Kalua pork

What it is

Kalua pork is a big cut of pork, traditionally a whole pig, seasoned simply with Hawaiian sea salt and cooked for hours until it is meltingly tender, then shredded. It tastes smoky and salty and clean, with no heavy sauce. You eat it with rice, in a sandwich, or piled next to cabbage.

A short history

The word kalua means to cook in an imu, the underground oven. You dig a pit, heat rocks in a fire, layer in banana and ti leaves, set the salted pig on top, cover it all, and let it steam and smoke for the better part of a day. Polynesian voyagers brought both the pigs and the earth-oven method to Hawaii more than a thousand years ago.

Pork carried a lot of meaning. Under the old kapu system, women were not allowed to eat it, along with certain other foods, until 1819, when King Kamehameha II set those laws aside. Today kalua pig is the centerpiece of the luau, the thing everyone lines up for.

How to make it at home

You cannot dig an imu in the backyard on a Tuesday, so this uses the oven and a little liquid smoke to get that pit-cooked flavor. If you can find ti or banana leaves, wrap the pork in them for the real thing.

The cut and the salt

Two ingredients carry this dish, so it is worth being picky about both.

Use pork shoulder, sold as pork butt or Boston butt. It is the same cut under different names and it is what you want: enough fat running through it that hours of low heat turn it soft instead of dry. Bone-in has a little more flavor and the bone slides clean out at the end. Loin and tenderloin will not work here. They have no fat to give and they go stringy.

Figure about half a pound per person raw. It loses a fair amount of weight as it cooks, and people eat more of it than they plan to.

For salt, Hawaiian sea salt, alaea salt, is the traditional choice. Alaea is red from the volcanic clay mixed into it, and it is coarse and mild. If you cannot find it, coarse sea salt or kosher salt works. What you must not do is swap in the same volume of fine table salt. Fine salt packs much denser in a spoon, and you will end up with pork nobody can eat. If fine salt is all you have, use about half.

Salt it generously and do it early. Rub it in and let the pork sit while the oven heats, or overnight in the fridge if you are organized. This is a salty dish by design. That clean salt-and-smoke flavor is the point, and it is why it needs rice next to it.

Oven, slow cooker, or pressure cooker

The recipe above is the oven version, which I think gives the best texture. The others work and I use them plenty.

In a slow cooker, rub the pork with salt and liquid smoke, add no liquid at all, and cook on low for eight to ten hours. It makes its own liquid. This is the easiest version and the one to start the night before a party. The texture comes out a touch wetter than the oven.

In a pressure cooker, cut the shoulder into three or four big chunks, add a cup of water with the salt and smoke, and cook on high for about ninety minutes with a natural release. Fast, and genuinely good, though it tastes a little more steamed and less roasted.

Whichever way you go, shred it in the liquid it cooked in and let it sit a few minutes before serving. Pork that gets drained and then shredded dries out on the plate. If there is a lot of fat on the surface, skim some off, but leave enough to keep it glossy.

If you can get ti or banana leaves, wrap the pork before cooking. It is the closest you will get to an imu at home and it does add something. Frozen banana leaves from an Asian market are fine.

What to do with the leftovers

This is half the reason to make a big batch. Kalua pork keeps four or five days in the fridge and freezes well for a few months.

Kalua pork and cabbage is the standard next-day move. Wilt chopped cabbage in a pan, stir the pork through with a little of its liquid, and serve over rice.

It also goes into fried rice, onto nachos, into quesadillas, on a sandwich roll with slaw, over a baked sweet potato, and folded into an omelet. My kids like it best just piled on rice with a fried egg, which is basically a loco moco with pork.

Reheat it with a splash of water or broth in a covered pan. Dry reheating turns it to straw.

Serve it with rice and mac salad, or try spam musubi for a smaller bite.