Kalua Pig

This weekend we had a mini-luau with some friends that we traveled to Hawaii with last year.  It's nice and rainy already here in Portland, but this time last year we were sitting on the beach, enjoying fresh fruit, beautiful seas and skies, and relaxing in the lovely weather.  We didn't make the trek back this year, but to commemorate the trip we had some Hawaiian cuisine favorites like mac salad, shoyu chicken, haupia pudding, and I made Kalua Pig for the first time.

Tim took some great photos for me of the prep and the cooking and then, in my haste to serve it up, I failed to get some shots of it all cooked!  But it looked like any other kalua pig you've ever seen and it tasted good too. Kalua Pig is not my favorite dish, but Tim was impressed and he's really my target audience.

It's really three ingredients - these two, plus a lot of pork.

The salt was a coarse grain and was surprisingly damp feeling.  The package said it contained carbon from coconut shells and it had a smoky scent to it.

The recipe calls for pork butt, but I found pork shoulder on sale at Whole Foods and the butcher said it would be perfect for this dish.  I haven't had a lot of conversations with butchers.  It was kind of fun.  He was very helpful and I appreciated his ability to talk through the recipe and process with me.

Salted, smoked, and ready to go.

Cooking away in the slow cooker.  We flipped it over once mid-cooking and by morning it was already fall-apart tender.  The salt worked in throughout the meat and the whole house smelled of hickory.

I wish we had a picture of it all cooked up, but you can probably imagine what it looked like.  It was dark, still moist, and very tender.  I should have taken more pictures at the rest of the luau too!  It was a success.