Kansas-style Pulled Pork

I got a 3-lb cut of pork shoulder shank to make some pulled pork. I put it in the slow cooker on low with:

• 1 diced onion on top of the meat
• 1/2 litre of white table wine
  
• Pork shoulder
• 1 diced onion in the bottom of the cooker

Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture of the pork at the start. I started the cooking process at midnight. At about noon the next day (so after 12 hours on low), I took the meat out of the cooker, discarded the juice, fat layer and the bone. After 12 hours of cooking, the bone and the fat layer are totally disconnected from the meat and just fall right off. You have to be really careful to not have the meat fall into pieces and splash down into the hot wine and juices as you remove it from the cooker, since the meat is very tender at this point.

You then pull the meat. This can be done by just running two forks through the hunk of meat, or if you let the meat cool, by using your hands.

The reason pork shoulder is so cheap (it was about $6 for 3 lbs from Sobey's, which isn't the cheapest grocery store in town), is that it is very dense with connective tissue. Normal cooking processes leave the connective tissue intact, which make it very tough and undesirable meat. However, when you cook the meat for 12 to 20 hours on very low heat (below 220F), the connective tissue has a chance to dissolve, release delicious fatty juices, and allows the meat to simply fall apart.

After pulling, and adding one more diced onion, the meat looks like this:


At this stage, I added 1 jar of Compliments Kansas City Smokey BBQ Sauce. For a discount brand BBQ sauce, I was very impressed. It was very smokey, and not overpowered with sugar like a lot of other BBQ sauces.

After adding sauce:


At this point I turned the cooker back on to low, and let the meat cook for another 8 hours to let the flavours develop even further. The final product looked like this:


On a bun with potato salad and coleslaw: