Somebody Stop Me

Stop me before I clog the arteries of women and children, who (as we all know) will be affected most.


The fact that I am the undeniable Potentate of Pork is no secret in these parts. Always tweaking, always experimenting, always striving for BBQ pork perfection at any and all cost, that’s me. That’s been my mission in life.

Carolina Style BBQ pulled pork is something we experimented with a number of years ago and were not impressed. It may have been an inferior sauce recipe. Maybe we didn’t get something just right.

When a new recipe fails we just walk away for a while and try it again at a later date when we either get bored or find another recipe from a credible source.


Cooking BBQ Carolina pulled pork is no different from any pulled pork for the most part. Rub it, refrigerate overnight, start the grill, add the pork butt and hickory wood, close the grill and allow it to smoke for about three hours.

Instead of adding more charcoal and wood every hour and BBQing it low and slow for nine hours as we have for years we recently have taken the pork butt off the Weber® at three hours, wrap it in foil and toss it in the oven at 300 degrees in a pan for another four to five hours. This works surprisingly well.


The roast rests for half an hour and then we pull it to shreds.


This is when we can make a choice. Either go with mixing in traditional tomato and molasses based sauce or add the Carolina sauce which is vinegar based. That’s all it is.

This time the Carolina BBQ pork was surprisingly good. It was the recipe that failed us the last time.

Here’s the new sauce recipe:

1 cup water
1 cup cider vinegar
½ cup ketchup
1 tablespoon sugar
¾ teaspoon table salt
½ teaspoon ground black pepper
½ teaspoon red pepper flakes


This makes for a very thin watery sauce. It is unlike any BBQ sauce that I am most familiar with. Instead of mixing the sauce into the entire batch of pork what we did was dip small amounts of pulled pork into the sauce batch and let it soak for a minute or two. Then we add the sauce-soaked meat to a large torpedo roll. Doing this must be a mortal sin to BBQ purists. Ask me if I give a fvck.

Lately we have been buying rolls from this Chicago bakery that makes outstanding soft sub rolls. We use these for everything from sandwiches to jumbo hot dogs to pulled pork and they are superior as a sauce-soaking roll.

Give this Carolina–style BBQ sauce a shot. We liked it a lot and will make it again.

Summer don’t get no better.