After being out and about cruising for several weeks before the HelmsMistress’s birthday, we were fortunate to have been able to get a restock via the CSA Farming Program in Loreto…including two large pieces of fresh pork. With nearly no fat on the meat and the cuts mirroring each other, I’m not sure they came from a supermarket. After leaving the Loreto roadstead quickly due to wind and chop starting to build, we bulled our way south to Candeleros Bay. Aside from the world class golf course and large hotel, it’s got clear water, good holding and a strong cellular signal that seems to provide a strong draw for cruisers. The bay is also a wind tunnel at times, just after the HelmsMistress’s Birthday we sat through 35kt gusts here and steady winds in the 20’s for several days. But I digress.
I wanted to make my wife a great birthday dinner and we were quickly running out of choices of food, despite our small reprovisioning in Loreto. I decided to cook the pork since we had plenty of it and I could think of multiple ways to cook it, but pulled pork is a perennial favorite for the crew. I knew I could do a longer 3-4 hour cook on the Big Green Egg to get perfect pulled pork, but since we had been on a snorkeling adventure around the point to Candeleros Chico that afternoon, I was way behind the power curve to get all that done. A new book on the boat, “The Healthy Pressure Cooker Cookbook, Nourishing Meals Made Fast” by Janet Zimmerman provided the inspiration for the meal and I used the pulled pork recipe to perfection. (1)
But…I also know we love some smoky taste to our pulled pork, so I chose to heat the Big Green Egg up to 200 degrees and allow the pork to cook over indirect low heat for an hour, meaning it wasn’t fully cooked but it had started to brown on the outside just a bit.
Since it was the HelmsMistress’s birthday…I didn’t do a great job with lots of cooking pictures, so I’ll use more wordy words to describe this cook. It went well and I had most of the ingridients in the recipe…which I just doubled because I essentially had two pork butts to cook. I mixed up the sauce, threw in the pork after cutting it and started the pressure cooker. Knowing the pressure cooker would heat up the galley, we retired to the veranda (cockpit) to toast her birthday and allow the cooking to happen. 25 minutes later, we had some of the best pulled pork I’ve tasted in my life. I’m not sure if it was the very high quality meat, throwing the meat on the Green Egg to start with or using the recipe from the book, but the meal was a hit. In the picture below, you’ll notice the meat has come out well, the sauce has great color but there’s food missing from my pan. I try to take pictures of the food before anyone starts eating it, but in this case I was too late and they had already started devouring the food before I could get a photo of it…so this one’s the best I have. This pulled pork recipe is simple to make, quick and really does give you a high quality pulled pork meal that you and your family will devour. Give it a shot, you’ll love it.
LF2SF doesn’t just cook this food to blog about it, these are our real meals, whether they worked or not. I challenge you to take a look at cooking with a pressure cooker, solar oven and perhaps a Big Green Egg to see what kind of different flavor profiles you can create. Wanna support us….FOLLOWING our blog is the best compliment we could get….if you’re having your friends read our successes and failures, ask them to follow us to keep reading.
PS: Happy Rosh Hashanah to any of my readers who might be of that faith!
1.Pg 59 The Healthy Pressure Cooker Cookbook
