Pulled Pork

Here at the Sandwich Club we are huge fans of pulled pork. In the USA they do pulled pork and they do it well, it’s something us Brits haven’t really got to grips with yet.

For the uninitiated, pulled pork is a very long slow way of cooking the shoulder (often referred to as the Boston butt) at a low temperature, this can be done in the oven or often on a barbecue.

For some reason there aren’t many places that do pulled pork in the UK and to the best of our knowledge no where that does it in Cardiff. One of the best we’ve come across is Bodean’s in London, we advise you to check it out.

So, we finally got round to having our first attempt at cooking our own pulled pork supplemented by our own homemade BBQ sauce.

The recipe was as follows:

First mix up your rub, we went for a simple one of chilli flakes, mustard seeds, salt and freshly ground black pepper. This then needs to be rubbed well all over the pork shoulder. Placing the pork shoulder into a baking tray we then poured over some cider and white wine vinegar and scattered over chopped onions and garlic. The shoulder then needs to be wrapped in parchment paper and foil and put into a pre-heated oven, ours was set to 170℃/Gas 3. This cooks for 3 hours before removing the paper and foil and cooking for a further hour (times will vary depending on the size of the shoulder you are using).

For the BBQ sauce we followed a recipe by James Martin. Fry onion and garlic in olive oil with chilli, fennel seeds and sugar. Add soy sauce, ketchup and season with salt and pepper. Bring to the boil and simmer for a few minutes.

To serve you will need to ’pull’ the pork by putting a fork in the shoulder and shredding the meat into small pieces using another fork. Heap into buns with the BBQ sauce and coleslaw.

There you have it, Pulled Pork!

No doubt we’ll be attempting this again, experimenting with different rubs. If you have your own pulled pork recipes we’d love to hear from you.

Hudsons,The Friary, Cardiff

From the outside, Hudsons looks a bit like a building site. Outside there is ample seating, ideal as an office gettaway when its raining.

Inside is pretty small. Theres a selection of baguettes, paninis and fresh baked potatoes. After much deliberation I go for the cajun tuna with peppers baguette. Unfortunately I’m informed that this is off the menu because they have ‘run out of chilli sauce’!

Firstly, a pretty big fail seen as there are at least 3 cajun spice themed baguettes on offer. Second, since when was cajun spiced anything made with chilli sauce? Zero times as far as I can recall.  Never did I see a slobbering Jamie Oliver ploughing through a Southern American state with a bottle of Tesco Finest chilli sauce looking for an alligator to cajunise*. At this point I skewed my head upwards to rescan the menu board, during which time one of the staff could be overheard discussing how he only just found out what cajun was and how to pronounce it correctly!

This unsettling background waffle hurried me into a decision and I go for the chicken tikka and mint mayo baguette. I’m handed a pre wrapped package and asked for money. No choice of bread, salad, spread or even just making it from fresh.

Bread was pretty standard fayre and the filling was very dry. I could taste a hint of the mint but there was no mayo to be seen anywhere. The salad was made up of a few shreds of lettuce. Personally I like a good helping of salad and always feel a bit cheated if it falls short.

This wasn’t very enjoyable. Despite this the jacket potatoes looked very appetising. Im sure this place does a roaring trade simply due to its location however, I’d prefer to make the effort and head to one of the arcades if I was after a good baguette in the city centre .

Scores:

Price: 1.5

Taste: 2

Look: 2

Service: 2

Originality: 1.5

Total: 9 / 20

*the act of infusing food stuffs with cajun spice