Carolina Pulled Pork

hey everybody i'm chef tom with atbbq.com and this is carolina pulled pork well today we're going to be smoking up a pork butt for some lexington style carolina pulled pork characterized by that vinegar bite that's mopped over the pork butt throughout the cook but the first thing we got to do is get the grill going so today we're cooking on the kamado joe classic three we've got the slow roller system set up which is going to give us some really great smoke flavor on this pork but we want to run it about 300 degrees today we're going to start with a bed of charcoal using the kj big block it's going to burn all day long really efficiently for us so this is obviously a lump charcoal that comes in nice big pieces these break down nice and slow burn for a long time and of course you've got your smaller pieces to help kind of get it going so we want to get a good coal bed going i'm going to start with some fire starters and just let this thing get going we're gonna give that charcoal bed a little bit of time to get started in the meantime we're going to start trimming up this pork butt so this is the boston butt pork shoulder we got the fat cap side here on this opposite side is where we're going to do most of our trimming we're going to find this little crevice that holds all of this connective tissue and stuff that i don't really want to chew on later so we're going to get rid of that so once you find that it should be on that blade bone end there's a blade bone right there you're going to locate this crevice get your knife and just kind of start cutting down into that to separate where these two muscles naturally separate i don't really intend to do too much trimming on this pork but today when i say that what i mean is i'm leaving the fat cap on a lot of times in our videos you guys have seen me take the fat cap off but we're going to do this as fuss-free today as possible this connective stuff i just really don't like the mouth feel or picking this out of the cooked pulled pork in the end so that's why we're getting rid of it now because a lot of this stuff either won't break down or only breaks down to kind of a gross consistency but we're just trying to take as much of this white stuff off as possible leaving that red meat behind so that's that pretty easy stuff now on the surface here i would feel around make sure there's not any bones on there that maybe the butcher missed i'm not feeling anything which is great fat cap side we're just going to leave the way it is all right so for the seasoning also going to be pretty simple typically with the lexington style pork they're just going to put salt on it it pains me to only put salt on it so we're going to do just a little bit more than that now this right here is just a little bit of our tar heel tang this is a carolina style sauce that we sell but it's going to be our binder for today we are going to make a mop from scratch but this is a great little sauce to have on your pork sandwich so for that seasoning we're going to be using the killer hogs tx brisket rub so this is essentially just salt pepper with a couple other little flavors in there like garlic onion and parsley so really straightforward not much to it we're going to let the pork do most of the talking today along with that vinegar mop that we'll be mopping throughout the process just a thin layer to get that seasoning to stick it's a big piece of meat so we can give it a good amount of seasoning that seasoning is just going to meld and mellow out over the coming hours as we smoke this baby mop up some of that rub from the board and that's it we got a nice coal bed going now so i'm going to throw in a couple chunks of our pecan wood get some nice smoke out of those put our plate here on top we're going to come in with a divide and conquer system and i'm going to set this up so that if i want to add more wood later i can go ahead and just open that up pop that open and throw more in we'll put these on the highest settings since we are smoking to try and get away from the the heat coming off just radiating off of that plate so that temperature comes up to 300 we're going to stabilize it right there and cut down that airflow a bit so the pork butt is going to go on fat side down just to give us a little thermal barrier in between where the heat is radiating for now we're not going to do anything we're just going to let it smoke open and start to form that bark now the game plan for today's cook is we're going to let it smoke open the entire way it's never getting wrapped and every hour or so i'm going to come back out here and we're going to mop it with our mopping sauce so let's put that mopping sauce together so we're going to start off with two cups of apple cider vinegar we're going to add to that a half cup of ketchup then we've got a quarter cup of brown sugar a tablespoon of crushed red pepper and then we'll do one tablespoon of our kosher sea salt so that just shake it up to mix all that together start to dissolve the salt and sugar and you can even do this ahead of time overnight the longer it sits the better it's going to taste i'm not going to start mopping until about an hour into this cooks so it'll have a good hour to kind of get to know each other in the jar there well it's been an hour since our pork butt went on we're going to open this grill up and show you how it looks and when we do that we're also going to mop for the first time so looking nice already starting to form a bark we want to make sure that we've got a little bit of texture on there and our rubs really attached as we're gonna start basting now so we've got our mop sauce now we've got our mop i'm just gonna start dumping on the flavor and that's all there is to it every hour we'll come back out here and do this again all right guys here's the two hour mark colors man just looking great that's really progressing i'm gonna hit it with the mop once again and then let it keep going well we are at the four hour mark now still just mopping away and letting this thing smoke as you can see the color is incredible i mean we're going to have some unreal bark on this when we're done and every time we mop this it gets a little bit more of that caramelization on the surface just for kicks let's take a thermometer and see where we're at four hours in about 175 coming up on so we've got a good 30 degrees to go just let it work all right guys seven hours in quite a bark going now turn this around for you right here is where that blade bone is and essentially what we need for pulled pork is for this blade bone to pull out of here as you can see we are really close so i'm going to give this one last mop well it's been about seven and a half to eight hours now total cook time uh this bone's about ready to slip out of here our internal temperature is up over 205 degrees in the deepest part of the pork butt so we're ready to pull this thing off well there it is incredible bark on the outside of there and this thing look at this just cracking ready to come apart give this uh shoulder blade a little wiggle and it's ready to slip out of there as well man it smells incredible great smoke aroma coming off of it also just picking up on that slightly sweet vinegary uh aroma that's coming off of that mop i mean this stuff looks incredible you're going to get a great bark to meat ratio with a cook like this i mean this bark has got some woof to it so just going to kind of shred this up by hand here on the opposite side we've got the fat cap and that fat cap has rendered out it's created this really crispy kind of a fat layer that is like i mean this is like crackling right here now grab a knife this right here is actually what we call the money muscle in competition barbecue so that's some of the most tender meat on the pork butt but this right here this has just got a great crunch to it i like to dice this up and just mix it in with the meat smells like chicharron this stuff comes apart pretty easy by hand here still nice and juicy down in the center of that i'm gonna spread our fat cap crackling around and then this man this is ready to eat throw it on a slice of bread with a little bit of that vinegar mop sauce or today we're going to do some tar heel tang all right i'm looking for some of that bark i want some of the juicy stuff too and a little bit of that crackling i'm just gonna top it off now with a little bit of tar heel tang that tomato vinegar bite oh yeah ma'am the crunch from that crackling is incredible great smoke flavor the textures are all over the place because you've got that black bark on the outside with the juicy pulled pork on the inside and then that little bit of heat out of the tar heel tang just puts it over the top i love my kansas city barbecue but i gotta say you guys know what you're doing out there in carolinas well thank you guys so much for watching be sure to check out atbbq.com for all the products featured in today's video if you enjoyed the recipe hit that subscribe button and if you have any questions or comments or there's anything you'd like to see me cook let me know in the comment section down below and let's be good to one another for more recipes tips and techniques head over to atbbq.com the sauce all things barbecue where barbecue legends are made

Channel: allthingsbbq

Views: 524,504

Rating: 4.8965979 out of 5

Keywords: atbbq, all things bbq, allthingsbbq, all things barbecue, bbq, barbecue, pork, pork butt, pork shoulder, boston butt, pulled, mopped, mop, mopping, the sauce, killer hogs, plowboys, be good, chef tom, kamado joe, ceramic, grill, grilling, smoking, smoked, egg

Id: t8jzXCxTOD0

Length: 12min 2sec (722 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 28 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/ImplausiblyObvious]

My experience has been that you can do this at higher temps (ex 300F), but that you don't get the same fat and collagen rendering that you get with lower and slower, so you get more globs of "goop" that have to be removed when the pork is pulled and the meat isn't as succulent as it is when done low and slow (225-250F).

Based on some of Aaron Franklin's comments in his book, I tried doing a pork shoulder at 285F and got a shoulder that finished faster, still had great bark, but all the stuff I wanted to normally render out did not. I had lots of undesirable stuff that I had to remove at time of pulling that I'd never seen before with a lower and slower method.

Rubs and other flavorings can and do have an impact on flavors, but low and slow (at least to my mind), affects the resulting quality of the finished product, regardless of how the pork is flavored.

[u/OrigHanksta]

Not sure about this one, but every recipe of his I’ve tried to replicate has been crazy good.

[u/Smoking_Habit]

I followed this recipe over the weekend but tweaked it a bit. I chose to drop it down to 225. Came out amazing!

[u/Double-LR]

I used the mop recipe this weekend, it’s an excellent vinegar mop, from what I read it is a piedmont/Lexington style mop, which I am a huge fan of.

I lowered the temp to 225 though and did a 15 hour smoke on a 8.5lb Boston butt. Came out awesome.

[u/collector-x]

What temp are you pulling at? Mine didn't have the goop, almost all fat rendered. I pull mine at 205, wrap and rest for 1-2 hours. Comes out awesome.