Pulled Some More Pork

My brother came over the other day and since he hadn’t had dinner he went to the store for food to cook at our place. He returned with a piece of pork shoulder, shaped like a fillet, and marinated in orange and ginger and also some potatoes and a bottle of ready made red wine sauce. He only cooked and ate half of it, so I had the rest for lunch the next day.

Since both my previous attempts mainly involved an oven and nearly whole days of cooking, I knew I had to change method or have something else for lunch. The choice fell on the cast iron pot that’s been heavily featured recently. I tipped the rest of the red wine sauce in, along with a bit of water, pork stock, sugar and half an onion in slices. Simmered the meat, which wasn’t as large as the big chunks of pork neck I’ve used before, for about two hours

Both this step and the next would have had really nice pictures, if the camera hadn’t messed the files up. (My trusty DSLR does become a bit iffy from time to time.  It’s about 10 years old.)

Next step was to rub the cooked meat with a new batch of dust, basicall same as the old one but with muscovado sugar instead of regular and some Sichuan pepper and English mustard powder added to spice things up a bit. Then half an hour in the oven at 150 C (300 F) to get a bit of bark going.

Pork pulled and camera working again.

The remains of the simmering part.

Meat reheated in a pan with a dollop of homemade barbecue sauce. It had time to go cold due to slightly poor planning with the garnish and all the fiddling with the camera.

Comparatively quick pulled pork with refried potatoes and some onions and romaine lettuce

More Pulled Pork

Sometimes us food bloggers get a bit single-minded about something. I’ve done Japanese noodles, cabbage and bacon, to mention a few. Now it’s apparently pulled pork. In my defense I have to say that pulled pork is very modern and I’m only going with the times.

Last time I simply roasted a pork neck at fairly low temp. This time it’s been allowed to wallow in its dry rub overnight and the cooking method will be a bit more elaborate.  A few years back I was given my parents’ spaghetti pot, because it didn’t work with their new induction stove. The pot comes with its own colander, which I’ve often thought should be usable for large scale steaming. And since the whole pulled pork thing has a bit of a macho air about it we’ll be using beer for steam (More specifically a pale ale from Denmark) Some kind of semi-moist pot roast I guess.

Aforementioned meat (one of many pork neck chunks residing in the freezer) in colander/steamer thingy. Beer goes in pot, followed by colander. Lid applied and the whole thing goes into the oven. In my oven it’s a rather snug fit, so one could probably use the stove too, but oven temp is so much more exact. 212 F in this case.

Meat after one hour. It’s showing signs of being cooked, but there’s not a lot of steam going on – more a faint smell of beer going flat.

Meat after two and a half hours. Applied a sprinkle of rub just in case. The smell of simmering beer is becoming rather tangible.

We decided to go have barbecue dinner with my brother, so I left the beer steaming contraption to its own devices

‘Flintstone roast’ – marinated slice of ham on the bone – is standard bbq fare for Swedes.

Meat after seven hours. Opening the oven door revealed a considerable amount of steam and the meat has visibly shrunk and is really starting to lose its structural integrity. Satisfied with the level of tenderness I applied another sprinkle of rub and increased temp to 250 F and left the lid off for an hour to get a bit of a bark.

Mission accomplished.

I decided to try this batch of pork in hot dog buns, which works quite well.

It’s also worth mentioning that I took my ‘secret’ sauce from the last post and improved it with a bit more mustard, a darker treacle, plenty of dark muscovado sugar and a dash of liquid smoke.

Midnight Pork

With pulled pork being all the rage over here (probably because of American cooking shows) and me having recently eaten some in NY and also the pork necks at the neighborhood grocery being ridiculously cheap this little project more or less came together on its own.

I’m sure there are many established ways to cook pork for pulling, but I prefer to not look things up unless absolutely necessary. My cooking method of choice is the ordinary oven, set to 100 degrees C (212 F) with a dish of water sitting at the bottom to provide some steam.

A two pound piece of pork neck, cut in half to reduce cooking time, brined and then covered in a dry rub consisting of mostly equal parts salt and sugar, half-parts smoked paprika and garlic powder and quarter-parts black pepper, onion powder, rosemary and ginger.

With the pork in the oven it’s time to improvise some sauce. In NY I encountered two types of barbecue sauce; The sweet, gooey sort and the thinner vinegary sort. I liked both and went somewhere in between. The piece de resistance of my concoction, though, is the Danish æblegløgg. (Gløgg (or glögg in Swedish) is the Scandinavian type of mulled wine, in this case non-alcoholic and made from unfiltered apple juice, lemon, star anise, cinnamon, cardamom and cloves). For those bad at reading Swedish or guessing what stuff is, the other ingredients are ketchup, honey, smoked paprika, dijon mustard, balsamic vinegar, mango vinegar and treacle.

Boiling the sauce down to a more syrupy texture.

A sauce that sticks to the inside of a dispenser bottle is pretty sticky indeed…

The reason for the post title being ‘Midnight Pork’ is that that’s about the time when it was done, since I put it in the oven at around 7 PM. I raised the temp to 150 C (300 F) for the last 20 minutes to get a more defined crust.

Let the pulling begin!

Since I hadn’t planned on going out in search of suitable buns around midnight (and we just don’t get those namby-pamby…I mean delicate… buns they have in the US anyway) I put my pulled pork on toast and was very very happy.