Franco-Carolinian "boarbecue"

This is the second installment of my post about cooking a gigot or cuisse or cuissot de sanglier. That's a fresh, raw leg of boar. The French terms in italics in that first sentence are more or less synonyms in this context. Here is a link to the first post.

    
The picture on the left above shows the gigot after it was cooked for 8 or 9 hours at low temperature in a slow cooker. I left it to cool down in the cooking liquid (vinegar, spices, and aromatic vegetables) overnight. Then I took it out of the cooker and put it in a big wok with some of the cooking liquid and some sweet-sour-spicy barbecue sauce. I put it in a slow oven (120ºC, 250ºC) for about an hour, basting it with the barbecue sauce. When it was very tender, I shredded (or "pulled") the meat with two forks and spooned on some more of the liquid and sauce.

    
The meat was not very different from the meat of a farm-raised hog. After "pulling" it I roughly cut the strands of meat into shorter pieces using a pair of kitchen shears. Before we ate it on sandwich buns with some more sauce and some coleslaw, I put some of the shredded, chopped meat in a non-stick frying pan and browned it slightly, again adding some of the sauce. As a side dish to have with the boar meat, I heated up some cooked white beans in a little bit of the cooking liquid left in the slow cooker. I chopped up the vegetables — a carrot, a big shallot, a stalk of celery — that had cooked with the meat and heated those up with the beans.

Here's a recipe for the western North Carolina style barbecue sauce I made to cook and serve the meat with:

Mix together in a sauce pan:

1 cup cider vinegar
½ cup ketchup or tomato paste
¼ cup of your favorite hot sauce (or more to taste)
1 Tbsp. salt
1 Tbsp. coarse black pepper
I Tbsp. worcestershire sauce
¼ cup sugar (or more to taste)

Bring to a boil, then turn down the heat a let the sauce simmer for 15 minutes.

Many variations on this kind of sauce are possible, of course. Here's a link to a selection of French recipes for this kind of slow-cooked meat. It doesn't have to be served in sandwiches, by the way. It's good with French bread, corn bread, or North Carolina hushpuppies.