Pulled pork "research":

I've been thinking about pulled pork lately. There's a recipe I kind of like out of the Betty Crocker cookbook, but Jerry's not a big fan and I'm not addicted, so I never make it anymore. It's very barbecue saucey, which is how I always assumed pulled pork was just supposed to be.

But in the past year or two, I've seen it done a different way. At the annual summer picnic at work, they've served barbecue from Dinosaur, which is just the seasoned pork, and you add the sauce at the last minute, right there on your bun. At the Ithaca Bakery, there's one where the sauce is based on strawberry jam, and it also seemed like it was added as a last-minute condiment. At Trillium on campus, there was a North Carolina pulled pork that was just the pork, with a vinegar sauce that we could put on top if we liked. All of those were very intriguing; I was surprised at how much flavor just the pork itself had.

I really like that this style doesn't involve jarred barbecue sauce. I haven't discovered a jarred sauce that I really like - I don't have any reason to keep it on hand, and don't like any of the ones I've tried enough to be motivated to experiment with it. Plus, industrial food is industrial. So I'm glad to ditch it.

So I'm currently looking up recipes, and I found this porknography website rich in the How of pulled pork. I really like how the dude explains exactly why all the important elements are important. Alas, I'm not going to do mine by the method he describes; it requires infrastructure I don't have (a smoker, etc.), and more planning-ahead skills than I can dredge up. What I have is a crock-pot. Nonetheless: there the link is, for reference.

It seems like the thing to do in a crock-pot is going to be to rub the pork in the appropriate spices, give it some liquid, and let it go. I seem to recall the Betty Crocker recipe using a lot of root beer to cook in, and then pouring much of it off before adding the barbecue sauce. That seems to be a typical crockpot approach - pork, cola, onions, and at the end, possibly omittable, jarred barbecue sauce. I don't generally like soda, but I make an exception for root beer - so it seems like that method, minus the BBQ sauce, might be acceptable, but not necessarily intriguing.

The most Googly recipe (i.e. a top hit, and one that several of the next hits on the front page either refer to, or are remarkably similar to) seems to be this one; it looks similar to the one I had in Trillium. It doesn't use any cola or jarred sauces, and some of the hits explicitly call it a Carolina pulled pork. I think that's the variation I'll try.

You know, eventually.