Please accept my apologies as I completely forgot to take a picture until about halfway through dinner - so here is what it looks like half-eaten!
This is my first foray into pulled pork. I love to eat it at BBQ restaurants (well, mostly at Stilwell Smokehouse but I'm not even sure if they exist anymore) but have never tried to make it myself.
Hy-vee had pork shoulder roasts on sale last week for $.99/lb, which seemed like a really good deal to me. Even if it's not a great cut of meat it's still only $.99/lb! Of course I had to buy about 6 lbs worth, but I figure that should make at least 3 meals. I knew once I saw it that I would try to make pulled pork with it, plus eventually probably some sort of Mexican stewed pork. I found this recipe that sounded good and decided to give it a whirl.
We like our pulled pork to be kind of sweet but not too saucy, and the sauce is more vinegary and much less heavy than regular BBQ sauce. This recipe delivered pretty well. I cut the quantities in half since I didn't think we really needed to make 12 sandwiches! As it is, we did have about enough meat to make 5-6 sandwiches so the recipe is pretty spot on there. I forgot to chop an onion and just added some dried onion flakes instead, but other than that I stuck to the recipe.
After I pulled the meat out of the sauce and shredded it, I noticed quite a bit of grease in the bottom of the bowl. This was probably due to the fact that this really cheap piece of meat was quite fatty. Doesn't Emeril always say something about pork fat being the king or something? I'm not sure I agree in this case. I drained as much as I could and patted some of it off with a paper towl. I opted to not mix in the rest of the sauce from the bottom of the crockpot because it was also quite greasy and I thought the texture was fine without it.
Both hubby and I thought that it was pretty good, not the best thing we've ever eaten but certainly worth making again. I might try another similar recipe next time and see if we can improve the sauce at all - there was something about it that just wasn't quite right but neither of us could put our finger on it. Maybe it was the lack of fresh onion?
I served with chips & a pickle - some people would say there should have been coleslaw but no one in our house eats it!
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Estimated cost of meal:
Pork: $2
Sauce: $1.25 (totally ballparked - too hard to price things like 1/6 cup of vinegar!)
Buns: $1.50
Chips: $.70
Pickles: $.50
Total: $5.95
Former life total: Dinner @ Oklahoma Joe's (I had a pork sandwich there and this was the actual cost of our meal): $22.73
Leaner Life Savings: $16.78 or 74%!!!
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