Chipotle Pork …..

My newest post is a result of watching the newest show on the Food Network, called Heat Seekers. The show has two chefs traveling the country looking for the hottest foods they can find. The chefs went to a barbeque place, and they did pulled pork that was smoked with hardwood and covered in straight up chipotle sauce. People claimed it was so hot they had to dumb it down. Here is my version.

I bought two big pork shoulders and brined them overnight. I just used straight up salt water as a brine. No other flavors were added.

These were so big I just brined them in the sink. I scrubbed my sink clean first, then poured boiling hot salt water into the sink. I only put about 2 cups of water with salt into the sink, then added cold tap water and lots of ice. You don’t want hot water as it will cook your pork. I added tons of ice so the pork would stay cold overnight, since I did not have a container big enough to hold all the pork.

After my pork brined overnight, I drained the water and poured real maple syrup over the pork. I poured a light coating over the pork shoulder. Then, I went to my grill and started burning real hardwood.

I closed the grill and kept the grill to a temp of 250 to 300. I tried to keep it as low as possible, but sometimes it would hit 300. I would add more wood as it burned out. I added enough wood to keep the fire burning for 7 hours.

As you can see, the pork is looking quite beautiful.

You can cook the pork longer, or even less, if you so choose. I brought the pork into the house, set it on a tray, and poured more maple syrup on it. I let it set covered for about 2 hours at room temp to cool and rest.

After it cooled, I shredded one by hand and took 3 cans of chipotles in adobe sauce and blended them in a blender. I poured that over the pork.

Now to balance out the fat from the pork, you need some acid. I took some apple cider vinegar, my favorite vinegar, boiled it, and poured it over shredded cabbage.

Now, that will be too strong for most people. Instead. you can either add some sugar to remove some sharpness from the vinegar, or serve with pickles or your favorite acidic food.

You can put it all on a bun or eat it without a bun, as I did. My friends and family were loving how good this was; it is the best. I left some pork plain for friends and family who cannot eat heat. I gotta say, I ate some plain pork after eating the Chipotle pork. Wow, what a bland and boring peace of meat! I could not eat it without some sauce or spice. The peppered pork was so good I just could not go back to the boring, old pork. Let me know if you try this and what you think.