Carolina Pulled Pork Barbeque

Today was my second attempt at making Carolina Pulled Pork Barbeque.   My mother-in-law is from Gastonia, North Carolina and she makes this dish sometimes when we are visiting and my wife and I both love it.   Its the best pulled pork barbeque we have ever had.

Last time we were visiting my wife's family, my mother-in-law gave me the recipe.   I tried making it in January but it was a poor imitation of my mother-in-law's barbeque, and I have been wanting make a second attempt at this.  

Now, it is often the case that when I get recipes from people who have been making something for a long time, the recipe they give me isn't exactly what they do.   Sometimes it is because the recipe was written years ago and after making the dish from memory for years, the recipe naturally evolves but the written recipe is never updated.   Then, when I ask for the recipe, the old written recipe is pulled from a yellowed card stuffed into a decades-old cookbook.

Over the past couple of days, I scoured myrecipes.com for pulled pork barbeque recipes.    Most of these are recipes contributed by visitors to the website.  I probably looked at over 50 pulled pork recipes and there were another 50 or so that I didn't get to.   Most of these used an off-the-shelf barbeque sauce or such a simple version of the sauce that I could tell there was no way the sauce would turn out to be anything like the Carolina BBQ my mother-in-law makes.

There were 4 or 5 recipes which looked promising.   I put the ingredients for each recipe into a spreadsheet along with my mother-in-law's recipe and compared the various recipes.   I came up with a variation of my mother-in-law's recipe which I felt would be a closer match to the taste I was trying to achieve.   The changes I made were primarily in the area of increasing the amount of water, decreasing the amount of dry mustard, adding dijon mustard, garlic powder, onion powder, and cumin.   I thought it would be good to reduce the amount of vinegar, but I wasn't sure, so I left it at one cup of apple cider vinegar.   (the last time I made it, I used 1 cup of white vinegar and the pork was waaaaay to vinegary). 

Instead of using my mother-in-law's method of cooking the pork in the oven, I cooked the pork slowly in the sauce for 4 or 5 hours in a crock pot.

It turned out great.   My wife and I both loved it.   I would say it was still not quite as good as my mother-in-law's Pulled Pork BBQ, but it was pretty good.   The pork still had a little more of a vinegar taste than I would like, so next time I will use a little less vinegar.

My daughter actually prefers the barbeque from a very good local restaurant called Blue Rock BBQ.    So, I stopped by there in the afternoon and picked up a little Blue Rock for her.    I prefer the homemade barbeque we had tonight over Blue Rock, although,  my wife and I did use Blue Rock BBQ sauce on our pulled pork when we made our sandwiches.