Carolina Pulled Pork Barbecue

I flew to Durham, NC a few weeks ago to attend my Duke 25th college reunion. Although I had been a little nervous about going to my first reunion in a quarter of a century, I ended up having a blast. Some of my closest friends and about 20 of my sorority sisters were there, and we reminisced about so many things I had tucked away in my memory for decades.

Alpha Delta Pi's, Duke, Class of 1984, 25th Reunion

Like my first date at college ... A friend of my aunt’s had a son who went to Duke and he invited me to go to his off-campus fraternity party. On the way home he asked his buddy to stop the car and then got out. We waited and waited, and after a while I started to wonder what had happened to my date. After half an hour, he returned. Apparently he had fallen down a steep hill while relieving himself. He had leaves in his hair. His pants were torn and his shoes were covered in mud. Needless to say, that was the last time we ever went out.

Another incident my friends reminded me about took place at the end of my sophomore year when we convinced the college quarterback to steal a six-foot-tall plastic pink flamingo from a putt-putt golf course down at Myrtle Beach. Unfortunately, the flamingo was cemented into the ground and my friends and I must have been a little raucous because the police showed up. We all ran away into the nearby bushes but the quarterback got caught by the cops (Thank God he didn’t get into trouble!).
























But all fun and mischief aside, one of the strongest memories that came back to me while at the reunion was that of Carolina Pulled Pork Barbecue. Down south it’s just called barbecue and it’s made with a distinctive vinegar-based sauce that is so lip-smacking flavorful! The reunion caterers served the pulled pork for lunch on the Saturday I was down there. Walking into the 1984 reunion tent with my old friends Cindy and Laura, I detected the unmistakable scent of barbecued pork – that rich and smoky meaty aroma that can only make you picture a whole hog slowly roasting on a spit all night long. To put it lightly, I was salivating. I was so busy the night before catching up with fellow classmates that I had only managed to eat two bites of chicken and then, when I got back to my hotel room, an assortment of about two dozen licorice, cherry and tutti-frutti jelly beans. I awoke the next morning starving, but too lazy to go down for breakfast, therefore having to resort to my vanilla Power Bar and an apple that I pilfered from the hotel gym.

Greedily eyeing the barbecue, I wondered to myself, “Could it ever meet my expectations? Would it be as good as I remembered it being 25 years ago?

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And, most importantly, would I be able to eat it in a lady-like fashion even though I was hungry enough to devour an entire pig at the moment?” The answer was yes on all three accounts. From the first bite, the barbecue delivered the hoped for punch – tender, hand-torn strips of pork packed with a heady taste of meat tinged with the greasy flavor from the marbled fat it was surrounded in, a brightness brought on by the tart acidity from the vinegar, and a rush of heat created by a hearty dose of hot red pepper flakes. Seeing no buns to tuck the barbecue into, I stood by the serving station and ate it slowly and appreciatively with a fork, trying to avoid conversation so I could fully enjoy my meal.

After I had consumed my fill, I deposited my empty plate in the garbage and started looking for my next course – chocolate chip cookies that were piled high on a table on the far side of the tent. It was there that I spotted my sorority sister Katie, who’s now living in Texas. “I forgot how much I love barbeque,” I said to her in between bites of my cookie. Katie, blond and blue-eyed with just as much energy as back in college, was one of my classmates in charge of organizing the reunion, and ever since reconnecting with her, we’ve been chatting on Facebook and I’ve been sending her my cooking blog.

“I’m going to make barbeque when I go back home,” I told her.

“Ooh, with vinegar?” she asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“Promise, you’ll send me the recipe?”

“Better yet, I’m going to blog about it,” I answered.

I quickly forgot about barbecue as I finished my cookie and looked around the tent, trying to remember what the men I knew there looked like as boys back in college, that is before they had gained weight and lost their hair. I was also busy sizing myself up with the other women – seeing who was still in shape, who looked like they’d had Restylane and Botox, and who had just let it all go.

I didn’t think about barbecue again until about a week ago. I was putting away some cereal boxes in my pantry when I came across my slow cooker. The lid was covered with dust, emphasizing the fact that it hadn't been used in a long, long time. Inside was a little paper booklet with recipes suggested by the manufacturer. Leafing through the pages, I found the recipe for “Carolina Barbecued Pork.” “OK, it’s time to fire up this old crockpot again,” I said to myself.


















The first thing I had to do was buy some pork butt, which, by the way, is not the pig’s rear end. According to the book, “The Barbecue! Bible 10th Anniversary Edition, by Steven Raichlen, “A true pork shoulder includes both the Boston Butt (the upper part of the leg with the shoulder blade) and the picnic ham (the actual foreleg), a cut of meat that weighs fourteen to eighteen pounds in its entirety and is used chiefly at professional barbecue competitions.” Thank God, his recipe called for “Boston butt alone (five to six pounds), which thanks to its generous marbling gives you superb barbecue.”

The pork butt that I purchased from my local butcher (and which I had to order in advance because he doesn’t usually have pork butt lying around), weighed in at 4.5 pounds and was about the size of half a loaf of bread. As mentioned in Raichlen’s book, the reddish brown pork was striped with white layers of fat, which I knew would generously add to the flavor of the meat.
















Early the next morning, I made the rub for the barbecue, combining brown sugar, paprika, salt and pepper, then massaging the mixture into the outer surface of the meat. I quartered a couple onions and placed them on the bottom of my crockpot, then sat the pork butt right on top. All that remained was to whip up the vinegar sauce and drizzle some of it over the meat. I decided to use Raichlen’s vinegar sauce because the crockpot recipe didn’t look tomato-ey enough. His recipe called for a healthy dose of ketchup, plus lots of brown sugar, which can never be bad.

The rest his ingredients were: vinegar, salt, red pepper flakes, and ground black and white pepper. As an FYI, I cut the amount of hot red pepper flakes that he called for in half, because four teaspoons sounded a little too hot for my taste! And I added some dry mustard and garlic salt.

As it turns out, Raichlen’s recipe has western Carolina roots. After doing a little online research, I discovered that down in North Carolina, they are quite divided on the issue of sauce. On the eastern side, vinegar is kept pure, and no tomatoes are added. However on the west side barbecue sauces are put together with a hint of tomato and sugar. Clearly, that was the direction I was going in.

After covering the meat with some of the vinegar sauce, I put on the top and set the crockpot to low and the timer to 10 hours. Now here’s the hard part – every time I walked into the house during the day, I had to smell the scent of the barbecued pork cooking, beckoning me, taunting me, making my stomach grumble and my head dizzy with desire, and I couldn’t even take one bite!

Around 5 p.m., I poured a little more vinegar sauce over the meat and let it finish cooking. Did I strip off a little piece of pork and taste it? Of course I did! It was so soft and tender from cooking all day long and it had that piquant, meaty, full-flavored taste that just knocks your socks off. I had to control myself from not eating any more, but it wasn’t easy. At this point, I do want to say that I added a few tablespoons of barbecue sauce (any market brand variety will do). It’s really your choice to doctor up as you choose.

I’m just warning you, the next part requires patience. After you put the meat and onions in a strainer to get rid of all the extra liquid and pick out any remaining big clumps of fat, you need to chop the onions and shred the meat. You could cut the pork up into bite-size bits, but I really recommend using your hands to pull it into small pieces (hence the name "pulled pork"). As Raichlen says, “A human touch is needed to achieve the perfect texture.” (Yes, your hands will be orange and greasy, but some warm soap and water will make you as good as new.) The shreds should be about one to two inches long and 1/8 to 1/4 inch wide.



















By this time, my husband, Bob, and younger son, Spencer, were already in the kitchen, almost circling me like hungry wolves. “Stand back,” I said, waving a serving spoon at them in mock-defense. “Dinner will be ready in a minute.” All that was left to do was to spoon the pulled pork on to hamburger buns and top with some onions, which were incredibly soft by now and bursting with flavor from having been cooked so long with the meat. Some people also add coleslaw on top of this, but I put the slaw on the side, along with a big serving of cornbread.

Well, I fed the animals, otherwise known as my family, and they were very happy. I probably could have served 12 other people as well. If you make this, invite company!

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CAROLINA BARBECUED PORK

2 onions, quartered
1 (4-6 pound) boneless pork butt

Rub:
2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 tablespoon paprika
2 teaspoons salt
½ teaspoon ground black pepper

Vinegar Sauce:
2 cups cider vinegar
½ cup plus 2 tablespoons ketchup
¼ cup firmly packed brown sugar, or more to taste
3 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons hot red pepper flakes
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 teaspoon freshly ground white pepper
½ teaspoon dry mustard
½ teaspoon garlic salt

Place quartered onions in crockpot. Combine brown sugar, paprika, salt and pepper; rub over pork butt. Place pork over onions.

Combine vinegar, ketchup, brown sugar, salt, hot red pepper flakes, ground black pepper, ground white pepper, dry mustard and garlic salt; stir to mix well. Drizzle about one third vinegar mixture over pork; cover and refrigerate remaining vinegar mixture.

Cover crockpot and cook low for 10 to 12 hours. Drizzle about one third of the reserved vinegar mixture over the pork during last half hour of cooking (you can also add a little barbecue sauce here, if you like).

Remove meat and onions, drain. Chop or shred meat and chop onions. Serve meat and onions on hamburger buns. Pass remaining vinegar sauce to drizzle over sandwiches.