Pulled pork is one of the most delicious meals I love to prepare. It’s succulent, full of flavour, and soft and easy to chew. Of course, pork is already a nutritious food. It’s loaded with:
But if you’re looking for a healthy pulled pork recipe crammed with flavour and nutrients, you’ve come to the right place.
Because to improve the nutrient density of this pulled pork recipe, I’ve added some organ meats. Hang on a second. Don’t go just yet. Before you start gagging convulsively and disappear into the blogosphere in search of a safer pulled pork recipe to try, hear me out. Because even if you don’t enjoy the taste of organ meats or have been too intimidated to try them, fear not. Because this pulled pork recipe doesn’t club you over the head with the overpowering flavours of the organs. Instead, expect a dish that smells and tastes deliciously porky with oodles of umami.
Of course, if you love the intense flavours of organ meats and don’t find them intimidating to prepare, you can increase their relative amounts and reduce the amount of pork to get your organ meat fix.
In case you’re not familiar with the reasons for including organ meats (called offal in the UK) regularly in your diet, let’s take a moment to recap. The organs are some of the most nutritious superfoods on the planet. However, organ meats nutrition is usually underrated even by nutritionists. While the popular press and nutrition blogs often vaunt vegetables like kale as the pillars of a healthy diet, you might be surprised to learn that the nutrient content of vegetables pales compared with some of the organ meats.
Organ meats are excellent sources of the vitamins and minerals many people are most deficient in. They’re often extremely high in vitamin B12, iron, selenium, riboflavin (vitamin B2), vitamin B5, and zinc. Kidney is one of the best sources of selenium; liver is the top source of vitamin A and an excellent source of copper.
Organ meats are the organs of an animal that are consumed as food. People have always eaten organs and prized them above muscle meats. Traditional cultures all over the world have developed delicious recipes that include organs. However, it’s only in recent decades that people in English-speaking countries have started to turn away from including organ meats as a dietary staple. Bland smelling and tasting foods like chicken, white fish, and grains have supplanted the more robust-tasting red meats, oily fish, and offal like liver, kidneys and heart.
But as recently as World War 2, people routinely served variety meats like stuffed hearts, tripe, liver, brains, and kidneys. During rationing, organ meats were, for the most part, exempt. And people were healthier for including them. However, many people overcooked liver, resulting in tough, chewy textures that were challenging to enjoy.
Meanwhile, attitudes to weaning infants in English-speaking countries changed. People began to think of tastes for food as inherent rather than something that developed over time and exposure. And weaning advice morphed so that young children were introduced early on to the blandest, sweet and starchy high carbohydrate foods first. Foods like baby rice, rusks, toast, cereals, sweets, chocolate, crisps (potato chips), french fries, potatoes, battered chicken, fish fingers, carrots, and sweetcorn became popular weaning foods. More ultra-processed foods began to replace real food. Then over time, the assumption started to creep in that children (particularly toddlers) were picky eaters by default and couldn’t learn to enjoy more intense tastes.
Now so few people in English-speaking countries like the USA, Canada, the UK, Ireland, New Zealand and Australia grow up consuming organ meats that it’s unusual to find people who learned from their parents how to cook them.
And that can make it intimidating and unappealing to begin dipping your toes into the seedy underbelly of culinary offal preparation. So much so that it can be hard to source organ meats in shops. Although this often depends on where you live. You’ll often find a diverse range of nose-to-tail delicacies in towns and cities with a large immigrant population where people brought their traditional cuisines with them when they emigrated.
If cooking offal is new to you, you might want to begin with a recipe where the flavour and appearance of the innards are somewhat disguised. So this pulled pork recipe will be right up your alley. You can even serve it to your kids; they’ll love it!
This recipe includes lamb (or goat) kidneys and heart. But there are plenty of other sorts of offal. And you can incorporate any of them. So what are some more examples of offal you could throw into the pot? Here are some suggestions:
Blood, spleen, oxtails, lungs, and intestines (chitterlings) also count as organ meats. But the flavours might not be quite right for this recipe. Or maybe they’re perfect for it. Who knows?
I’ve discussed the benefits of medicinal mushrooms a little in some other posts. You can read more about them here. And if you’re looking for another recipe using medicinal mushrooms, why not try this delicious honey pulled beef brisket with herbs?
Not too shabbily. A single portion of this pulled pork recipe exceeds the daily recommended dietary allowances for protein, thiamine (vitamin B1), niacin (vitamin B3), pantothenic acid (vitamin B5), and vitamin B12. But also provides at least:
Heart is also one of the top dietary sources of Coenzyme Q10, a powerful antioxidant essential for energy metabolism and necessary for mitochondria to function optimally. CoQ10 is one of the most popular supplements to support energy, heart and neurological health.
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