Pull the other one --- Pulled Pork
All of a sudden everything is pulled. Pork, beef, lamb, plonkers, chains, even chicken. What is all this about other than a marketing ploy? Well it seems it's real food, imported from the US. Thought it looked tasty, but have you seen those US Recipes? all Butts, cups, broiling & alternative meanings of Barbecue. And Liquid smoke. So this page is my English version.
I first bought a 2 kilo/4lb pork shoulder joint, neck end, bone in, (from our splendid local butcher, S J langton in Glenfield, who tells me this cut is called the "Spring". - I have a "stove top smoker" which works well in an oven. - Started off on stove top to get my mix of hickory and apple wood chips smoking
Left it on on the stove top until it stops smoking, about ten minutes. Now, how long for cook for, and at what temperature. The suggestion, averaging out from various websites was four hours at 250f (That's 130c/Gas 1/2), so that's what I did - the result of that was very nice roast pork, but wasn't going to be pulled anywhere. So two more hours, and then two more. No luck. I'd prepared a marinade from beer/honey/tomato puree/Worcester sauce/paprika etc. So I put that, and the pork into an electric slow cooker, on low, and left in overnight, a further nine hours. At last the pork fell off the bone into the shreds that one sees illustrated. I left it (refrigerated) in the marinade until warming it up the next day. Again, no idea how this was supposed to taste, but it was moist, slightly smoky and very pleasant.