Café Rio Pork Recipe

When we went to BYU, Dem and I (along with 98% of Provoans) ate at Café Rio. My favorite meal was the pork salad, which is a beautiful amalgam of sweet shreeded pork, cilantro-lime rice, black beans, lettuce, salsa, etc. Anyway, in the years intervening graduation and now, we've longed for pork salad many times. Well, in order to assuage these longings, I've developed a, I might say, a pretty dang good Café Rio pork salad recipe. I'll post the entire recipe in later (it's somewhat long), but I'll post the sweet pork recipe below.

Sweet Pork Ingredients
• 3.5 lbs pork shoulder (a.k.a. pork butt) — boneless is easiest
• 10 oz. can red enchilada sauce
• 8 oz. Dr. Pepper
• 1 ½ cups light brown sugar
• 1 can chopped green chiles
• 2 teaspoons salt

Cooking Instructions

Preheat oven to 250 degrees. Place pork in crock pot bowl. Add brown sugar and green chiles. Pour in enchilada sauce and Dr. Pepper. Put aluminum foil over bowl and cut 8–10 slits. Place in oven and cook for 5–6 hours. (I prefer this to the crockpot method because the meat cooks more evenly.)

Take bowl from oven. Remove pork to a cutting board under which you’ve placed two layers of paper towels. Place liquid into sauce pot, turn burner on high, and let boil while you pull the pork. Now, take two forks and pull the pork apart. Pull until the entire butt is reduced to a big pile of stringy goodness. Remove unnecessary fat globs.

Place pork in liquid. Reduce until mixture is not runny. The pork is runny if you pull some out with a tong and you see a string of liquid coming dripping off. A few drops is okay, but no liquid strings.

Place pork in container and set aside.

* You can make the pork ahead. Pork placed in an air tight container will keep for 5–7 days in the fridge. If you do make ahead, remove pork and reheat it in a sauce pot before using.

Other Café Rio Recipe Links

1. Kalyn’s Kitchen
2. Tried & Trues
3. Grandmas Syrup
4. Pimp My Dinner
5. Hot out of the Oven
6. Recipe(tried)
7. Where Cooks Collide
8. Lauren Black
9. Menu Planning 101
10. Griffin Family