Slow Cooker Cafe Rio Sweet Pork—make your favorite restaurant’s sweet pork at home with just a handful of ingredients. This pulled pork is perfect over salad, rice, tacos, burritos, quesadillas or on a toasted bun.
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Get the INSTANT POT Cafe Rio Sweet Pork recipe here
Slow Cooker Cafe Rio Sweet Pork
Are you a fan of the sweet pork at Cafe Rio or Costa Vida? If you don’t know what I’m talking about Cafe Rio is a restaurant that is sort of like Chipotle, only better. They are famous for their sweet pork salads which contain a fresh flour tortilla, cilantro lime rice, beans, romaine lettuce, sweet pork, cotija cheese, lime, guacamole, fried corn chips and their famous house dressing, a creamy tomatillo ranch. My mouth is watering just thinking about it!
Now you can easily make the sweet pork at home and it tastes almost identical to the real thing! You can make all the fixings for the Cafe Rio style salads or you can just serve this meat over a taco. That’s how I enjoyed it and it was the bomb! I loved the sweetness paired with a freshly baked tortilla (I find these in the refrigerated section of the grocery store), garden fresh tomatoes, chopped cilantro and a generous dollop of full fat sour cream.
This recipe is a bit unique because you slow cook twice. The first time you slow cook to get the pork shreddable. Then you slow cook the second time to infuse all the flavors into the shredded pork. The second cooking time is 2 hours.
This is a great recipe to feed a crowd! It would be a great addition to a nacho bar. If you want you can easily double this recipe. Just double all the ingredients and keep the cooking time the same. And don’t worry about all the shredding you’re going to have to do. I just used a hand mixer to shred the meat in about 5 seconds! It worked so well.
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More Slow Cooker Pork Recipes…
Slow Cooker Garlic Herb Pork Chops and Green Beans
Slow Cooker Mississippi Pork Sandwiches
Slow Cooker Sweet and Sour Country Ribs
Slow Cooker Savory Pork Burrito Bowls
What Slow Cooker Did You Use?
To make Slow Cooker Cafe Rio Sweet Pork I used my Ninja Auto-iQ 6 Quart Slow Cooker.* My favorite feature of this slow cooker is that it has a stove top function. This is perfect for sauteing or browning before you slow cook. This slow cooker has four manual cooking functions: slow cook, stove top sear/Saute, steam, and bake.
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Slow Cooker Cafe Rio Sweet Pork
- Prep Time: 10 minutes
- Cook Time: 10 hours
- Total Time: 10 hours 10 minutes
- Yield: 8–10 servings 1x
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Make your favorite restaurant’s sweet pork at home with just a handful of ingredients. This pulled pork is perfect over salad, rice, tacos, burritos, quesadillas or on a toasted bun.
Ingredients
- 2 ¼ cups Coke, divided (not diet)
- 2 ½ pounds pork shoulder, trimmed of excess fat and cut into quarters
- 1 ¼ cup brown sugar, divided
- 1 tsp garlic salt
- 1 (4 oz) can green chilies
- 1 (10 oz can) red enchilada sauce
Instructions
- Pour 1 ½ cups of Coke into slow cooker. Add in the quartered pork, ¼ cup brown sugar and garlic salt.
- Cover and cook on low for about 8 hours. Remove the lid. Discard the liquid. Shred the meat and return it back into the slow cooker.
- Add ¾ cup Coke, 1 cup brown sugar, green chilies and enchilada sauce to a blender. Blend until smooth. Pour the mixture into slow cooker.
- Cover and cook on low for another 2 hours.
- Use tongs to serve the pork on top of salads, rice, burritos, tacos, quesadillas etc.
Notes
I like to buy the Pork Carnitas meat from Winco for this recipe. You can also use pork shoulder, butt, country style ribs, picnic roast.
After I discarded the liquid I shredded my meat in 2 seconds using my hand mixer. Basically I just pulsed it a couple of times.
- Category: Pork
- Method: Slow Cooker
*Karen Petersen is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com.
What if you wanted to put the crock pot on high instead of low? Do you know how much time it would be there for?
I’d say around 6 hours
Sounds good!
★★★★
It is!
It sounds good except for the coke. I would definitely leave that out.
You’ll need to add some sort of liquid. Could you use a different soda perhaps root beer or dr pepper?