Dehydrated Pulled Pork for Backpacking

Nov 2

Versatile, nutritious and delicious, this pork makes a perfect snack straight out of the bag, or rehydrate to supercharge protein in instant noodles, rice, wraps or commercial dehydrated meals!

hiker in blue shirt with pork crackling — *Delicious crispy pulled pork that won’t break your jaw like jerky!*

Home-dehydrated pulled pork is incredibly moreish and delicious. I stumbled on it by accident when testing for our Dehydrated Pork Chow Mein (our next recipe). I tasted it on its own after dehydrating and was blown away. Unlike jerky made from raw, marinated meat, cooked pulled pork won’t break your jaw: a delightfully crunchy texture that’s easy to chew. And with an astonishing 80% protein — 80 grams per 100 grams! — and 1,730 kJ of energy it’s also more nutritious gram for gram than jerky because more of the water has been removed, and it also keeps longer than home-dehydrated jerky.

And if you want it heated in a meal, it’s shredded so it rehydrates quickly: put it in cold water and bring to the boil (depending on the speed of your stove), then let sit in a cosy for ten minutes and it’s ready to eat, fast enough to pair with instant noodles and other quick-cooking meals.

Flavours

Your flavour profiles can be almost anything, including:

Chinese Barbecue
Spicy Mexican
Smoky Texan Barbecue
Fiery Vietnamese
Italian

Uses on Trail

hiker emptying 50g sachet of dried pulled pork into his hand — *Pulled pork snack on the trail*

There are countless ways of using dehydrated pulled pork on trail. We mentioned a few but let’s look at more options in detail:

Straight out of the bag as a snack; add chilli and whatever spices you like to a basic flavour profile
Added to soupy instant noodles into cold water before bringing it to the boil and adding noodles, or sprinkled dry on top of cheesy noodles for crunch
Sprinkled dry on instant mashed potato, or reconsituted and topped with instant mash as a cottage pie
Pulled pork wraps: rehydrate and combine with rehydrated salsa in a wrap or taco
Vietnamese: rehydrate and serve with rehydrated asian slaw in a wrap, rehydrated or dry with rehydrated pickled carrot, cucumber, daikon and onion in a wrap with sriracha mayo, or cold-soaked in a rehydrated Asian-style salad with rice noodles
Spicy Mexican: with rehydrated beans and corn chips or in a tortilla or quesadila, with rice or in burritos
Italian: rehydrated with a tomato and Mediterranean herb base, fennel and pasta, or added to supermarket mac’n’cheese
Chinese barbeque: include in any chinese-style rice or noodle dehydrated meals
Smoky Barbeque: with a rehydrated coleslaw salad in a wrap, sprinkled on top of rice or rehydrated salads for crunch and protein!

pot of delicious looking Pork Chow Mein — *In Pork Chow Mein on the Larapinta Trail.*

This recipe is for Chinese Barbeque flavoured pulled pork but, as we’ve seen, you have many other flavour profiles from which to choose. Look at some of the recipes at the end of this post for more ideas.

Scale the amount of sauce to match the quantity of meat you’re cooking and, if using commercial sauces, choose ones with less than 3% fat (less is better). Many different jar sauces are available. The following three products are all Chinese barbecue Char Siu, but have very different flavours; The Noh product is a dry rub rather than a sauce.

jar of Lee Kum Kee — Lee Kum Kee, slightly more authentic flavour than the…

jar of Kantong — … Kantong, which is quite tomatoey rather than barbecuey. Both are widely available in Australian supermarkets.

packet of Hawaii Chinese Char Sui Seasoning Mix — This oddly-named “flavours of Hawaii Chinese Char Sui Seasoning Mix” is a dry rub available online.

The recipe below makes around 450g (15.9oz) of dehydrated pulled pork, which for us makes 9 x 50g (1.8oz) snack packets for us to share (25g/9oz each).

Ingredients:

*1.6 kg (3.53 lbs) pork shoulder, trimmed of all skin and fat to leave about 1.5kg meat, cut into 8cm chunks
1.5 tbspn Chinese Five Spice
6 cloves garlic chopped
3 thumbs ginger grated
2 onions finely diced
**750ml (25.4 fl oz) Chinese Barbecue (Char Sui) sauce for meat
3 tbspn mirin
3 tbspn soy sauce
3/4 cup Shaoshing (Chinese rice wine) or dry sherry
1/2- 1 cup water
optional: chilli powder or finely chopped fresh chillies to taste

*Double all the quantities if you want to use half for snacks and the other half in our Pork Chop Suey recipe, or in instant noodles, commercial dehydrated meals etc. If you’re doubling the recipe, you may need two casserole dishes/dutch ovens as the meat cooks in a single layer.

** Be guided by the instructions on the sauce mix you choose, and use the amount recommended for 1.5kg of meat (or 3kg if doubling the recipe).

Method:

This recipe can be made in either the oven or a slow cooker. The latter creates a different texture with less browning and crispy bits, but is easier: just follow the instructions on any slow-cooker pulled pork recipe. I used an oven.

Traditional oven recipes usually require a short time at high temperature to sear the meat combined with longer braising covered, but this can be tricky because we remove nearly all the fat from the pork. Pan browning (lightly) works well without excessively toughening the meat. If you do oven sear, watch your meat like a hawk!

Some recipes recommend marinading the meat overnight, but this isn’t really necessary for our purposes because:

we are chunking the meat rather than leaving the shoulder whole,
it’s slow cooked,
we’re adding additional flavours rather than relying only on the jar sauce, and
we also mix some leftover marinade with the meat before dehydrating: believe me, there is plenty of flavour.

I’ve written the recipe in such a way that you should be able to adapt similar recipes using the same technique.

pot of well marinated diced pork before cooking — You have two options to start. It’s worth understanding both as some recipes lend themselves better to one or the other.

Either Pan Sear the meat:

Preheat oven to 150C (300F).

On stove, heat a heavy dutch oven or casserole over medium high heat and lightly seal meat in scant oil. Turn regularly until lightly browned, then remove.

Next, reduce heat to medium, add scant more oil only if necessary, lightly saute the onions until just softened, then add other fresh and dry spices, aromatics and/or other finely chopped vegetables and fry a minute or two longer, stirring well.

OR Oven Sear:

Preheat oven to 230C (450F).

Lightly oil the bottom of a heavy dutch oven or casserole and lay onions and any other vegetables in the bottom of the pot. Mix meat with any aromatics (garlic, ginger, spices, herbs) and place on top of onions and/or other vegetables. Roast uncovered for about one hour, turning meat halfway. Meat and spices should be browned but not burnt, so start checking through the oven window after 15-20 minutes.

Remove pot and reduce oven to 150C (300F).

Next for both methods:

Add liquid ingredients: jar sauce, shaoshing, mirin, soy sauce (other recipes might include juice, liquid smoke, stock, beer and/or cider) and mix well. You need a little more liquid than for standard recipes because you have removed almost all of the fat from your meat, so it will toughen more easily. If pan searing, return meat to pan and mix. Jiggle pot so the vegetables sink to the bottom and the meat rests on top in a single layer. You're braising, not boiling: meat should only be partially submerged ie half to two thirds its thickness.

casserole pan with pork covered with baking paper — Cover pork with baking paper. Again, we're doing this because we've removed the protective fat.

pot covered with alfoil — Cover pot tightly with alfoil.

green enamel ware pot with lid — Put on lid. This enamelware pot was too light: my enamel cast iron dutch oven works much better and doesn't get as dark around the edges. Place in oven and cook at 150C (300F) for a total time (including oven searing time if doing so) of 3 - 4.5 hours. Check now and then and blot any excess oil from the surface. The chunked meat cooks much faster than does a whole shoulder.

If after a couple of hours it all looks too wet or pallid, remove the baking paper to allow those chewy crispy bits to develop. If too dry, add scant water or stock. Check for done-ness: it should easily pull apart.

delicious pulled port on tray with two forks — As soon as the meat is fall-apart tender, remove it and use two forks to shred it thoroughly. Moisten well with some of the remaining marinade, which should now be quite thick. Avoid over-wetting the meat, and mix again. Taste as you go so you don’t add too much or too little. Make it so it tastes just slightly too strong, as dehydrating weakens flavour.
Spread on dehydrator trays and dry at 63C (145F) until completely dry, breaking up clumps partway through.
If there’s any leftover sauce, spread it thinly on a silicone- or baking paper-lined sheet and dehydrate it too. Flip onto mesh when it’s dry enough to peel easily from the baking paper.

50 gram packets of pulled pork snacks — When dry, package meat into individual ziplocs (if using soon) or vac seal into bags. A 50g (1.8oz) snack contains 40g protein and 865kJ.

If you’ve dried leftover sauce, powder it in a spice grinder and seal it into vac-seal portions to use like stock powder or a flavour sachet with ramen, rice, or dehydrated vegetable dishes for extra punch.