- 5-7 pound whole pork shoulder (Pork Butt, Boston Butt, etc.)
- 1 medium to large onion
- A few cloves of garlic
- BBQ Rub Seasoning
- Liquid Smoke
- BBQ Sauce
- Salt and pepper
take a few cloves of garlic and give them a rough chop. quarter the onions
add some salt and ground black pepper.
Now you just need to season the pork. Give it a nice good coating of the store-bought BBQ rub or your own spice mix. Don’t be shy as it’s nearly impossible to over season it at this point. If you really want some flavor you can season it and then wrap it in plastic wrap and keep it in the fridge overnight so that some of the flavors begin to really get absorbed into the meat. That is totally optional, but also totally delicious.
Drop the pork into the crock pot with the rest of the ingredients and it’s time to add some of the liquid smoke. This stuff is concentrated so a little bit goes a long way. For this recipe I usually use 1-2 tablespoons. We will be discarding the cooking liquid when we’re done anyway.
To top things off you’re going to want to fill it about two-thirds of the way with water. Be careful and don’t over fill it because it will get boiling and bubbling and you don’t want to make a mess on your counter to clean.
This picture isn’t very exciting, but this is your pork’s home for the next eight hours or so. How long you cook this is really up to you. If you crank it out on high you can finish it in about 3-4 hours. Personally, I usually put it on low and then let it go overnight for at least 8 hours. On a few occasions I got busy and it’s cooked for 12+ hours and it’s still fine. We’re adding enough liquid that there’s no real danger of it all boiling off and burning your meat so don’t get too concerned about the exact cooking time. Also, for reference I believe this is a 6 or 6.5 quart crock pot and it holds a 7 pound pork shoulder with just a little room to spare. Obviously, keep the size of your crock pot in mind when deciding how big of a piece of meat to get.
After letting it cook for a number of hours this is what you’re left with. A big brown juicy hunk of awesome. The only thing left to do now is separate the meat from the bone and most of the fat so that we can drain all of the liquid. So, go ahead and grab the single shoulder blade bone and just pull it out. The meat is so tender at this point it will slide right out.
Once you remove the bone you can just take a slotted spoon or some tongs and fish out all of the chunks of meat from the crock pot and set it all aside in a large bowl. This is also your chance to separate all of the fat and everything sticking to some of the meat so in the end you’re actually left with a relatively lean pile of meat.
After you’ve pulled all the meat from the crock pot you can go ahead and dump all of the liquid, fat, onions, and everything that remains. I’m sure you could find a use for this stock if you wanted, but in my experience it tends to be really fatty since you render almost all of the fat out of the meat so it isn’t the most useful. Once you’ve dumped the liquid and fat you can throw the meat back into the crock pot.
Now we get to actually make it look like pulled pork. The meat is so tender at this point that there’s not much pulling involved. All you have to do is take two forks and use them to shred the meat. As you can see above I’d hold one in each hand in the position they are and then drag them toward the outside of the pot. Repeat this for a few minutes and you’ll have a perfectly shredded pile of pork.
All that’s left now is to add the BBQ sauce. I prefer Sweet Baby Ray’s, but any sauce that you love is perfect. Depending on how big your pork shoulder is you may need anywhere from a half a bottle to a whole 40 oz bottle of sauce. In my case, the 7 pounder required nearly a full 40 oz bottle of sauce. Start by adding a small amount and then mix it in to see how it looks before adding more. You can always add more sauce, but once it’s mixed in you can’t remove it. So play it safe and start slow.
And there you have it. After adding all of my sauce and mixing it in for a few minutes I’ve reached the consistency I wanted, which was perfect for putting on a bun to make a sandwich. At this point the pork probably needs to be heated up a bit, but here’s a little tip. Because you’ve now added sauce to the mix that is high in sugar you have to be careful with the heat. Even on low, if you let it sit for maybe a half hour you could find it starting to burn on the sides. Low is fine if you’re able to keep stirring it every 10 minutes, but don’t let it sit unattended at this temperature. If your crock pot has a “keep warm” type setting, this will work perfectly. Otherwise, as long as it’s warm enough to serve, your pork is done! I bet you already know that, because if you’re like me you’ve been picking at it for hours.
*This is almost word for word off another website but I can't remember which ones it was*
