January 1 was clear and sunny here in western Washington, but cold. My idea of a good time is not tending a grill all day in cold weather, so I found another recipe in Cook’s Illustrated for indoor barbecued pulled pork.
To the novice: Barbecue is not a slap burgers and hot dogs on a blazing grill affair. In the South, it’s cooking a large hunk of meat at low heat for a long period of time until the collagenous connective tissue gets softened. Meats that aren’t naturally tender get barbecued: Brisket, pork shoulder (or the whole hog in eastern North Carolina), or ribs. Wood is the preferred fuel for barbecue. When we barbecue ribs outdoors, we do it on our gas grill with water-soaked wood chips to add smoke.
The recipe makes some accommodations to moving the barbecue process indoors. Since it’s not a good idea to have wood chips smoking up an indoor oven, the recipe calls for liquid smoke in the brine and in the mustard you massage over the meat before sprinkling on the rib rub (I used a 1:1 blend of black pepper and hot smoked paprika). The meat is brined for two hours, rubbed and sprinkled, then placed on a rack in a roasting pan. Cover the meat with parchment paper, then foil, and bake at 325° Fahrenheit (F) for three hours. You then uncover it, pour off the fat in the pan, and put it in the oven for another hour or two until the internal temperature reaches 200°F. Let the meat rest a bit, then shred it with two forks and mix with barbecue sauce of your choice. Being a lazy bum, I thinned out some store-bought barbecue sauce with some cider vinegar to roughly approximate the Lexington (NC)- style sauce. [Disclosure: I spent seven years living about 1/2 hour north of Lexington, so I am schooled in the Lexington way of barbecue.] I also made some Lexington-style vinegar-based coleslaw to put atop the pork in hamburger buns. Plain old squishy buns are traditional, but I used onion buns. In eastern North Carolina, the barbecue sauce is little more than vinegar and cayenne pepper, and the coleslaw is mayonnaise-based. South Carolinians use a mustard-based barbecue sauce on their pulled pork. This is as wrong as putting mayonnaise on a pastrami sandwich.
If you want to go whole hog (so to speak) with barbecue, you can have other sides. Hush puppies are traditional in Lexington. You can also get beans, greens, or fries (preferably sweet potato). Dessert is generally banana pudding made with Nilla Wafers, cobbler, or pecan pie. And, as luck would have it, I made pecan pie yesterday as well.
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