Braised Pork Shoulder Sandwiches You'll Want to Eat All Week

Use simply spiced pork to make a lunch worth looking forward to.
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Photo by Laura Murray, styling by Judy Mancini.

Welcome to Cooking Without Recipes, in which we teach you how to make a dish we love, but don’t worry too much about the nitty-gritty details of the recipe, so you can create your own spin. This is associate web editor Alyse Whitney's recipe for a braised pork shoulder sandwich.

It's 2 p.m. on Sunday and my entire apartment smells like pork. No, not brunchtime bacon—braised pork shoulder. Yes, even in the dead of summer I'm braising pork, because it makes the only sandwiches I don't get sick of after four days of leftovers.

This obsession started when I got my first slow cooker, but I've found that the texture is much better when you braise low and slow in a Dutch oven. To start, take a boneless pork shoulder (about 3-4 pounds), trim it of excess fat, pat it dry, and season liberally with kosher salt and pepper. Heat a Dutch oven with a good glug of vegetable or grapeseed oil so you can really crank the heat without it smoking—or large skillet, if you're transferring to a slow cooker—and sear all sides for a few minutes until deeply browned.

While it's searing, slice up an onion and smash some garlic cloves. Once the meat is browned, nestle the onion and garlic around the pork and pour in 1 ½ cups of chicken stock. You may need a little more, depending on the size of your pork—you want the meat to be submerged about ⅓ of the way. Bring it to a boil, cover it with a lid, and slide into a 325° oven. A 4-pound roast takes about 3 hours to be almost-fall-apart tender. I check it after 2½ hours for doneness, but have cooked it up to 4 hours. If you're using a slow cooker, all steps are the same, but go for about 8 hours on low or 5 hours on high.

Once it's cooked, shred or slice it. Shredding is most common, but sometimes I like a nice thick slice of pork on a roll, which doesn't fall out of the bread as easily. Most people associate barbecue sauce and pulled pork. I am not most people. I prefer to make my pork sandwiches without sauce, instead adding flavor with lots of caramelized onions, melted cheese, and some sort of pickled peppers on some form of bread—toasted at my desk, don't tell the fire department—with a swipe of mayonnaise to finish. Sometimes I sub in pickled onions if I forget to caramelize a batch at the beginning of the week, and other times I go with pickled onions and carrots with cilantro and spicy mayonnaise for a banh mi-ish situation.

A sandwich is a tough thing to eat at your desk, so use it as an excuse to step away from the screen for a quick break (and make sure to bring lots of napkins). If I eat sandwiches for a few days in a row, I'll make different combinations, like roasted red peppers, arugula, and Parmesan, or an Asian chicken salad-style wrap with pork instead. This does make a lot of braised pork shoulder, so I portion out leftovers into deli containers and freeze half of it for future meals. Sometimes that's to top salads, and other nights it's to stir-fry noodles and vegetables. Honestly, the possibilities are as endless as Sandra Bullock rom-coms, and lunchtime has an equally fairytale ending whenever braised pork shoulder joins the party.

Another way to braise the bar on pork: