately, before adding them to the fire. Since I had to cook the pork for a few hours, the fire did start to die down, and I tried to add the briquettes without lighting them first. It kind of worked, kind of didn't. I ended up finishing the pork off in the gas grill for an hour. I tried to use a wood chip smoking box in the gas grill, but it didn't really work. Fortunately, there was enough smoky taste from when it was on the charcoal, that I only needed the gas grill to finish cooking the pork, not flavor it.

It tasted pretty good! We had it on buns with 'Carolina style' coleslaw (no mayo, no carrots or anything, just cabbage and a vinegary, watery BBQ sauce). I didn't quite get it to the temperature it needed to be to be really fall-apart tender - so it would be more accurate to call it Partially Pulled Partially Chopped Pork. But we both still liked it. I forgot to take a picture before we ate, here's one with the remains:



Mark took a close up so you can see the pink ring at the edge of the meat - which is what everyone goes for (it shows your smoking has been successful). I was pretty pleased with that. I don't know what the pink ring is really meant to look like, but to me, I definitely have some pink in my pork:



And here's Mark looking full:


It was also really good a couple of days later when we had it as leftovers.

Next up is ribs.