You’ve been seeing the most delicious pulled pork on social media for years. Usually a coal barbecue or a special smoker is used. But all you have is a nice gas barbecue. Can’t you make pulled pork? Of course it is. With a few handy tricks and some free time you can make really good pulled pork on a gas barbecue.
What meat do you make pulled pork with?
Pulled pork is generally made from a pork shoulder or part of it. Beautiful meat with a great ratio of fat and connective tissue that makes great pulled pork that above all tastes very good. This is due to the large part of connective tissue that is converted into gelatin.
In America they also talk about the Boston Butt or the picnic. The Boston butt is a smaller cut pork shoulder so that the meat fit exactly in a small barrel. Such a barrel was also called a butt. The Picnic is cut even smaller and has more neck meat in it.
A pork shoulder or Boston Butt is just not very consistent in structure. You have the fattier part with a lot of connective tissue higher in the shoulder and more lean meat lower in the leg. This means that the meat must be prepared much more carefully for the best result. Those differences in the meat ensure that pulled pork from pork shoulder is really very tasty.
We’re going to make it a little easier for you this time. We’re using an attorney here. A beautiful piece of meat higher up from the shoulder in the neck of the pig. This is the part the butcher cuts his shoulder chops from. Beautifully threaded meat that has an almost equal structure from front to back.
The attorney is also a bit fatter, which makes preparation a lot easier. That fat protects the meat from overheating which could cause it to dry out sooner. In addition, the attorney is often smaller. That also makes it a lot cheaper to try once. And you’re done a lot earlier too. With an attorney, you don’t have to get up at 6am hoping to be done by dinner.
This is a Livar attorney weighing almost 3 kilos. Still not a stupid piece of meat. Maybe more than you need. But that is not a problem. Pulled pork can be frozen and used for many other recipes. All we do with the attorney is cut out a few loose pieces of fat and flesh here and there. Leaving them on will only make them dry.