Why It Works
- Packing the pork and aromatics into a just-big-enough baking dish allows the pork to cook mostly in its own fat.
- Using the rendered cooking juices to make a salsa verde eliminates waste.
- Broiling the braised carnitas instead of frying makes it easy to crisp up a big batch.
Carnitas.The undisputed king of the taco cart. The Mexican answer to American pulled pork, they should be, at their best, moist, juicy, and ultra-porky with the rich, tender texture of a French confit, with plenty of well-browned crisp edges. The most famous version of the dish comes from Michoacán, in central Mexico. Delicately flavored with a hint of orange, onion, and occasionally some warm herbs or spices like cinnamon, cloves, bay leaf, or oregano, all it needs is a squeeze of lime, some chopped onion and cilantro, and simple hot salsa to form a snack of unrivaled deliciousness.
The best part is thatcarnitas couldn't be easier to make.All you have to do is take whole pork shoulders, chop them up and season them, then dump them into your five-gallon vat of hot lard in order to slowly break down the collagen and connective tissue. Then all that's left to do is shred the meat, crisp it, and toss it into tacos andyou've got some comidas fit for el rey.The more batches of carnitas you make, the tastier they become, as the fat picks up flavor from every previous batch.
But what's that you say? You don'thavea five-gallon vat of lard kept at a steady 200°F (93°C) in your kitchen? Oddly enough,neither do I.
Of course, there are ways to work around this fact. The best is to buy just as much lard as you need—say a quart or two—and do a small-scale version of the real deal by placing the seasoned pork in a Dutch oven, covering it with the hot fat, and cooking it slowly on the stove top. The texture comes out perfectly, though the flavor suffers a bit. Rather thanaddingflavor to the pork, the brand new lard actuallydilutes it.Without the benefit of cooking multiple batches to build up flavor in the cooking fat the way a realtaqueriacan, your carnitas will never be as good as the real deal.
Not to mention that you end up with an extra quart or two of flavored lard to store until the next time you make carnitas. Maybe that's not a problem for people likeChichi, who seem to have an unlimited capacity to find novel uses forlard, but what are the rest of us to do?
Shedding the Fat: The Best Way to Cook Your Pork Shoulder
There are pretty much two things that happen when you cook a fatty, connective tissue-laden cut of meat like a pork shoulder in low temperature fat (which I define as under 250°F (120°C)):
- Connective tissue breaks down.Beginning at around 176°F (80°C),* the proteins that make up the connective tissue (mostlycollagen) will slowly break down and convert to gelatin. Unlike collagen, which forms tough, fibrous strands, gelatin will not coagulate at serving temperature, instead acting to thicken liquids, allowing them to lubricate muscle fibers, and giving food a luscious mouthfeel. But the breakdown process takes time. At 176°F, it can take upwards of 8 to 12 hours, whereas at 200°F or so, this time can be reduced to closer to 2 hours.
- Muscle proteins contract, expelling moisture.Muscle fibers begin to contract at around 120°F (50°C), squeezing liquid out of their ends. They contract tighter and tighter as the temperature gets higher, until eventually the liquid is almost completely expelled. Unlike collagen breakdown—which is time dependent—the amount of liquid expelled from muscle fibers is related pretty much only to the temperature they are heated to.
*Some breakdown will take place at even lower temperatures, but it's so slow as to be completely impractical without the benefits of something like asous vide immersion circulator.
So the key to great carnitas (and Frenchconfit, for that matter) is to heat the meat to a specific temperature, and try and keep it there long enough for the collagen to break down, while minimizing the amount of moisture lost. The large quantity of fat helps to accomplish this in a few ways.
First off, it coats the food, making it more difficult for water to escape. The fact that the fat is hydrophobic (it repels water) helps it perform this function even better. Secondly, it acts as a temperature buffer. A large quantity of oil will heat and cool very slowly, helping to deliver a more even, consistent temperature. Finally, it helps deliver fat-soluble flavor molecules, like the oils in orange zest or bay leaves.
A lot of you may be asking: Doesn't the fat actually penetrate into the meat and make it juicier? This idea has been pretty conclusively proven false, and is easy to prove to yourself: Weigh the fat in a pan before and after slow-cooking meat in it. The mass will actuallyincrease, indicating that the meat is actuallylosingfat, not gaining it.
So the question is, is there a way to achieve all of those goals without resorting to buying a separate container of lard?
Watered Down: Why Braising in Stock Isn't Effective
Lots of home recipes for carnitas attempt to solve this problem by replacing the lard with a liquid, usually a combination of stock and orange juice. I decided to give this method a go, comparing it side-by-side with the traditional method. The pork on the left was cooked in lard, while the one on the right was braised in stock. Both batches were cooked in the same oven, at the same temperature, and both of them came up to around 208°F (98°C) during the cooking process.
The difference is not immediately obvious, but the stock-cooked pork on the right shows some telltale signs of dryness: It shreds into fine threads rather than moist chunks, and the top edges show a flat, matte-like finish rather than the moist gloss of the fat-based version.
Tasting the samples confirmed what my eyes told me:The stock-based version was definitely dry and overcooked.
So how could two pieces of pork, cooked for the same amount of time at the same temperature have cooked to different degrees? A lot of it has to do with the hydrophobic property of the oil I already mentioned—it helps keep the liquid inside the meat. The other reason has to do with heat capacity—the amount of heat that is required to change the temperature of a body by a given amount. Water has a heat capacity of about four kilojoules per kilogram degree Kelvin, meaning that in order to raise one kilogram of water by one degree, you need four kilojoules of energy. (For the record, that's 1/302,000 the amount of energy you'd need to provide per second in order to send aDeLoreanback to the future.) Oil, on the other hand, has a heat capacity of about half that amount.
Here's what it boils down to:Given a setmassof oil and water at the same temperature, the oil will have about half the amount of energy as the water. This means that foods cooking in a givenvolumeof oil at a specific temperature will cook more slowly than food cooking in water at the exact same temperature.
No wonder the stock-braised pork was coming out dryer than the oil-cooked version:Oil is a much better temperature buffer than water.To get moist and tender pork, my cooking medium would need to have a relatively high proportion of fat to water.
A Tight Fit: Why You Should Switch to a Smaller Baking Dish
A new question entered my mind: Why do I need all the liquid in the first place? Is it possible that the only reason many home recipes use a lot of liquid is to emulate the real deal? Just because using lots of oil makes sense in a taqueria setting, does it necessarily mean that it makes sense in my own kitchen?
Here's what I was thinking: Rather than have my pork pieces swimming in a lot of fat,why not just cook them in a much smaller container, fitting them together tightly enough that they'll cook in their own fat as it renders out?As long as I'm careful with the temperature, the pork should have enough fat in it to cook plenty slow, right?
I seasoned up another batch of pork, and rather than placing it in a Dutch oven on the stovetop to heat, I placed it directly in a baking dish. I chose the smallest one I could find that I could squeeze the pork into and added just enough oil to cover the top surface and prevent it from drying out. This ended up being about a quarter cup. After tightly covering the dish with foil, I placed it directly into a 275°F (135°C) oven to slowly heat up. It reached 208°F after about an hour, and held there until I pulled it out two hours later (a total of three hours). Here's what I got:
Looking pretty good.
Before I even tasted it, I wanted to make sure that my theory about the fat ratio in the cooking liquid held, so I drained the pork in a fine-mesh strainer set over a bowl to figure out exactly how much fat and liquid were expelled in the cooking process.
Turns out that the ratio of the cooking medium was about 60% fat and 40% water-based liquid—much better than the nearly 90% water-based liquid I'd had in the stock-braised version! And the proof was in the pork:This batch was every bit as tender as the batch I'd cooked in lard.
What's more,it was actually even more flavorful than the lard-cooked version.With completely fresh lard, a lot of the flavor of the pork and the seasonings gets diluted. Only by repeatedly using the same lard over many many batches of carnitas will it actually become flavorful enough to enhance the flavor of the meat. By not adding any extra liquid and very little extra fat, all the flavor of the pork and seasonings stays right where it belongs:in the pork.
In order to further maximize flavor, I skimmed off the excess fat and added it back to the meat, which I shredded into large-ish chunks. The liquid I reserved to use as the base for a quick and easy tomatillo-based salsa. Look, Ma,no waste!
Tacklin' Cracklin': How to Crisp Up Your Carnitas
The final step: crisping the edges. Many lard-based recipes call for deep frying the pork pieces in the rendered lard. I couldn't do that because I didn't have enough rendered fat. Cooking them in a dry skillet on the stovetop works pretty well—they've got enough fat that they'll crisp up without burning or sticking. It does, however, require you to cook in batches and lend a lot of attention to the pan.
By far the easiest method is to simply shred the pork, put it on a foil-lined baking sheet or back in the baking dish, and throw it under the broiler.After it develops a nice crust, I like to stir it back in and broil it again, to double up on the crispy bits.
The best part of this method is that it allows you to crisp up a small portion of carnitas in the toaster oven, or to do a full party-sized batch in the regular broiler.
Since the meat is well seasoned and quite fatty, it also lasts quite a long time and freezes well: You can store it in the fridge for at least three days before the final crisping step, or in the freezer for several months. If you freeze it in the right shape (wide and flat), you can even broil it directly from the freezer with no real loss in quality.
July 2010
Recipe Details
No-Waste Tacos de Carnitas With Salsa Verde Recipe
Prep25 mins
Cook4 hrs 10 mins
Active45 mins
Total4 hrs 35 mins
Serves4to 6 servings
Ingredients
2 medium onions, divided
1/2 cup (8g) chopped fresh cilantro leaves and tender stems
3 pounds boneless pork shoulder, cut into 2-inch cubes
1 tablespoon (8g) kosher salt, plus more to taste; for table salt, use half of the volume or an equal amount by weight
1 medium orange
6 cloves garlic, halved, divided
2 bay leaves
1 cinnamon stick, broken into three or four pieces
1/4 cup (60ml) vegetable oil
6 medium tomatillos (about 1 1/2 pounds, 0.7kg), husks removed and halved
2 jalapeño peppers, stem removed and halved lengthwise
24 corn tortillas
1 cup (150g) crumbled queso fresco
3 limes, cut into wedges
Directions
Adjust oven rack to middle position and preheat oven to 275°F (135°C). Cut one onion into fine dice and combine with cilantro. Refrigerate until needed. Split remaining onion into quarters. Set aside. Season pork with 1 tablespoon salt and place in a 9- by 13-inch glass baking dish. The pork should fill the dish with no extra space. Split orange into quarters and squeeze juice over pork. Nestle squeezed orange pieces into dish. Add 2 onion quarters, 4 cloves garlic, bay leaves, and cinnamon stick to dish. Nestle everything into an even layer. Pour vegetable oil over surface. Cover dish tightly with aluminum foil and place in oven. Cook until pork is fork tender, about 3 1/2 hours.
Set large fine-mesh strainer over a 1-quart liquid measuring cup or bowl. Using tongs, remove and discard orange peel, onion, garlic, cinnamon stick, and bay leaves. Transfer pork, rendered fat, and cooking liquid to strainer. Let drain for 10 minutes. Transfer pork back to baking dish. You should end up with about 1/2 cup cooking liquid and 1/2 cup fat. Using a flat spoon or fat separator, skim fat from surface and add back to pork. Shred pork into large chunks with fingers or two forks. Season to taste with salt. Refrigerate until ready to serve. Transfer remaining cooking liquid to medium saucepan.
Add tomatillos, remaining 2 onion quarters, remaining 2 garlic cloves, and jalapeños to saucepan with strained pork liquid. Add water until it is about 1 inch below the top of the vegetables. Bring to a boil over high heat, reduce to a simmer, and cook until all vegetables are completely tender, about 10 minutes. Blend salsa with immersion blender or in a countertop blender until smooth. Season to taste with salt. Allow to cool and refrigerate until ready to use.
To serve: Preheat broiler to high with oven rack 4 inches below heating element. Broil pork until brown and crisp on surface, about 6 minutes. Remove pork, stir with a spoon to expose new bits to heat, and broil again until crisp, 6 more minutes. Tent with foil to keep warm.
Meanwhile, heat tortillas. Preheat an 8-inch cast iron skillet over medium-high heat until hot. Working one tortilla at a time, dip tortilla in bowl filled with water. Transfer to hot skillet and cook until water evaporates from first side and tortilla is browned in spots, about 30 seconds. Flip and cook until dry, about 15 seconds longer. Transfer tortilla to a tortilla warmer, or wrap in a clean dish towel. Repeat with remaining tortillas.
To eat, stack two tortillas on top of each other. Add two to three tablespoons carnitas mixture to center. Top with salsa verde, chopped onions and cilantro, and queso fresco. Serve with lime wedges.
Special Equipment
9- by 13-inch glass baking dish, large fine-mesh strainer, medium saucepan, fat separator (optional), immersion or countertop blender
Notes
Carnitas can be prepared through step 3 up to three days in advance. Pork can be crisped up straight from the refrigerator. You can lower the heat in your salsa verde by removing the seeds from the jalapeños, or omitting them entirely before simmering.
Read More
- Pantry Essentials: All About Salsa
- These 4 Mexican Braises Will Jump-Start Your Fall
- Tacos
- Mexican
- Pork Shoulder
- Pork Mains