The thing about making pulled pork, it turns out, is that then you have an absolute ton of pulled pork you get to eat. That’s a good thing, no doubt, but it requires a pretty serious commitment to pork-eating. You don’t want any of that pork going bad — especially not after you labored over it for 13 hours or whatever — so you’re going to have to come up with a bunch of ways to prepare it: pork tacos, pork and eggs, creamed pulled pork on toast, pork chili.

None are better than the O.G. pulled pork sandwich, though. I had this for five consecutive non-breakfast meals.

The sandwich: Pulled pork sandwich from the TedQuarters kitchen.

The construction: Smoked pulled pork on potato bun with sliced pickle, barbecue sauce and cole slaw.

For the buns I used Martin’s hamburger buns, a good, consistently soft potato bun. The sliced pickle and cole slaw were store bought. The sauce is something I sort-of made. It’s what barbecue guru Steve Raichlen calls a “doctor sauce,” made by combining other barbecue sauces then adding honey, vinegar, apple juice and spices. The recipe is here. I recognize it’s not a traditional Carolina-style barbecue sauce that would typically top this sandwich, but I had some left over from an earlier barbecue project and thought it was pretty delicious.

Important background information: I fear that sandwiches are never quite as good when you make them yourself as when someone else makes them for you, even if you are — like me — unbelievable at making sandwiches. Still delicious, mind you, but I think there’s something deep inside our minds that knows the sandwich is a significantly less convenient meal if we’ve had to construct it from its elements, which in turn makes us appreciate the sandwich ever-so-slightly less.

What it looks like:

How it tastes: Good. The pork is outstanding; really caught a lot of the smoke flavor without being overwhelming, and the cut of pork itself turned out to be moist (read: fatty) throughout. The crusty outside parts add nice spice from the rub and some variance to the texture. Real delicious stuff we’re talking here. I mean, it’s pulled pork.

But despite that, and despite tasty and fresh ingredients throughout, I never managed to make a Hall of Fame sandwich in the five pulled-pork sandwiches I endeavored. Maybe if I were preparing them for guests I would have gone a little further to make sure the pork was warm, the barbecue sauce was room temperature and the pickle was crunchy, but at home, negotiating all the ingredients from my refrigerator, I don’t know. I guess I knew the sandwich was going to be awesome if I just piled on the right proportions of each ingredient — and don’t get me wrong, it was awesome — but I never took the type of care I should have to maximize its sandwich potential.

I think the pickle was at least part of the problem. I used sandwich-stacker pickles that had been sitting in my fridge for months, so they were never really crunchy. Plus I think I would have been better off with a couple slices of bread and butter pickles or something, which offer more skin, more surface area, and so, more crunch. The cole slaw — which was good, but unexceptional, just cole slaw — adds some crunch, but the pork is so soft that it’d be nice to have it bookended by crunchy things, and the pickle didn’t pull its weight. Plus it sogged up the bun with pickle juice. Delicious, delicious pickle juice.

The bun was really good though. So was the barbecue sauce. Honestly, if you’re bored, try that recipe. It’s easy to make and spicier than most barbecue sauces (depending on what rub you use, I suppose), plus adding all that vinegar really gives it some tang.

What it’s worth: The pork wasn’t all that cheap and there was a lot of labor involved here, but the pork butt yielded so much meat that the total cost of this sandwich, to me, was probably less than $3. Pretty amazing when you think about it. All you need to do is spend 13 hours smoking a pork butt and commit yourself to only eating pork for a week.

How it rates: 80 out of 100. A tantalizing sandwich with the potential to be an all-time great, but sidetracked by poor work ethic and unable to maximize its talents. There are a ton of baseball players like that, but not many I can find from North Carolina. So I’ll call this the Otis Nixon of Sandwiches, even though Otis Nixon is probably not an 80, but mostly because I’ve always wanted to create “the Otis Nixon of Sandwiches.”