It seems appropriate to follow up a post on pullups with a post on pulled pork. Below is a pic of two pork tenderloins, slow-cooked and sauced with keto barbecue sauce, which has no added sugar.* I'm eating nothing but this today, having decided to change my schedule a bit. You'll recall I had originally scheduled chicken for today's slot.
Tenderloin is not the first choice of meat for fans of pulled pork, but I've used it before. Normally, you use pork shoulder, and properly speaking, you run your pork shoulder through a smoker for several hours, allowing it to acquire a crispy outer "bark" along the way. I don't have access to a smoker, and in the past, I've used my broiler to simulate the char of smoked pork, to varying success. You take a third of your pork out of the pile, sugar it up (I've used honey), then set it under the broiler until you get your char. Mix the charred pork back in with the rest of your pork, and now you've got a nice variety of tastes and textures.
I didn't do any of that this time around; I simply slow-cooked the pork in a new crock pot (another gift from the boss), flaked it apart, and sauced it up. If I do this pork again, I'll try to do it right next time. The nice thing about the tenderloin, though, is that (1) it really is tender, even if it's not fatty, and (2) the meat is sold trimmed, so you can just cut it into chunks and toss it into your crock pot. No need to de-fat the meat afterward, either, which is the biggest pain when you're dealing with pork shoulder. I don't mind when pork fat renders out and provides a certain unctuousness to the final result, but I hate finding little clumps of unrendered fat when I'm eating a pulled-pork sandwich. (Come to think of it, I also hate finding little bones in my pulled pork—something that's happened before at certain restaurants where the pork-pullers didn't do a careful job of breaking down the meat.)
Hopefully, this means that the carnivore diet is off to a good start. The meat was tasty; I'm pleasantly stuffed, and I think I have enough left over to eat tomorrow. If I'm hungry tonight, or any night, I've got hot dogs at home to quench my appetite. Carnivore Day One.
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*This doesn't mean sugar-free. The base of BBQ sauce is ketchup, and the base of ketchup is tomatoes, which are naturally sugary. Tomatoes are used in keto cooking, however; you just have to use them in moderation.
2 comments:
Looks good. That's how I've always made mine--in the crockpot without doing any brazing. One thing I've never done though is cut the meat up first. It's easy enough to pull apart after 8 hours in the pot. Isn't that why it's called PULLED pork?
The pork tenderloins were a little too long to fit in the crock pot without cutting, so each tenderloin got sliced in half, and then everything fit.
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