Pulled Pork

Earlier in the summer, we visited some family friends who used to live next door to us. While we were at their house, they were kind enough to prepare a delicious supper for us. There was certainly a nice variety of dishes, but the one that stood out for me the most (besides the wonderful strawberry shortcake for dessert of course), was the pulled pork. Even though I am usually not a huge fan of pork, the moment I walked in the house I could smell the enticing aroma of the pulled pork in sauce warming up in the oven. I knew I had to try it, and I was sure glad I did. The pork was extremely tender, moist, and flavorful. You didn't even need a bun or roll to eat it with, I just ate it by the forkful it was so good. So soon after we arrived home, I asked my mom to ask for the recipe. I knew we probably could not exactly duplicate the pulled pork we had there, because it would be extremely difficult to top, but we had to try.
Our friend promptly e-mailed us the recipe, although she said there was no real recipe for it, and you could vary pretty much all of the ingredients and adjust the cooking times/methods a bit and the recipe would still work out. I suppose as long as it is thoroughly cooked and has a good sauce, you can't really mess up on pulled pork, however, it just won't be as good as this pulled pork. We just got around to trying this recipe yesterday. We used a pork loin instead of the typical shoulder, because that is what we found at the grocery store. The night before we roasted it with some vegetables and apple juice (cooking liquid was one of the main ingredients that could easily be varied). The house smelled very good at this point, but I knew I had to wait until the next day to try the pork. The next day, we baked the shredded pork with some barbecue sauce and served it on buns. The result? The pork was certainly very tender. The only problem was, we had not used the same barbecue sauce as our friend had, which was basically what made the dish so good. The pork is smothered in sauce, so you really have to have a good tasting barbecue sauce. The barbecue sauce we used was a bit strong and overwhelming. I had thought we would use the same sauce, but it turns out we did not have it on hand, and we didn't want to make a trip to the grocery store just for that. This pulled pork was good, but next time we will use the same sauce, and it will be even better, though I'm not sure it will ever be as good as our friend's was.