Oh my goodness, this recipe made a lot of food. That is, of course, part of the point of the first recipe in a pair out of Cook Once Eat Twice, it’s supposed to make enough of the major component of two recipes for four people to eat twice. Even so, I was startled at how much pork we had leftover. I did try to recruit visitors for this evening to come help eat all the food this was supposed to make, but no dice. Which is sort of a shame, because we had way more than “eat twice”, but that said, we’ll have decent leftovers one day as well. And that helps, especially with a move coming up.
All in all, I think we got effectively three dinners out of this recipe (two lunches for me and two dinners for the two of us), as well as leftovers for the freezer. I suspect those leftovers will make about three sandwiches, so another dinner and a single lunch. More likely, actually, will be us luring our friend Jessie over for dinner and beer and packing help one night in late June or early July. Not bad for cooking once!
Ingredients
1 ~4lb boneless pork shoulder or butt roast
1 tsp salt
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp paprika
1 tsp black pepper
1/2 tsp ground red pepper (we used, again, our New Mexico red chile powder here)
1 medium onion, thinly sliced
1 medium bell pepper, thinly sliced
1 18oz bottle barbecue sauce
1/2 c packed light brown sugar (we only had dark brown sugar, so used that)
Sandwich rolls or hot cooked rice to serve on.
Instructions
Combine spices (salt through red pepper) in a small bowl, then combine the brown sugar & barbecue sauce in a medium bowl. Trim the roast of any excess fat, then rub the combined spices all over it.
Spread the onions and bell peppers around the bottom of the slow cooker (think of it as something of a roasting rack made of FOOD), then place the roast on top of them. Pour the sugar/sauce mixture over the roast (it’s thick, so feel free to spread it out with a spatula or something). Cover, then cook on low for 8 – 10 hours.
Once cooked, pull the pork out and trim any remaining obvious fat, then pull it into coarse shreds with two forks. Serve the pork with sauce on sandwich rolls or over rice.
Refrigerate any leftover pork and sauce for Pork Tacos with Roasted Green onions.
Cooking and Consumption Notes
Cooking
We had about a 4.25lb roast, and it made gobs of food. It was nearly impossible for me to trim any excess fat from the roast, as it came pre-strung together by the butcher. Possibly I could have cut the strings and let the roast fall apart, but I wasn’t sure if that was a good idea.
The recipe calls for a 5qt slow cooker, but we used a 4qt oval with no ill effects.
The sauce is incredibly thin. I think that I’d try to find some way to thicken it a bit if I were to make this in the future. Which I might, but every recipe remade is a recipe I can’t count toward our total.
Consumption
Super tasty on rolls. We had some extremely nice deli rolls from the little Italian grocery down the street, and I think that was a good choice. The sauce soaked into the bread deliciously, but the solid crust of the rolls held together very well. So I recommend not skimping on the rolls. Also, I wanted to eat this all the time, on good rolls. It’s pretty delicious.
Bill says, “It was tasty. The pork wasn’t quite as tasty as expected, and it was tougher than we both expected to shred.”