North Carolina · Main
Lexington-Style Pork Shoulder
- Advanced
- 10 h
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
Leads with wood-smoke running underneath, acid holding everything up to the light, trailing gentle sweetness.
Ingredients
- 1 pork shoulder, about 4kg, bone in
- 2 tbsp salt
- 1 tbsp black pepper
- For the dip: 250ml cider vinegar, 120ml ketchup, 120ml water, 2 tbsp brown sugar, 1 tbsp red pepper flakes, 1 tsp black pepper, 1 tsp salt
- For red slaw: 400g cabbage, 120ml of the dip, extra sugar
Equipment
Thermometer · Smoker
The skills inside
Allergen screen
None found among the 14 screened.
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Hold the smoker at 110C over hickory. Season the shoulder with salt and pepper.
- Smoke fat-side up 8-10 hours until it pulls at 92C internal, spritzing with vinegar in the last hours. 600 min
- Simmer the dip ingredients together 5 min into a thin tomato-tinged sauce. 5 min
- Rest, then chop the shoulder, working through the bark, and dress lightly with the dip.
- Toss the cabbage with dip and extra sugar for red slaw and serve both on a bun or a plate.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Low & slow smoking 12 recipes
- The smoke coming off is thin and blue, not white and rolling. White smoke is unburnt fuel and it deposits soot and acrid phenols; a fire drawing enough air to burn its own smoke is what perfumes rather than tars.
- The chamber held its temperature within a narrow band for the whole cook, adjusted with the air intake rather than by adding fuel in armfuls. A pit swinging fifty degrees cooks the outside twice and the middle once.
- The stall was expected and waited out or wrapped through deliberately, not chased with heat. A brisket that sits at 70C (158F) for three hours is losing exactly as much water as it needs to; the cook who turns the fire up renders it dry.
- Doneness was judged by feel and by probe, never by the clock: the probe slides in with no resistance anywhere, and the number that matters is the one where the collagen has gone, not a time per kilo.
- It rested long and warm, an hour or more, wrapped and out of any draught. Cut straight off the pit and the juice runs onto the board instead of staying in the slice.
Where it goes wrong The fire was fed for temperature rather than for combustion, so it smouldered: white smoke, a bitter deposit on the surface, and a swing in the chamber every time more fuel went on. Then the stall was read as a stall in progress rather than evaporation doing its work, the heat went up, and the meat finished dry with a hard grey band under the bark.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Riesling or Grenache
- Also Right
- Cru Beaujolais
- From the Taps
- Farmhouse saison
- Zero-Proof
- Cloudy apple juice, chilled
Pork loves fruit and gentle sweetness: orchard-note whites and low-tannin reds flatter it where heavy oak flattens.
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