Awesome Pulled Pork

In the world of smoking and grilling, pulled pork is perhaps one of the most popular slowly cooked dishes. There are so many different recipes for making pulled pork that you might get discouraged to try any of them. We decided to show you the easiest possible way to make really tasty pulled pork, with guaranteed success!

Naturally, everything begins with the choice of meat. In this recipe we are using a two-kilo cut of pork neck, which is widely available at supermarkets. Start with preparing the pork neck for cooking. Using a knife, remove all extra membranes and lumps of fat. When the piece is cleaned, it is salted by injecting.

Make the brine for injecting. The amount to inject is 100 ml brine for each kilo of meat, which means that our two-kilo cut will need 200 ml of brine The brine is made by adding 1 tsp salt to every 100 ml of water. For our recipe, mix 2 teaspoons salt with 200 ml water. Using a marinade syringe, inject the brine into the meat by inserting the needle into several places in the meat. As you are injecting, you will see how the meat swells nicely, then the brine will stay inside well. Now it is good to place the meat into a sealable bowl or bag and leave it in the fridge for the night. A few hours might be enough, but a longer time is always better.

If you don’t have a marinade syringe or you don’t want to get one, you can also immerse the meat in brine, but salting it this way will take much longer, 2-3 days. If you salt the meat by immersion, make the brine by dissolving 2 tablespoons salt to 1 litre water.

When the meat has been salted, dry it with a paper towel.  Next, the meat is seasoned. Spread the whole surface with a thin layer of Poppamies Original Mustard. The mustard gives the meat a nice flavour and makes the seasoning stick and form a spicy bark on the surface. Next, rub a generous layer of Poppamies Burgers & Ribs Rub on the meat, as much as you can easily get to stick. Allow the spiced surface to moisten from the meat juices for about 15 minutes. Now the meat is ready for cooking!

Set the grill or smoker to low heat, approx. 100-110 °C. The pork is first cooked on indirect heat for about three hours, until the surface is nicely browned. If you need to revise the basics of barbecuing or smoking, watch the Poppamies BBQ Course on YouTube (only in Finnish for the time being)! When you are halfway through smoking, turn the meat around. When cooking on indirect heat, the heat comes only from one direction and turning the meat makes it cook more evenly.

After three hours of smoking, the meat is placed in a heat-proof oven dish, for instance, a cast-iron pot. This makes the meat stay juicy during the rest of the cooking, and we can save all the delicious juices that seep out of it. The grill or smoker temperature can be raised up to about 120 °C, and the cooking is continued for about four hours. The meat is ready when you can push a skewer into it easily, without much resistance at all. Another easy way to see if the meat is ready is to pull it apart with two forks, if it pulls apart easily, it is ready. If the meat doesn’t seem to pull apart easily, continue cooking it for about an hour and try again.

Before pulling, allow the meat to rest in a closed container for about one hour in room temperature. The meat is pulled in its own juices by pulling it apart with two forks At this stage, the meat is also seasoned with Poppamies Smoky Apple BBQ Sauce. Use about 100 ml to one kilo of meat, so in this case, 200 ml.

This is an easy way to make guaranteed fantastic pulled pork Try this pulled pork in a burger or pizza, or have it with tacos!

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