30 hours cooked!? What are you making? A pork pudding?! Luckily my teeth are just fine and i don't need to make everything liquid to eat it. That doesn't mean that there is anything wrong with cooking your meat for 30 hours. BUT (yes there is a but) ... it depends how you cook it for 30 hours.
There is a cooking method called Sous-vide. It means cooking your food in a vacuum bag submerged into the water at a precise temperature for an extended period of time. The inventor of Sous-vide in the form that we know it today was a French chef Georges Pralus. Not that long ago you still needed a huge machine to heat the water and it wasn't suitable for home kitchens at all. But few year ago a new generation of Sous-vide heaters emerged that are much more suitable for home kitchens. They are small and only the heater in a size of a larger stick blender. You can fix it on any container. And most of them are packed wi-fi so you can check you water temperature everywhere you go and even control the heater. The most common new generation Sous-vide are Anova, Joule, Sensaire, ... I took Anova and I'm using it almost every weekend for the last half year :) In the beginning i used pots to cook in them but i found it much easier to just buy a food safe plastic container so i can fill it with more water and get more circulation.
Anyway enough about Sous-vide let's get back to my Carolina style burger with pulled pork! I had this dish planed for several weeks now and it was time for me to try it. I searched the internet for a good seasoning rub recipe. Because cooking in sous vide is all about the seasoning. If you don't mix that up ... than you have nothing to worry about! So i found a recipe that sounded really promising. It was called Carolina rub. I modified it a bit and prepared a nice batch. Than i covered pork shoulder (1 kg) with some mustard and covered it with a generous amount of seasoning. Put it all in a plastic bag, vacuumed it and submerged it into the water for 30 hours on a 68°C.
A day and a half later i took it out of the water, opened the bag and poured the juices to a small pan. The juices were a base for my BBQ sauce together with ketchup, mustard and some extra Carolina seasoning. That is one of the major benefits of sous-vide. Almost all the juices stays in the meat. And the rest of them were used for BBQ sauce. So you don't loose anything.
Next I seared the meat in a pan on high temperature for a minute on each side and pulled it all apart to get - pulled pork :)
All i needed to do is combine it with some ingredients that i like and serve it with some oven baked potato slices :) It was delicious!! A can of Coca-Cola was like a desert.
FULL Ingredients used:
My version of Carolina rub:
- 10 g of fine ground salt
- 10 g of brown sugar
- 10 g of sweet paprika
- 10 g of smoked paprika
- 10 g of freshly ground black pepper
- 3 g of ground cumin
- 3 g of chipotle morita chily
Pulled pork:
- 1 kg of pork shoulder
- 25 g of Carolina rub
- 1 large table spoon of mustard
Pulled pork burger:
- burger bun with sesame
- pulled pork
- fresh lettuce
- brie cheese
- BBQ sauce
- Have you ever heard or tried sous-vide cooked food before?
- Do you own a sous-vide. Share your recipes in comments! I'll be more than glad to read and try them out.