Pork Slow-Cooker Recipe question -- Need answer fast . . .

Cafe Society
1

I’m cooking up a batch of stew with beans, cubed pork, other ingredients. I need to know if I’m cooking the pork long enough to be safe. I think so, but I’d like some independent opinions. Need answer fairly quickly because I’ve already started preparing some of the other ingredients to cook today (Tue. May 26).

The details:

I have this recipe for beans, pork, and a bunch of vegetables and chicken broth, to cook up in a slow cooker. The recipe calls to cook at HIGH for three hours and then LOW for six more hours.

Last two times I tried this, the meat came out definitely over-cooked. Now I want to try cooking the meat just two hours on high and five hours on low.

To be clear: Last two times, I was working with pre-cooked slabs of pork, that I could in theory have eaten (and sometimes did) straight out of the fridge. This time, I’m starting with a slab of raw pork. The meat and all the vegetables are all cut up into little pieces. I estimate that the meat, beans, veggies, and liquid all total about 5 quarts.

Cooking on HIGH, the stew all boils and bubbles medium-vigorously, I think. On LOW, it all boils and bubbles more gently. But is it still really at boiling temperature all this time? Is seven hours of boiling (two hours HIGH and five hours LOW) enough to really thoroughly cook the meat? Seems to me it ought to be.

Please be patient and answer in grade-school Cooking For Dummies terms. I am the proverbial bachelor who can’t fry water here.

2

I would think so. It will be cooked through, but not necessarily tender. It should be tender, though.
I think 7 hours is plenty. If you are able to, test it after 7 hours and if not tender cook it some more!

3

Can you provide a few more key details:

  • how much pork (lbs)? (Slab is not a unit of measure I’m familiar with :wink: )
  • How large of a pot/slow cooker?
  • How much liquid are you adding?

My initial guess is that under-cooking is not going to be an issue. Neither is over-cooking, tbh. Stews are usually pretty hard to get wrong and don’t demand very precise timing.

4

Yes the pork will be safe but;
What cut of meat and what is the end consistency you’re looking for. Pork loin makes terrible shredded meat but would hold up as a cube longer. If your looking for shredded meat there are a lot of cuts shoulder, butt, cushion?

5

The two hours on high is probably enough to render it safe. 2 on high and 5 on low is more than enough for safe pork preparation.

6

If you have seven hours, I wouldn’t bother with the high at all. The only reason I would ever use High on a slow cooker is if I have 4 or less hours( and for cut up meat, I’d be happy from a safety perspective even with only 4 hours on low. 7-8 of low will be safely cooked, fall apart tender, and still somewhat juicy(assuming the basic cut had some collegian and fat to start with).

7

Thank you all for your responses so far, written so even I can understand! :wink:

The meat in question comes from a free charity-ish monthly food distribution, and is something of a mystery package. However, upon reading the label (whoda thunk of that?), I see that it is in fact fully cooked already. The cooking instructions say just to boil in the unopened plastic wrap for 15 minutes. It is pork shoulder and/or leg, and is allegedly already shredded. (I wouldn’t have known that because it is still a mostly-frozen solid lump.)

The label says: Serving size 35g, servings per container: 1. That can’t possibly be right, not even close. I think it’s more like one pound or so.

I meant to cut it into cubes. But if it’s already shredded, I’ll work with that somehow. As y’all may have gathered, ALL my cooking is experimental. :smack: :slight_smile:

The slow cooker is a 7-quart tub. There will be at least 3 cups of chicken broth, thickened somewhat with a finely-grated potato that will starch it up somewhat. The tub will be about 3/4 full, I estimate, so probably about 5 quarts. There will be plenty enough liquid for all the solid food to be fully covered.

Last two times, the meat was definitely overcooked. The pieces came out tough and chewy. On my second attempt, I put the meat in about an hour late (thus, 2 hours on high instead of 3, and still 6 hours on low). That was an improvement, but still came out fairly tough. I assume this means the meat was overcooked, not undercooked?

As for the vegetables, I’ve got that pretty well worked out. Cook separately during the last hour of the slow-cooking and dump into the stew about 30 minutes before it’s all done. That gets the veggies cooked to about the consistency that I like them (well-cooked and soft, not crunchy, but definitely not mushy).

8

I guess the main reason this recipe calls for such long cooking is because it’s basically a bean dish. The beans are about as much as all the other ingredients combined. It starts with 2 to 3 cups of dried beans, suitably pre-soaked per instructions and then cooked to death in the slow cooker.

I’m still a little confused about what should happen when the meat is over-cooked. It came out definitely tough and chewy (tougher and chewier than when it went in), and after seven to nine hours slow-cooking, that can’t possibly have been undercooked, could it? I was expecting it to be “fall apart tender” like you said. What went wrong?

Do I need to mix in some kind of tenderizer? Enzymes? Battery acid? Lysol? Clorox? Can I make a stew that will protect me from Covid-19 at the same time?

9

Dried beans may change the equation a bunch. You don’t want to just throw Kidney Beans in a slow cooker only for any length of time. The have a poison called phytohaemagglutinin that is destroyed by a boil for long enough, but get magnified by slow cooking. High or low, it just doesn’t get hot enough. Kidney beans must be properly boiled, before being put into the crock pot.(canned beans are fine to put in a slow cooker as they have been properly boiled as part of the canning process to kill Botulism.)

10

I have found that slow cookers vary considerably as to their actual temperature for “Low” or “High”. My favorite cooker’s low seems to match another model’s high. So I won’t trust any recipe unless it was designed for the model I plan to use.

11

Probably the biggest variable here is WHAT kind of pork you’re using. If it’s tenderloin, loin chops or something like that, it’s tender, but has little fat or connective tissue, and is going to get tough in a slow cooker, regardless of how long you cook it. Tenderloin is more for quick, high heat like grilling, broiling or pan frying, where you can track the doneness and take it off quickly.

For stews and slow-cooked stuff, you really need pork shoulder, belly, ribs or possibly a loin roast. They have more fat and connective tissue, both of which will keep it more tender over time as it cooks, especially via the conversion of the collagen to gelatin in slow-cooked meat.

12

I have a bunch of different kinds of dried beans, including kidney beans. Today I’m using pinto beans. They all come with pre-cooking directions on the package, and the directions seem to be about the same for all kinds of beans. I’ve read before what you wrote about kidney beans, but I intend to treat all kinds of beans the same. Is it only kidney beans that have poison like that? If I eat them raw, will it protect me from Covid-19?

All the instructions say to pre-soak for 24 hours then drain and rinse, OR boil for a certain length of time (like 3 hours or so) then drain and rinse. I’ve just finished doing all that, and I just dumped the beans into the crock pot along with a large finely chopped potato and a huge chopped up onion and 4 cups of unsalted chicken stock. This is the first tranche of ingredients, that I’ll cook on high for two hours.

Then I’ll turn it to low and put in the chopped up pork and let that simmer for five hours. That will be the second tranche of ingredients. All the other veggies get put in later, about 30 minutes before it’s done. That will be the third and last tranche of ingredients. We’ll see how that turns out. (Note that my plan today is to not cook the meat for any hours on high.)

It’s pretty much a crap-shoot as to what kind of pork I have here. The label says shoulder and/or leg, shredded. It looks fairly fatty to me, but I haven’t actually opened the package yet. Seeing that it’s already pre-cooked, I’m not concerned about cooking it long enough to be safe. I assume it’s already that.

13

Curious here. I’ve just grabbed some packages for all the kinds of beans I have and re-read the cooking instructions on them. They all have some variation of one or both of:

(a) Soak in room-temperature water overnight, drain and rinse;
(b) or, Boil for (some specified number of) minutes, let soak for an hour or two, drain and rinse;
© or, your choice of either of the above.

THEN, mix with other ingredients and simmer to desired tenderness.

Strangely, the instructions on the package of kidney beans DOESN’T include (a) or (b) or ©. But I know from prior reading that it’s necessary. When I cook dried beans, option (b) is always the method I choose.

14

The limited cooking I do is usually kind of a crap-shoot anyway, so I always play it by ear as best I can. The recipe I have here is some hand-scribbled thing my neighbor gave me, and I’m not even using quite the same ingredients as it calls for. It’s always experimental with me, since I don’t really know what I’m doing to begin with.

The PRIMARY thing I wanted to get from this thread is some assurance that I’m cooking the meat enough to be safe. By all accounts here, that seems assured.

15

If you’re worried about trichinosis, off the top of my head, that dies at 137F (but it has to be held for some limited amount of time at that temp; the higher, the less time), but also that it’s pretty much non-existent in commercial pork in the US. (Heck, I’ve eaten raw pork in the form of mett, which is basically like a German pork version of beefsteak tartare.) At any rate, after an hour on high, I’m sure you’ll be well, well past this point, especially as you’re using cubed pork and not something like a whole butt.

16

Others have already responded but in my personal experience, two or three hours on high or six or seven hours on low is sufficient as long as you’re cooking cut up pieces of meat.

I will note that I always brown up the pieces of meat in a frying pan before putting them in the crockpot. I do it for the flavor but it also starts the cooking process.

17

I’d be willing to bet even if you had a whole shoulder in there, with that kind of cooking time and a moist cooking environment, you’d be well, well, into the safe zone. I’m guessing you’d be over 180 at that point, but it depends on your slow cooker. Today’s slow cookers, though, seem to run hotter than older ones. The slow cooker pulled pork recipes I’ve seen (for a smaller, 6 pound butt) are usually around 8 hours on low. When I simmer pork for stew on my stovetop, I keep it at below boiling, so we’re talking probably around 190 degrees, and the pork is soft and tender after about 3 to 3 1/2 hours.

18

The process is underway even as we [del]speak[/del] [del]write[/del] type.

The pork, now unwrapped and in the stew, indeed turns out to be pre-cooked pre-shredded meat. I’m going to cook it for 1 hour on high (that is, with crock already pre-heated and bubbling with other ingredients) and 4 hours on low (during which time, I’ll add a whole bunch of vegetables a little later).

I wasn’t specifically thinking of trichinosis, but rather just in general, cooking meat in a way to make sure it’s safe. If anything, I would probably have worried about something like salmonella or whatever. My secondary concern was about the right cooking time since the meat came out tough and chewy and (I assume) way overcooked the last two times I tried this.

One important tool I DON’T have is a cooking thermometer, so I have to take it on faith that the temperature is right. If the solid food is immersed in liquid and that is bubbling, that certainly means it’s hot enough, doesn’t it?

19

Oh, if it’s pre-cooked, pre-shredded meat, for something like this, I’d actually just add it in at the end of the cook. Like you only need enough time to warm it through.

20

Okay, it’s done! I think this came out much better than the last two times. The meat is more tender, and doesn’t seem grossly overcooked and tough.

Since the prior stews only filled the crock 3/4 full, I added a lot more of everything this time. It’s got a little too much liquid (chicken broth), so the stew is a little more watery than I would have preferred. With the veggies, the crock was nearly brim full this time, and I had to leave the turnip out.

Also, the veggies are overcooked and a little mushier than they should be, but not too badly so. This is totally my blunder. I meant to put them in at T-30, but purely due a time-keeping error, I put them in at T-60.

It’s kind of an all-day project to cook a stew like this, which is not my preferred way to spend a day, and that’s not even counting the shopping time and some of the clean-up time. OTOH, a crock full like this will keep me fed for several days at least.

Thank y’all for your advice!