Pulled pork is THE classic Southern barbeque. This batch of pulled pork was made from an 11.5 lb. fresh picnic ham and was served to general appreciation at an early 4th of July dinner party. I used some ideas from Jeff Phillips’ book Smoking Meat.
Pork
¼ cup yellow mustard
½ cup spice rub
Disposable aluminum pan.
The pork was coated in yellow mustard, both for its own flavor and to help the rub stick to the meat. The meat was then put into a disposable aluminum pan slightly smaller than the dimensions of the smoker. This made clean up much easier and made the fat and juices from the pork available for further use. I set my Masterbuilt electric box smoker to 275 degrees ( a bit on the high side for “low and slow” since I was concerned that even starting at 6:30 a.m. this large hunk of meat would not be ready for dinner by 6:00 p.m. I also thought my smoker was actually operating a bit lower temperature than its setting.) I used hickory chips to smoke the pork, adding fresh chips every 45 minutes for about 2/3rdof the total cooking time.
The meat was at about 192 degrees by 4 p.m., so I turned the smoker down to 225 degrees and left the meat in the smoker to continue to slowly cook until about 5:15 p.m. At that time I took the pork out of the smoke. This is what the pork looked like when it came out of the smoker.
I ladled all the fat and juices in the pan into a gravy separator and covered the pan with aluminum foil and put it into a 150 degree oven to rest for 30 minutes. The rendered fat was put into a small jar in the refrigerator which I plan to use to make ramen soup base.
After resting, the fat on the pork was discarded, the meat was pulled into shreds.
After shredding, the defatted meat juices were mixed back into the pulled pork to moisten it. It was very good.