I took it upon myself to do a meat dish on last week's Slow Cooker Saturday because I felt bad for Blake. I've been making him eat a whole lot of meatless, healthy, and fish-based dishes lately and he deserved to eat something that he would really enjoy. Oh sure, he said he liked the French onion soup and the vegetarian satay, but let's be honest, my man is a carnivore. He was off taking a long, tedious teaching exam last Saturday, so while he was gone I cooked a pork butt in the Crock-Pot.
There are probably hundreds of pulled pork slow cooker recipes online, and I looked at many of them before deciding that this should be a really simple thing to make. In fact, I think I made it about as simple as humanly possible. I used a total of four (4!) ingredients, including the pork butt itself!
Most of the recipes I found for slow cooker pulled pork called for either some sort of dark soda like Dr. Pepper, Root Beer, or Coca-Cola or a medium to dark beer. As you can see, I used Dr. Pepper. Also, they almost all cut up one whole onion and put it in the pot, so I did that as well.
Now, where most of the recipes differ from my "easy way out" is that they had elaborate seasonings to add to your pork, essentially making your own rub. I highly suggest going the route that I did and buying pork rub from the store. Blake had already discovered a pork rub that we like for when he barbecues ribs or butt, so we just used it. It's called Spade L Ranch Pork Chop & Rib Seasoning and we buy it at Albertson's in Southern California. For us, it is way more economical this way, rather than buying all the different seasonings to go into a homemade rub. This container cost around $3-$4 and easily will last us through 4 or more large cuts of pork or ribs.
We bought a 3 1/2 pound pork shoulder (butt) with the bone in. Because this was my first try at cooking meat, we bought the smallest one at the butcher to make sure it would fit in the Crock-Pot. I'm confident we will be able to buy a bigger one - probably around 5 pounds - and it will fit nicely. There was a lot of room in there. Blake put the rub on the night before for me, because even though I now eat the thing, after 12 years of being a vegetarian, I'm still squeamish about touching the raw meat.
Since there are only four ingredients here, the steps are so beyond simple. Quarter (or eighth) a whole onion, put it in the pot:
Dump in a can (or 12 ounces if you're measuring from a 2 liter bottle like me) of Dr. Pepper:
Place big hunk of raw meat on top:
And then cook away! I did a method of 1 hour on high first, since my pork butt was not room temperate, and then switched it to low for the rest of the cooking. Other recipes said 8-10 hours of cooking time on low, but I basically just kept an eye on it. It ended up being done at about 7 hours total (including the one hour on high). You can tell it's done when the bone slides right out of the thing like butter and it's basically starting to fall apart on its own.
Here it is at the one hour point when I turned the temperature down to low. Not much of a difference, but the meat was starting to sweat:
Here it is after 3 hours total:
And after about five and a half hours, you can see that the bone is already ready to fall right out of the meat:
At this point, we flipped the whole pork butt over to give the juices a chance to get soaked in on the other side.
It was already starting to pull apart once we flipped it, but the center seemed like it may have been a little tough still so we figured at least a couple more hours. Blake was home by this point and assisted in the flipping process (two sets of tongs were used). Also, I found it pretty amazing that there ended up being so much liquid in the crock pot. I never would have guessed so much juice could come out of that pork butt, but what do I know!? haha
Right at about 7 hours, we declared it done, although it probably would have been perfectly fine if we stopped cooking it an hour earlier. At this point it was literally falling apart and Blake had filled the kitchen floor with drool.
Once he started picking at the meat and eating it straight out of the pot, I figured we had better take it out and pull it, otherwise there wouldn't be anything left for me to eat. Here's a nice sequence shot of when I took out the bone. Photos by Blake:
Once we took the bone out, the whole thing started crumbling, so we pulled out the pieces and put them into a bowl. We hadn't even started pulling or shredding it yet, and this is what it looked like:
Then it was time to shred, or pull, the pork:
We didn't want to make all of our pulled pork saturated in barbecue sauce because we thought we might want to use some of this meat for tacos on a different day (we didn't, we ate it all in about a day and a half). I did spoon some of the juice from the slow cooker back into the shredded pork mixture, about three or four servings spoons full, just because it seemed a little dry once we pulled it.
Lastly, we heated up some buns, sliced a little onion and topped it with our favorite barbecue sauce. We used onion hamburger buns and medium sized Hawaiian Rolls for sliders. Both tasted delicious. Blake was so happy, nearly in tears over how good it was. So juicy and tender and the flavor was incredible.
Even Mr. Barbecue/Smoker Man admitted that this Crock-Pot pulled pork was every bit as good as his 10-hour smoked pork butt. Although it doesn't have that wonderful smokey flavor when you do it this way, you get a lot more of the taste of the actual pork instead. It's a good trade off.
Anything that gives him that look on his face deserves to be done again, so it's another (bigger) pork butt going into the slow cooker tomorrow. This time I'm planning on using some of it for pulled pork tacos...for real this time!
I'll keep you posted ;)
[ j. ]
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