‹ The Fire 50 › Cook it at home

The Fire 50 · cook it at home

Carolina pulled pork with vinegar sauce (oven or grill)

About 8 hr, 30 min hands-on · 8 people

Whole-hog cooks mop with a peppery vinegar sauce, and a bone-in shoulder cooked low gives you the same pull-apart meat and crisp bark at home. Pile it on a soft bun, Burnt Ends style, or eat it on a tray with slaw.

Save it and it opens in Chef Amazing with a timeline, mise en place, what you already have and a shopping list.

The real one

You need

• 1 bone-in pork shoulder (Boston butt), 3.5 to 4 kg (8 to 9 lb)
• 2 tbsp kosher salt
• 1 tbsp brown sugar
• 1 tbsp black pepper
• 1 tbsp paprika
• For the vinegar sauce: 360 ml (1 1/2 cups) cider vinegar
• 1 tbsp brown sugar
• 1 tbsp red pepper flakes
• 1 tsp black pepper
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 tbsp ketchup (optional, the Lexington way)
• To serve: soft buns, coleslaw

How to make it

1. Season (10 min, the night before if you can): Mix the salt, sugar, pepper and paprika and rub it all over the shoulder. Refrigerate uncovered.
2. Cook low (6 to 8 hr): Grill or smoker at 120°C (250°F) with hickory or oak; or the oven at 135°C (275°F), fat side up in a roasting pan. Cook until the bark is deep brown and the meat reads 93 to 95°C (200 to 203°F) and the bone wiggles loose.
3. Make the sauce (5 min): Stir all the sauce ingredients together until the sugar dissolves. It's thin and sharp on purpose.
4. Rest and pull (30 min): Rest the shoulder 20 minutes under foil. Pull out the bone, then pull the meat into chunks with two forks or gloved hands, mixing in bits of the dark bark. Chop it if you like it the Ayden way.
5. Sauce and serve (5 min): Toss the meat with about 1/2 cup of the sauce, taste, and add more. Serve on buns with slaw on top, or on a plate with the rest of the sauce at the table.

Tips

• Fat cap up lets it baste itself.
• Leftovers reheat best covered with a splash of the sauce.
• For a crisper bark, uncover the last hour in the oven.

Chef Amazing's own home version of pulled pork shoulder, in our words; not any restaurant's recipe.