recipes

I’ve long been a fan of pulled pork (both because it’s delicious, and because it can lead to innuendo overload of course).  I never really thought about making it, but when Cat unearthed the dormant slow cooker to make some healthy food it occurred to me that this would be a perfect vessel to experiment with this easy to make culinary deliciousness.

Upon researching online I found a few intriguing recipes involving using Coca Cola or Dr Pepper to slow cook the pork joint in, which piqued my interest sufficiently to decide to go for an Irn Bru variant, partly to be a bit different, but partly because in my Forest circle of friends we have a probably-inane-to-the-outside in-joke around anything Scottish and Oscar – so it’s officially Oscar Austin Memorial Pulled Pork.

So having marinated the meat overnight in a spice and Worcestershire Sauce mixture I set everything in motion this morning and having got back from football I can happily announce that when coupled with some Newman’s Own Sticky Barbecue Sauce in a flatbread burrito style, it’s bloody delicious!  Definitely something I’ll be making again, and probably including some other fillings like coleslaw and/or rice or similar.  Although an all-meat wrap is a win in anyone’s language!

Should you wish to replicate this piece of culinary wizardry then you will need:

Ingredients

One shoulder of pork
Seasoning (I used Salt, Pepper, Paprika and Chilli)
Worcestershire Sauce
Barbecue Sauce
Flatbreads
Irn Bru (I used a litre of it!)

To prepare I rubbed the meat with the dry seasoning mixture then added Worcestershire Sauce and left the meat in a ziplock bag in the fridge overnight.  I suppose if you were in a hurry you could get cracking after a few hours, but given this is a slow cooker mission then prior planning is key anyway!

Once you’re ready to get cracking transfer the meat to the slow cooker and pour in the Irn Bru so that it’s covering the meat.  Put the lid on, what it on low and leave it for 10-11 hours (my work-followed-by-football day meant it was 11 hours – if I’d been in I’d have struggled I think to leave it that long!).

Remove the meat from the cooker and it should be pretty easy to remove the fat from it – once you’ve got yourself a nice lean lump of cooked pork in some kind of bowl you can set to it with two forks and pull it apart into a lovely pile of shredded goodness.  Originally I had planned to add some of the sauce back to it, but elected not to – so I disposed of the sauce.

Because I was too excited/poor planned/lazy to have prepared some coleslaw or any other accompaniments I whacked the pulled pork straight into some warmed flatbreads, applied a healthy slug of barbecue sauce and wrapped it up burrito style and tucked in.  It was a delicious moment!

Tender fally-aparty pork with a gentle spicy kick along with a hint of Irn Bru goodness and some lovely caramelisedy bits from the edges where the joint had basically so broiled in the lovely sticky Scottish elixir.

Enjoy!

Since it was inspired by, and is now named after Oscar Austin, here’s a picture of him, too.