In the past, I used to use decent ribs in a pan in the oven for pulled pork but really would rather not use oven for this anymore as the amount I cook is so small. I tend to use crock pot for as much as I can nowadays. But time I made, the end was result was not as tender as usual, probably a mistake in either overcooking or some other recipe adjustment needed for switching from oven to crock.
Anyhoo, if you make pulled pork via crock pot and feel it is generally successful, what cut of pork do you use?
Thanks…I’d seen this referenced while interneting around, but I’d never heard of it before, and then there was always two or three other “butts” (giggity!) referenced, like shoulder butt or upper butt or whatever, so it got confusing. Aside, I’ve noticed a lot of “new cuts” of meat out there recently, and have assumed they are marketing attempts to sell less-expensive, less-demand stuff under attention-grabbing names…what exactly is a “country rib” anyway? (rhetorical question.)
I’m gonna get even more technical for no reason:
Boston Butt is part of the shoulder, there’s two halves: the picnic shoulder is leaner and sometimes still has the skin on, and the boston butt is more consistently marbled so generally people prefer it. It has kind of an odd shaped bone running through it, I’d recommend bone-in and just remove the bone after cooking.
Country-style ribs is one of those generic names for meat the butcher is trying to sell. Typically it’s a boston butt cut into big rectangular strips, but it could also be the picnic shoulder or the rib-eye end of a boneless pork loin.
Buy a boneless pork butt and cut it in half. A half perfectly fits in a small crockpot or instantpot. You can freeze the other half for another day. You can even cook it from frozen if needed.
lol…so not a rib. Funny! But…two birds with hone stone: now I know what a “country rib” is, and if I buy a package, apparently I have some boston/picnic butt to use for pulled pork recipe (I’ll try that adovada sometime soon, Max).
I’ll need to look, but if I was a betting man (and I am…), I’d bet they charge more per lb for the “rib” version of butt than they do for the regular chunk of butt, because, you know, ribs are better.
I use this recipe for pulled pork. It’s simple and makes wonderfully tender meat every time. I use the instant pot instructions, but it also has slow cooker (crock pot) and oven instructions.
Until last spring, my cooking was limited to grilling and microwaving. Then I discovered smoking “low and slow” on my Big Green Egg with indirect heat for eight to twelve hours! The Fogo charcoal guy is my favorite YouTuber on this subject.
We had never been big pork fans until I discovered Tom Thumb specials on nine pound bone-in pork shoulders/butts. They are often on for $1.99 but this week it is $1.77/pound. Every few weeks they have a “digital special” for $0.99 where you order online and pick it up at the store. You need to order $30.00 total or get hit for about a $3.00 fee but, it’s easy to find another $20.00 groceries you need these days.
Three pound beef chuck roast is another favorite that occasionally has heavily discounted specials. Smoke it exactly like brisket and pull or slice it.
Cuts like brisket, chuck roast and pork shoulder come from regions where muscles did a lot of work and result in very tough meat. They were not very desirable and therefore cheap until BBQ joints, crock pots and smoking grills became popular a few decades back. It seems to me that as brisket got the attention and moved up in price to two or three times the price of pork shoulder, the shoulder was somewhat forgotten and remains a great bargain.
The secret of crock pot or smoking is that the heat for a long time causes the various connective tissues to break down. You know how hard it is to separate raw meat from bone. An exciting moment when starting to pull pork is when you grab that big and still very hot bone and it slides out clean as a whistle.
I don’t have a smoker, but make pulled pork in the slow cooker/crock pot. I learned this recipe from my mom.
I use a pork loin (not tenderloin). Cut it in thirds and brown on all sides in a skillet on medium heat, then put the three pieces on end in the slow cooker.
Thinly slice a red onion and put on top, along with 1/3 of a jar of BBQ sauce. Cool on low for 6-8 hours. Pull out meat and transfer juices to a saucepan over medium heat. Simmer juice to reduce by 1/2 while shredding pork. Return pork to slow cooker and add another 1/3 jar of sauce and some of the reduced juices.
Serve on toasted buns with dill pickle slices and optionally with cole slaw. Save some to use in jambalaya.
Note: mixing a little BBQ sauce into the slaw to spice it up makes an awesome side dish, too.
My recipe for pulled pork is dead-simple. Boston butt. A bunch of peppers and onions with liberal chili powder, garlic and other crap. Slow cook until it’s fork-tender. Then pull out the veggies and add more chili powder, diced green chili and season with salt and pepper.
A couple weeks ago we went to the Denton macaroni and cheese festival. Our favorite (and the one that won) contained Spam that was “candied” in a teriyaki style sauce.
I could see that.
I fry spam in teriyaki sauce when I make Musubi
I picked up the taste for spam when I was in Hawaii for a couple months.
There was a taco truck off one of the gates at Pearl that has spam and eggs breakfast tacos I went to almost every morning.
