Kyl Haselbauer has 20 years of experience working in fine-dining and modernist kitchens, including Bar Cotto and Anchovies &amp; Olives in Seattle. He is also the owner of Bright Spot, a café and coffee shop in Seattle.

Kyl Haselbauer

There’s nothing like pulled pork, cooked low and slow for hours until the meat falls apart when you look at it, inviting you to slather it in sauce and pile it high onto a soft, sweet bun. Except ... that’s not true. There’s microwaved pull pork cooked from start to finish in two hours. If that sounds odd to you, you just haven’t been paying attention. <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/making-the-most-of-your-microwave">The microwave is one of the most powerful tools in your kitchen</a>, and you can use it to do all kinds of stuff in the kitchen, <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/it-s-a-microwave-frenzy-from-epic-delicious-to-epic-fail">both nutty and normal</a>. The key to producing tender, moist pulled pork is to use the most neglected feature of the microwave: the power setting. Pork shoulder—a large object that contains a lot of water—will heat up unevenly if you try to cook it all the way on full power. By reducing the power setting to 30%, you’re telling the machine to cycle its magnetron off and on, giving the meat time to heat up evenly to the temperatures at which collagen converts to gelatin. Wrapping the pork (or cooking it in a microwave-safe covered dish) traps steam, preventing the outside of the meat from drying out and burning—we don’t want <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/crispy-prosciutto">crispy ham, after all</a>—while creating a moist environment that’s also very good at absorbing energy and distributing heat. From there, it’s just a matter of dialing in the amount of time it takes your microwave to ride out the collagen-to-gelatin conversion process. Weaker microwaves will require you to extend the cooking time; stronger microwaves, like ours (1200 watts), transform a shoulder into perfectly juicy and shreddy pulled pork in under two hours. 
You may have tried pulled pork every which slow way you can think of: <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/bbq-pork-shoulder">smoked</a>, <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/oven-north-carolina-style-barbecue-pork">in the oven</a>, <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/smokerless-smoked-pork-shoulder">using sous vide</a>. It’s time to try it fast!

Microwave Barbecue Pulled Pork