Be Excellent To Each Other

Could you give us a demo?

Also, I want it to be almost a jam/jelly/preserve, so there'll be plenty of water and sugar in there, and I'll be boning it, probably leaving the skin on for cooking. Not just the pork recipe done with duck.

I wish you luck with it, but I don't think it'll work. The reason pulled pork is juicy and tender is that you're rendering the fat inbetween the meat fibres and allowing it to penetrate the meat. The equivalent for duck is confit, cooking it literally submerged in fat - because there is no fat inside the meat. Water and sugar can't take the place of that fat.

I'm always willing to be proved wrong, of course.

Would it work on an old cock? like coq-au-vin?

Coq au vin rarely gets to the falling-apart texture of pulled pork. And that's because you cook it for less time. And you cook it for less time because otherwise it would be tough as boots.

Cavey?

Too much information.

Besides, if it DOES go really dry, I can just set it in butter and spread it on toast.

More pulled pork on the go today

I basically winged it on the ingredients but if I can remember what I put in:

1.3kg pork
Jamaican bbq spice rub thingy from the world food section of Sainsbury's
500ml chicken stock
couple of dashes of white wine vinegar
salt
pepper
chilli powder
tabasco sauce
worcestershire sauce
large onion
4 cloves of garlic
cumin
paprika
topped up with some extra water to make sure it is covered. There were probably a few more random spices thrown in that I can't recall

Basically i'm doing pretty much the same recipe but without the sugar and additional wine, and with a bit more of a chilli kick to it.

I shall report back.

We have got a LOT of tomatoes and chillis that need preserving.

Awesome!

Heh. Must be pulled pork day today - I've just taken mine out of the oven. This is my "recipe" (because, like yours it's totally winged when I do it)

Make a mixture of Worcester sauce and liquid smoke and rub on the meat.
Make a spice rub, consisting of the following...

Smoked paprika
Smoked, cracked peppercorns
Mild chili powder
Mustard powder
Brown sugar
Cumin
Oregano
Thyme
Garlic powder
Onion powder
Flaked sea salt
Freshly ground black pepper
Ground white pepper
Pinch of cinnamon

Rub this on the meat, cover and refrigerate for at least 12 hours.

Oven on at 275F (mumble mumble C)

Meat in a roasting pan, covered tightly with tin foil for 3-4 hours until it pulls apart easily with two forks.

There's usually very little in the way of juices in the pan at the end, so I pour in a few cups of water, stir it around to get all the goodies off the pan, then add in ketchup, soy sauce, apple cider vinegar, Worcester, brown sugar and a little more liquid smoke. Season to taste, transfer to a saucepan and reduce to a thick sauce.

Serve on pancakes, covered in map{Stop that nonsense! Ed.}

That was a great success much more to my taste than last time and mrs t loved it too.

The pudding in the toad in the hole (with m&s chorizo sausages) i made this evening wouldn't cook and tasted like custard. Dead weird.

My "Craster's Pulled Pork" is in the slow cooker. Ooooooh!

Has any forum member NOT pulled Craster's pork yet?

I'm not going near his pork with a 10ft barge pole.

You're missing out, it's juicy and tender. And comes apart in your hands.

I had Craster's pork juice running down my chin last week.

Well, that went wrong.

Oh dear. What happened?

You're meant to rinse it after you brine it, right?

Yeah. Doesn't usually make much of a difference though. Was it salty as fuck?

Yup. Probably because I didn't rinse it.

Just skip the brine next time. It makes little difference in the sliw-cooker method.

Went to the supermarket today and they had big 2kg+ pork leg joints reduced, so I decided it was time to try this pulled pork. Got the pork in the fridge with the rub on it just now, going to leave it in 'til bedtime then I'll cook it overnight.
Making lamb kebabs for dinner, made a marinade of yoghurt, various spices and garlic and a squeeze of lemon. Going to put them on skewers with pepper, red onion and cherry tomatoes then griddle them and serve them with a tomato and red onion salad and some Gilly fried rice, which is pancetta, onion, garlic, chilli, stir fried with cooked basmati rice and finished off with a splash of soy sauce and some spring onions. I always like to heat mine up a little bit once it's served by sprinkling some dried chilli flakes on it as well, but I got a Thai hot sauce today so I might try mixing a little of that through a wee test batch.
Finally, I have given baking a go. Don't think I've ever baked anything before but I had some over ripe bananas so I'm making white chocolate and banana loaf. It's in the oven right now, a bit nervous about how it'll turn out. I cook the way that most people on here seem to do, which is to read a recipe to give you an idea then start adding something's and taking away others at a whim. Had to be very strict with myself to make sure I got all the measurements correct with the baking.
I'll report back with results if it goes well.

...

Who are you?

That's jonny..

Can't you crack the code?! It's the short form of my old username, people used to call me sdg when I was superdupergill all the time.

It was a rubbish joke.

Although your avatar doesn't work, which doesn't help.

I'm too lazy to fix the avatar I'm afraid.

Hah, just realised why it was a joke.

I took the liberty of fixing it myself

Finally!

Haha why is it a train?!

Surely I don't need to explain! Look closer...

I was just staring at it for about five minutes trying to figure it out, saying things like 'cloud train' 'steam train' 'sky train' 'flyi...' Ahh! I consider myself quite intelligent but man, I can be thick at times

Right, I have made and eaten (some of) the pulled pork! The joint I had bought was almost 2.5kg so I cooked it for about eleven or twelve hours and I think that was pretty perfect. I didn't use Wostershire sauce because I'm not fussed for that and I had noted that Trooper had said he didn't really like the fruitiness of the sauce, so I wanted to avoid that. I'm not a big fan of BBQ sauces either so I tried to make it a wee bit more spicy. Added Tabasco as well as a wee bit of chilli but I had to be careful not to make it too hot as then my girlfriend would probably leave me. It turned out really well, the sauce isn't exactly to my taste but it is nice. Craster, is the alcohol necessary in the sauce? I used white wine but I was wondering if that was adding to sweetness of fruitiness?

Finally, my master stroke...I googled pancetta fried rice to see if anyone had a recipe like my made up one, to see if anyone added anything extra. Found a food blog and the writer made it pretty much exactly like me, with the addition of a few extra veg plus a chilli hot sauce called Sirachi. I got the sauce yesterday and it is lovely. Even better, it says on the bottle it is perfect for on roast meats or cold cuts or kebabs, so after getting a portion of pulled pork today I mixed through some of this sauce. Very very tasty. Wish I'd been brave enough to buy the garlic chilli version but I was worried it would be really strong with garlic and I am planning to take these rolls to my work this weekend!
Anyway, if you haven't heard of or tried that sauce before, I recommend. I got in a big tesco for a few pounds and it has a great flavour. It isn't just let's see how hot we can make a sauce, it has a very nice sweetness to it as well which when mixed through rice make you think of thick red sauces you would get from the Chinese. The heat is nice as well, strong enough to make you get a runny noise but it doesn't blow your head off. Usually that would put me off a hot sauce but this one is a different class.

You wouldn't get any fruit from the Worcestershire sauce in there. You would pick up a little umami though.

Sriracha is really just a basic chilli sauce -- nothing but a paste of chillis in a solution of vinegar with a little garlic, sugar, and salt. This is the basic sort of sauce most homemade chilli sauces are based on, and I know Bik has posted a number of recipes that are cut from the same cloth. There's lots of brands, pretty much interchangeable, the most famous being Rooster sauce.

A couple of the added-garlic ones I've tried have been offputtingly strong on the garlic. And that's from me, and I really like garlic.

Until I drove past it, I had no idea that Sriracha was a place in Thailand.

Gilly, there's nothing vital in the pulled pork sauce. It's all about just building a liquid base to braise the pork that tastes nice as a sauce when reduced.

Umami? I must confess I made some assumptions about Worcestershire sauce, I'm not sure I've really tried it before.
@Craster I have a vague memory of seeing a post in here before asking about an ingredient required to break down the pork or something, was that the cider vinegar rather than the alcohol? Regardless, it really is a delicious recipe so can I just add myself to the chorus of people thanking you for sharing it with us

Also re that sauce(sorry my post is all out of order and messed up, I'm on my phone) I didn't realise it was such a basic sauce, I really love the flavour though. Well balanced and goes really great with this. Think it's a new staple in my kitchen! If I ever grown chillies ill be chasing bik down for a recipe.

Also also,I'm eating a bit of the banana and white chocolate loaf I made the other day, wow. It's delicious

Cholula Chilli and Garlic sauce is the best sauce in the world.


And sdg - heat and time is all you need to 'break down' the pork, really.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umami

The booze won't penetrate further than the outer quarter-inch or so, so it won't be doing much to break it down.

That, as I pointed out on Facebook, sounds delicious.

Oh, very interesting thank you. I hadn't heard of that before, but maybe I will use the Worcestershire sauce next time!
The recipe for the banana loaf came from the Green & Blacks cookbook and is pretty simple, I can send you it if you want? Willow is still obsessed with it, she will come running from anywhere in the house the moment the loaf is brought out.

Worcestershire sauce is one of the greatest inventions ever, possible second only to mushroom ketchup:

My mushroom ketchup looks just like that. I think each bottle is a lifetime's supply.

"&c" is one of my favorite things this month.

Um. I buy about a bottle a month.

Huh. I use it every time I cook something I think it works with, and somehow I hardly use any. Perhaps I am cooking the wrong things.

Tonight: hot dogs (some premium bratwurst I found in Waitrose, with homemade buns) and chips (with Nando's peri-peri chip spice, which I found in Asda).

Heh, snap, I found that this week. Is it new out, I hadn't seen it for sale before. Still yet to try it though but I assume it is exactly the same as the stuff they use in the restaurant, so not too hard to work out what it will taste like