BBQ Pulled Pork

Taste: Juicy, tender, and wonderful.

Cleanup: Fair amount of mess.

Ingredients: All available at Publix

I made Instant Pot BBQ Pulled Pork.

The biggest challenge with this was finding the pork shoulder at Publix, probably because the visible part of the label in the meat counter said pork butt (which certainly doesn't sound like shoulder at all :-). (If you are curious, google will turn up lots of info about the origin of the name, but I'll mention that "butt" was an English unit of measure and barrels came in butt size).

I bought a pork shoulder that was a little over 3 pounds, and cut it into two fairly even pieces (complicated by the shoulder bone that was in one half). That made it easier to fit the pieces in the pot for searing and cooking. I also bought some marinade and soaked the chunks in it for 30 minutes prior to searing. Part of the extra cleanup was the long tongs I bought so I could lower chunks of pork into the hot oil for searing without splashing.

Searing still managed to send little droplets of oil everywhere. If I do this again, I'll probably make a big collar out of aluminum foil to put around the top and catch most of the splattering.

After the searing, I just waited for the pot to cool down some to make dumping in two cups of water safe, put the hunks of pork back in, put the top on, turned the release valve to pressure, and pressed the Meat button and set the time to 100 minutes (since I had a slightly larger chunk of pork than the original recipe, I used an extra 10 minutes).

After time expired, I turned if off, waited 10 minutes, then released the steam, and I had two wonderful hunks of pork (though I definitely think they were smaller hunks after cooking than I started with). The traditional criteria for tenderness is "fall off the bone", and by golly the hunk with the shoulder bone was indeed falling off the bone.

Shredding and mixing with BBQ sauce took more time and made more mess, and probably wasn't worth it. I believe the tidbits I tasted right out of the pot were actually better than the the final pulled pork BBQ I made (not that it was bad, mind you, I just think the plain pork was better).

Perhaps just having hunks of pork over rice would be best next time, maybe with some green beans.

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