Carnitas! (bet you thought it would be turkey)

Carnitas Taco Night!  Who doesn’t love taco night.  Given the week you’d think it would be a Thanksgiving recipe.  We’ll get to that, but first let’s hit the meal we did the Wednesday evening before the big day.  We were going to order pizza for our guests’ arrival, but things worked out and I had the time to get these bad boy carnitas tacos on the table.  So let’s go!!

The Prep:

Pork shoulder.  It’s quite the hunk-o-meat.  I got a boneless 5 pounder, which it turns out could probably feed the entire OWS crowd.  If they ate meat, that is.  More for the rest of us.

• Get at it with the boning knife.  Skin off, cut meat into rough cubes an inch across.  Trim off fat and silverskin.
• Toss with canola oil and S&P.
• In batches, sear on the stove top in a big pot.  Don’t crowd or they’ll steam, not brown.  Let them get all good and caramelized.  Evacuate into a bowl.
• Deglaze pot with a good slug of white wine.  Scrape up all the bits, then add a box of chicken stock.
• Now: 2 cinnamon sticks, lots of chili powder, a generous few shakes of cumin, 3 or so bay leaves, lots of cracked pepper.  4 or 5 garlic cloves, smashed to a paste.   Take a vegetable peeler to an orange and drop in a nice big peel of zest.
• Add all the chunks.  Cover pot, and then into a slow 225° oven for 3 or 4 hours.  Yes, hours.  Stir every so often.  Keep adding more chicken stock if it starts to dry out.  I ended up using another whole box here.
• After a few hours, your chunks fall apart into awesome porktastic carnitas.   Let sit (covered) outside the oven, and drizzle with chicken stock if it’s dry at all.  Oh and take out the bay leaves.

Serve with your favorite taco fixins’, on a roll with some pickles, or right out of the pot.  Here I did tacos with corn salsa (corn, red onion, jalapeño, cilantro and S&P), sour cream with chipotle, jack cheese and some shredded red cabbage.

A few notes:

Be aggressive trimming the shoulder.  We’ll lose up to 1/5 of it, but that’s ok.  Some people leave most of the fat in, but that’s a bit much even for me.

During the stove-top browning — if your pot gets all black and burned on the bottom, skip the deglazing.  We don’t want all that bitter burned stuff in our braising liquid.  Just start the braise in a new pot.  It will be fine.  Next time, keep the heat a touch lower when searing.

With all the chicken stock we are adding here (which btw adds back some of the body we lose by trimming away a good part of the fat), you may want to run with a low sodium version.   I go for the Kitchen Basics.

The Takeaway:

Just the aroma alone is enough to make you want to do this again and again.  And this shoulder yielded a dinner for 7, a leftover dinner for 3, plus a half a freezer bag more for weeknight meals.  It’s not a quick process what with taking down the shoulder, the searing and then the braising.  But your patience will be rewarded.   Get to zen with the pork shoulder, people.  It’s all about good.

• braising
• carnitas
• i thought he was doing turkey
• le creuset
• pork shoulder