Healthier Slow Cooker Pulled Pork

I have so much to say about slow cookers that I don’t know where to start.

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with mine. I love the idea of it: throwing a bunch of healthy ingredients into a pot, turning it on, leaving it all day, and coming home to a nourishing stew, soup or chili. What’s not to love about that? But my attempts to execute on this idea have been met with mixed success. Mostly failure, actually.

I expect slow cookering would be relatively foolproof if I used commercial sauces and soups—powdered onion soup mix, canned cream of mushroom, or jarred barbecue sauce, for example. This is what slow cookers (or crock pots) were invented for back in the convenience-food-crazed 1970s.

But slow cooking with real food—vegetables, stocks, fresh herbs, and stuff like that—doesn’t work quite as well. You often end up, in my experience, with a dinner that is bland, soupy and cat-foodish in appearance. I once made a promising slow cooker peanut-butter chicken stew recipe that tasted and looked so terrible it went straight into the trash.

I considered giving up on the slow cooker all together, but judging by the amount of requests I get for “slow cooker recipes, puh-lease!!!!” I figured it would be something like shooting my busy-parent-cooking-blog in the foot. So I persevered. And I’m finally ready to unveil my first (hard won) Kiwi & Bean approved slow cooker recipe.

Before I get to the recipe, a few things I learned in my slow-cooking experiments that I hope will help you maximize your own chance of slow-cooked success:

Fat is your friend. The slow cooker works best with fattier cuts of meat, like chicken thighs or pork shoulder. Don’t trust a slow-cooker recipe that calls for chicken breasts or pork tenderloin.

Start with a flavour base. The dump-it-all-in-and-turn-it-on recipes are appealing for their simplicity, but they are generally too good to be true. Raw garlic and onion, in particular, are rendered inedible by slow-cooking. (There are not too many things that I find truly disgusting, but slow-cookered raw onion is at the very top of the list.) I highly recommend spending a tiny bit of extra time to develop a base of flavour, by sauteeing the garlic and onion, toasting the dry spices, searing the meat, or all of these things. I don’t relish the thought of sauteeing onions at 730 am before I leave for work, so I will usually prepare the “flavour base” the night before and store it in the fridge overnight, as I have recommended in the pulled pork recipe below.

Cut back the liquid. This is key. Liquid doesn’t evaporate from the slow cooker in quite the same way it does when you cook a dish on the stove or in the oven. So if you intend to create your own slow-cooker recipe, or convert your grandmother’s oven or stove-top braised stew recipe to a slow cooker one, cut the liquid by half, possibly even three-quarters of what you would otherwise use.

Pulled pork is right in the slow-cooker sweet spot: a muscular fatty cut of meat drenched in flavour and slow cooked with a small amount of liquid until it is falling apart, super-tender and saucy.

Most pulled pork recipes call for a bottle or two of commercially prepared barbecue sauce, and while I’m sure that would be delicious, I’d rather skip the preservatives and save my sugar quota for cupcakes. Or chocolate. You know what I mean? So this recipe, while it hits all the pulled pork buttons: tender, saucy, salty-sweet is actually pretty good for you, and possibly even “healthy”. Honest. It’s great on a big soft onion roll, of course, but if you want to extend the health theme just a bit, try it on brown rice, quinoa (as pictured here) or tucked into a corn tortilla with a little red cabbage slaw and some pickled jalapeno peppers.

This recipe makes a hefty portion. We eat it for dinner on day one and lunch on day two, and freeze the rest for a future meal.

43 Responses to Healthier Slow Cooker Pulled Pork

Perfectly sweet and saucy. I looked up the recipe this morning and admittedly groaned when seeing the prep work. In reality the time it took to put together the few, simple, on-hand ingredients and prepare in the pan was far quicker than gathering the long list of ingredients many recipes contain. Who knew that such a small amount of maple syrup would produce the same tasty results as those recipes loaded with sugar, ketchup, molasses etc. So impressed, I’ve passed it on!

This recipe is absolutely fantastic!!! My husband was skeptical as he does not like the typical pulled pork served in restaurants, but loved this recipe! Lots of flavor, even though I omitted the salt and pepper following cooking. Also, since my family loves garlic, I often use more than called for by a recipe. I used six cloves instead of 4 cloves; even so, the dish was not overpowered by garlic or any other ingredient. Lots of well blended flavor! Overall, I am not huge fan of Crock Pot cooking, but this recipe is a keeper for sure! The 4lb pork shoulder roast cooked for 8 hours on low and was fall-apart tender. The fat easily separated and was tossed out. Thank you the sharing!!!

This recipe came out perfect!! So delicious!! Thanks so much :):) I’ve been wanting a damn good recipe for a very long time and these are wonderful! I am so excited about them .Can’t wait to make them again! Thanks again for such a recipe 🙂

We made this today and was absolutely delicious but soooo spicy!! We used 2 tablespoons of the chilli powder as recipe says (in Australia our tablespoon is 20ml measurement) is this correct as other comments say this recipe is kid friendly and we’re not sure how haha? We struggled with the heat. Perfect recipe otherwise thanks so much! 🙂

Hi Lauren — the chili powder we buy and use here is a mix of several spices (cumin, coriander, paprika, etc.). It usually contains a bit of actually chilies, but not much. May be that you used ground chilies? That would definitely make this dish way too spicy!

Made this for tea today.. slow cooked for 12 hours and added about double the water so it created a sauce.. served with healthy coleslaw and quinoa. Beautiful and went down well with the husband who doesn’t like ‘healthy’ food

I made this pulled pork tonight and it was delicious! In fact, my husband said it was the best pulled pork he has ever had. So glad we have leftovers and will most definitely be making it again! Thank you so much!

I tried this recipie today (& yesterday, as I made the rub the night before). The pork turned out tender, shredded easily. We wrapped ours in Boston lettuce leaves, garnished with some thin sliced red cabbage, diced red onions, shredded carrot and a squeeze from a lime wedge. Healthy and delicious!

We love our slow cooker but it has taken us a long time to find out what works best. What I also love is our mini slow cooker. We cut recipes in half so if there is a massive fail we aren’t left with tons and tons of it. Plus it’s much less bulkier to store and clean. You’d be surprised how much you can fit in one of those. I’ll def try this recipe. Thanks!

Hi! I found your site from looking for baby led weaning recipes on Pinterest! Your recipes look AMAZING! Is this recipe something you would feed your baby? I LURVE pulled pork!!!!!! But lately I’m not sure how much salt (soy sauce) my baby can eat? Would I give him low/no salt options during the day + give him this for dinner???

Hi Shelli! Glad you found the site! How old is your baby? I fed my little guy this pulled pork from about 10 months onwards. At first I separated a little for him before I mixed the pork into the sauce at the end (just to make it less salty) but these days (he’s 14 months now) I just give it to him as-is–sauce and all. And yes I absolutely will do less salt during the day and more salt for dinner! I’m no doctor but that seems to make sense to me :-).

I can’t say that I have used my slow cooker much lately.. and this recipe is just the perfect excuse for me to pull it out and use it. I love pulled pork and I love how you have made this a healthy version especially!

I am in a slow-cooker induced depression at this very moment. Turned it on before we all left to go to the dentist and run errands, only to come home hours later to find out that Ryan had unplugged it just before we left, not realizing what he was doing. OMG, the worst. Bye-bye beautiful (organic) beef! 🙁 But now this post has me feeling happier, I think I will order up a pork shoulder from the farmer at our market this weekend!