Cold Smoked/Sous Vide Pulled Pork

I haven't seen a sous vide post in quite awhile, but tried this on Sunday evening/Monday and thought I'd share (no pictures unfortunately).

Picked up the A-Maze-N Pellet Smoker last week for my birthday and wanted to try it out. Most people use it with an electric smoker to supplement the smoke output; basically you can use it to cold-smoke or hot smoke foods. I don't have a dedicated smoker and really was intrigued with the idea of cold-smoking meat for a few hours and then putting it in the water bath to cook during the week. I figured I would start with some pork shoulder.

The smoker tray comes with a couple pounds of "pitmaster choice" pellets which is hickory/cherry/maple. I put the shoulder in the weber kettle with the a-maze-n smoker underneath. I also put some cheese in there to try to cold smoke. Started Sunday evening about 8. Temperature never got above 80 degrees in the kettle and smoked for a couple of hours. It's pretty amazing how much smoke that thing puts out; I'm pretty excited to use it moving forward.

After I had put a couple of hours of smoke on it, I diced into several-inch chunks, seared on the stove top, and into the water bath at 160 degrees for about 20 hours. Result was just a hint of smoke, but pretty good texture, very similar to what I get on the smoker. Flavor was good to very good; not the best I've ever had but certainly good enough to eat. All the collagen and fat was liquified, but the meat didn't taste as greasy as a lot of pulled pork I eat is. For best results I think I should have put in an ice bath and refrigerated with the liquid left in the bag (of which there were tons) to see if it would have rehydrated.

Overall, if you were thinking of smoking and then sous-vide, I would recommend doing so. My results were pretty great for a weeknight meal that gives me lunch for the rest of the week.



ps--the cheese was awful. I think it was the wrong kind of wood, and two hours for my relatively small chunks of cheese was way too long. Maybe 1/4 of the time smoking is what I'll try next time. Felt like I was biting into an ashtray.