By two o'clock last Saturday it was still eighty-eight degrees, the pecans had started thumping onto the carport roof, and our house smelled like it had been slow-roasting since sunrise, because it had. We had five families coming over from Lila's second-grade class, sixteen people if you count the toddler who mostly ate buns, and I had decided weeks ago that I was not going to stand over a grill in September heat. Two slow cookers on the kitchen counter, one of them borrowed from our neighbor across the street, did the work instead.
Pulled pork is the most forgiving crowd food I know. It holds for hours on the warm setting, and the leftovers turn into supper for most of the next week.
The pork
I bought two bone-in pork shoulders on our last Costco run in Columbia and froze them until the week of the party. Each was a little over seven pounds. A shoulder loses close to 40 percent of its weight as it cooks, so about fourteen pounds raw gave us around eight and a half pounds of meat, which fed sixteen people generously and still left plenty.
Ingredients (feeds 14 to 16, with leftovers), roughly $52 total:
- 2 bone-in pork shoulders, about 14 lb total (about $30)
- 2 yellow onions, thickly sliced ($1.50)
- 1 cup apple cider vinegar, 1/2 cup water ($1)
- Rub: 1/4 cup brown sugar, 2 tbsp smoked paprika, 2 tbsp kosher salt, 1 tbsp black pepper, 2 tsp garlic powder, 1 tsp cayenne (about $2 from the pantry)
- Mustard sauce: 1 cup yellow mustard, 1/2 cup cider vinegar, 1/3 cup honey, 2 tbsp brown sugar, 1 tbsp butter, a few dashes of hot sauce, black pepper ($4)
- 24 soft buns ($7) and a big bag of slaw mix with a simple dressing ($6)
Steps
- The night before, pat the shoulders dry, rub them all over with the spice mix, and wrap them in the fridge.
- In the morning, lay the sliced onions in the bottom of each slow cooker. Set a shoulder on top, fat side up, and pour half the vinegar and water around each one.
- Cook on low for 9 to 10 hours, until a fork twists into the meat with almost no effort and the bone slides out clean.
- While it cooks, whisk the sauce ingredients in a small pot over low heat for about ten minutes. It thickens a little as it cools.
- Lift the pork onto a sheet pan, pull out the bone, and shred with two forks. Skim the fat off the cooking liquid and splash about a cup of it back over the meat so it stays juicy.
- Return the shredded pork to one cooker on the warm setting. Put the sauce on the table and let people dress their own sandwiches.
Notes
- The mustard sauce is a nod to where we live. Out here in the Midlands, mustard-based barbecue sauce is just what barbecue sauce is, and our guests from up north always ask for the recipe.
- Keep the pork unsauced in storage. It is far more useful for leftovers that way.
Three meals from the leftovers
We ended up with a little over three pounds of plain shredded pork. I divided it into three freezer bags the same night, each about a pound, and labeled them with what they were going to become.
1. Pork and black bean quesadillas (Monday)
Warm a pound of pork in a skillet with a drained can of black beans, a spoon of the leftover cooking liquid, cumin and a squeeze of lime. Fill flour tortillas with the mixture and a handful of shredded cheese, then crisp them in a dry pan. Lila calls these "party tacos," and I am not correcting her. Extra cost: about $6 for tortillas, cheese and beans.
2. Sweet potato and pork hash (Wednesday)
Dice two sweet potatoes and an onion, cook them slowly in a little oil until soft and browned at the edges, then fold in the pork and let it crisp. Top each plate with a fried egg. Ben puts mustard sauce on his. Extra cost: about $5.
3. A quick Brunswick-style stew (Saturday)
Simmer the pork with a can of crushed tomatoes, two cups of chicken broth, a bag of frozen corn, a bag of frozen lima beans, a diced potato, a spoon of the mustard sauce and a little Worcestershire for about forty minutes. It tastes like it took all day. Extra cost: about $9, and it fed us twice.
What I would change next time
I would make a double batch of sauce. It ran out before the last round of sandwiches. I would also start the slow cookers an hour earlier than I think I need to, because one shoulder took a full eleven hours to fall apart.
But the afternoon itself was everything I wanted. The kids ran barefoot under the pecan trees until the mosquitoes found them, the grown-ups ended up on the screened porch with sweet tea, and nobody had to stand over a fire. When the last car pulled out, the kitchen was mostly clean, because the only real cooking had happened while we slept.
