Slow-Cooker BBQ Pork

I will always have a special place in my heart for New Orleans, mostly because the wonderful doctors there fixed my baby nephew's tiny heart. Children's Hospital, I thank you. (Baby Dylan is doing wonderfully, by the way.) But another, much smaller and more trivial reason I love NoLa is Voodoo BBQ. Their food is exquisite and divine. I know, not words one associates with bbq, but whatever, I don't care. It is so good, hubby and I ate there two days in a row. Remember my previous post about corn pudding? Well this is the restaurant my dad and brother-in-law were talking about. And let me tell you, that corn pudding is perfection. I'm going to have to play around a bit, but I think I'll be able to get close to it... Ok, small tangent. Voodoo has GREAT bbq pulled pork. The slow roasting (for who knows how many hours) leaves the meat so fragrant and so tender and so moist. It's decadent. I dream of it. I aspire to make something half as good. (Their Jamaican jerk chicken kicks butt as well.)

Since our last trip to NoLa, I've kept an eye out for slow cooked pork done in the crock pot. I finally came across this recipe at SoupBelly which seemed super easy. All I had to do was wait until I came across a good-sized pork shoulder and remembered well enough in advance to prepare it; it takes a total of 18 hours! That is slow cooked, my dears.



The recipe is super duper simple, especially if you have a favorite BBQ sauce. Now I know there are differing opinions on what makes a tasty BBQ, but I like a smokey sweet tangy with a little kick kind of sauce myself. With as little vinegar as possible. (Have I ever mentioned that I HATE vinegar?) Perhaps foolishly, I used a BBQ sauce I'd never had before, but it was the same brand as a meat marinade I absolutely adore. Hubby and I use Stubb's for marinating steaks and kabobs, so I figured I'd like their BBQ sauce. In the end, it wasn't too far off from what I wanted, but I did doctor the dish a bit before serving it. What seemed so potent in the bottle really mellowed out. C'est la vie, no? In the end, I added brown sugar, garlic powder, onion powder, salt, black pepper, and red pepper. The end result was quite tasty.

Slow Cooker BBQ Pulled Pork

• 4 lbs pork shoulder (or butt)
• 2 large onions, coarsely chopped
• 1 cup ginger ale (you'll most likely find this is the alcohol section of the grocery store)
• 18 oz bottle of BBQ sauce

Place half of the onions on the bottom of the slow cooker. Place the meat on top (leaving the fat on as it will add juicy flavor and we'll get rid of it later). Cover with the remainder of the onions and pour ginger ale on top. Cook on low for 12 hours.

Remove meat from the slow cooker and shred with forks. It should be fairly tender and easy to shred.*

Discard any bones you might have and also discard the liquid in the cooker. Return the meat and any onion pieces back to the cooker and pour in the bottle of BBQ sauce. Stir well and cook on low for an additional 6 hours, though it can cook a bit longer. Add any additional seasonings you feel it might need.

Serve on a bun! Or by itself really.

* Note: Hubby had a hell of a time shredding the pork (a task left to him since I was babysitting baby Dylan). So if you look carefully at the picture, you'll notice cubes instead of shreds. We're not sure why it didn't shred; hubby thinks there was actually too much fat in the meat which made it rubbery (though it wasn't when we ate it.) He said it just wouldn't separate; he spent an hour dismantling the thing! After additional cooking time, the meat was more tender and fell apart more, so perhaps our heat was a bit too low. I was using a massively old slow cooker that I'd never used before, so that could have been a factor. Oh well. It all turned out fabulously!