Quarantine Cooking: Pulled Pork & Blue Corn Tortillas

Photo by B. Jones. Shredding the pork. 25 May 2020.

Yesterday we had a Memorial Day feast of pulled pork, homemade blue corn tortillas, grilled pineapple, rum & pineapple barbeque sauce from a recipe by Kauai's Koloa Rum, and sides from our local Pork Barrel BBQ. My sister even brought a spicy jackfruit as a vegan alternative to the pork, which made for a great addition to the tacos. As with my other quarantine cooking posts, I'm recording these recipes for future cooking, and also for a reminder of how we passed the time during the stay-at-home period to become better cooks. For the blue corn tortillas, we used blue corn masa flour from our local Mom's Organic Market. From the photos below, these tortillas turned out awesome and went very well with the pulled pork & jackfruit.

Photo by A. Jones. Blue corn tortillas.

Photo by Patrick Jones. Jackfruit, pineapple, cucumber & guacamole.

For the pulled pork, I picked up a 4.5 lb pork shoulder from our local butcher. The evening before grilling, I seasoned the meat with Traeger Pork & Poultry Rub and about 4 tablespoons of brown sugar. To smoke the meat, I roughly followed the timing on this recipe from Traeger Grills. The pork cooked for about 5 hours at 250 degrees until it reached 160. Then I placed the pork on a foil pan, added a 1/3 cup of apple cider and covered with foil. I kept the meat in the foil on the grill for another 3 1/2 hours. After the meat hit 205, I removed it from the grill but kept inside the foil pan to set before pulling.

While the pork was smoking, I cut up a fresh pineapple into circles, and held back a 1/2 cup of pineapple to go in the rum & pineapple barbeque sauce. I stumbled onto this recipe while browsing Koloa Rum's Instagram feed from Sunday night. While I don't have any Koloa Rum in the house, I did substitute with a nice Rhum Barbancourt 8-year old rum from Haiti. The remaining pineapple was placed on the grill for 30 minutes after I removed the meat.

Photo by Patrick Jones. Koloa Rum's BBQ sauce.

Rum & Pineapple BBQ sauce from Koloa Rum
1/4 cup dark rum (I used Rhum Barbancourt 8 year)
3/4 cup ketchup
1/2 cup fresh pineapple
1/2 Tb mustard (we used dijon)
1 clove garlic
2 Tb Worcestershire Sauce
1 Tb vinegar (Apple Cider Vinegar)
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1 Tb Maple Syrup
1/3 cup water

Mix ingredients in blender and pulse to desired consistency. Pour into small sauce pan and bring to a boil, allowing the sauce to cook down and darken in color. Pour into a mason jar and enjoy (will keep 3-4 days).

Allison prefers spicy barbeque sauce, so we ordered a squeeze bottle of Pork Barrel original BBQ sauce along with our sides. I thought the Koloa recipe turned out pretty awesome, and I'll be using this with the leftovers this week.

Pork Barrel's cool cucumber salad and potato salad accompanied the tacos as sides, along with fresh corn on the cob, refried beans & cheese.