Carnitas are Easy, Inexpensive, and Delicious | Kenji’s Cooking Show

hey everyone it's kenji and we're going to make some carnitas clear our screen first all right oh god this oven uh all right oven door good oven on all right oven set to 275. so uh carnitas is a um uh mexican um sort of like mexican pulled pork um traditionally what you would do is you would take pork shoulder um at least this is what they did you know when i lived in spanish harlem all the mexican places that made carnitas there they would take um big chunks of pork shoulder and then you would slowly cook it in these giant copper kettles um in lard and rendered lard with some flavorings um and then see you know so you're essentially like conf you're doing sort of like the equivalent of like a french confit where you cook and cook meat sort of in its own fat um and the idea is that it slowly breaks down the meat um similar to braising but oil actually transmits transmits heat um at a given temperature oil will actually transmit heat a little bit more slowly than water will so it's actually a little more gentle than brazing so long as you don't go above that boiling point of water um and the idea is that you you cook it slow cook it until uh the meat completely is completely falls apart and sort of tender and then depending on the style of um carnitas you get it would then continue to be cooked and crisped in that fat um so it's sort of fry in that fat afterwards or in some places you would get it and then they would crisp it on a um on a comal you know like on a flat top um once you ordered it um or uh in certain styles it's not crisp at all it's kind of um chopped up with uh you know sometimes with pork fat pork skin chopped up and just served kind of um soft tender in the taco but the style we're going to do today well you could do it any way you want but this this method i have um i basically i cut the pork shoulder so this is this is pork shoulder um aka boston butt um you want all the fat and connective tissue and all that stuff in there because that's all going to kind of melt down and turn into gelatin um as it slow cooks um and the idea is that you're gonna rather than using like a a ton of oil or lard um we're gonna pack the meat into a container um an ovenproof vessel where it barely just fits in a single layer so so like this essentially you can do this in this you can do this in a baking baking sheet anything that's oven proof where the amount of pork you have is going to fit in sort of a single layer all right so then i'm going to take some salt season it up nicely something all over all right pack it down in there i'm gonna go wash my hands a second [Music] so this method i call it no waste carnitas because um you don't really have so you know doing it in a giant vat of pork fat uh is sort of economical when you have a you know when you're doing it at a restaurant or taqueria or if you do this a lot at home or you have a lot of use for that pork fat so you make a lot of you know a lot of tortillas that call for pork batter you make a lot of refried beans that call for pork fat it's not doesn't make so much sense if you cook a lot of different foods and you don't use a ton of pork fat in your own cooking so this method you don't need all that pork fat but you still get a ton of really good porky sort of flavor let's see can you see uh can we see what's going on in there yeah i think we can see what's going on all right so the other flavors i have um i've got some bay leaves i'm gonna break them up and just kind of tuck them in there i've got an onion i'm gonna split it into quarters don't even need to peel it really actually i will peel it because i'm gonna use this for salsa later so a couple quarter onions and we're also just going to kind of nestle in here okay just like that an orange this is a valencia orange you could use like a civ you know a sour orange that would be even better if you have them um but i don't so in orange i'm gonna squeeze the juice over this is a pretty sort of classic um flavor profile although you know carnitas vary a ton like some recipes call for coke or 7up in the marinade but i just like orange juice onion bay leaf garlic some cinnamon just gonna break it up a little bit get the cinnamon stick pieces in there and a few cloves of garlic um in the testing i did you know i tried i tried doing a bunch of carnitas a bunch of different ways i'm both brazing in liquid you know water-based liquid like stock something like that versus braising in fat and i did find that braising it in fat because fat is more gentle because it has a lower specific heat capacity um it doesn't uh pull out as much liquid from the meat i think it also it also has to do with the um the juices from the meat being held in by because the meat gets surrounded with fat um so it works better to do that way so i prefer doing fat over the recipes that call for braising in like a you know water-based liquid all right so we got our garlic onions bay leaf cinnamon stick orange and salt and that's it and so now i'm just going to add some this is just canola oil so you basically want to just add just enough that it's coating the top so it's probably like a quarter cup maybe a half cup of oil so not not like completely swimming in it but just enough to sort of fill up all the little cracks so that the meat um is covered in oil and everything kind of nestles in there and then as this cooks the fat is going to render out and add to that oil um so that's all we do all right and now we cover it um if you did this in like a baking dish you can just cover it tightly in foil we cover it we throw it into a 275 degree oven all right and then we do nothing we just let it sit there until it cooks and that will take about three hours or so maybe a little more maybe a little less but i just checked it ideally what you want is the pork to be just tender enough to sort of start shredding but not so much that it'll excessively dry out or anything let me grab a fork oh yeah all right so you can see the pork rendered all this extra fat and then let's get a chunk out and put it on our cutting board and see what it looks like so you want to be able to kind of push it with a fork and see how it sort of holds its shape but it's still completely shreds when you work at it just a little bit that's a perfect actually oh god it's good all right yeah all right now we're gonna make a couple things to go with this pork um so we wanna let this pork cool um and you could just eat it like this as it is um you know drain it and eat it soft like this um but what we're gonna do is actually um crisp it up we're gonna do a crispy style so [Music] let me pull out these chunks of pork um and if you wanted to you know if you made this like a day ahead you can let this cool to room temperature you know cover it let it go to room temperature and then throw the whole thing in your fridge and it'll actually come out a little bit better um if you let it cool in its own juices than if you pull it out and let it cool like what i'm doing here because when you do it like this you lose a little bit of juice due to evaporative moisture but its pork shoulder is going to be like super juicy pretty much no matter what so you don't have to worry too much about that um and then what we're going to do is we're going to make a quick salsa verde using some of the juices that came out of the pork um and then we're also gonna make some quick pickled red onions which a good condiment to have in your fridge um i don't know i think i think ethan klabowski i'm not sure how to pronounce his name koblowski ethan big lebowski's got um a a video called like why you need to have pickled red onions or like the one condiment i put on everything or something like that about red pickled red onions and frankly he's right um they're always in my fridge pretty much always until my until my wife finds them and then they disappear within a day or two um but but i have a batch of them going like pretty much at all times as many restaurants i worked in also had a batch of pickled red onions going pretty much at all times all right so we're gonna set this aside meanwhile i'm gonna set my oven to broil all right and we're gonna start making our salsa verde this is based pretty much on the same salsa i made the salsa verde video a while back this is another one of those condiments i kind of have very frequently and if you're going to know just one how to make just one single type of salsa this is the one oh and in the interest of efficiency actually let's start getting our pickles with onions going so i've got a cup of vinegar here i'm going to add to that about a cup of water it's just plain distilled white vinegar you could use cider vinegar you could use rice wine vinegar it doesn't matter too much it depends on what flavor you like a couple tablespoons of salt and also about a cup of sugar so equal parts sugar vinegar and water with a pinch of salt in there and because i happen to have them in my fridge i'm going to throw in some thyme sprigs as well you could use like episode you could use nothing you could use bay leaves you could use allspice you could use cloves whatever tickles your fancy all right meanwhile i'm going to get these tomatillos going you can make a salsa like this using regular tomatoes also roma tomatoes would work really well for something like this you do it basically the exact same way where we're going to we're going to broil these to get them nice and charred and then we're going to puree them i love this dish because i mean everything together because it's kind of a streamlined process you know like while the pork is cooling down to the point where we can shred it that's like basically just enough time to make these other elements happen um and then you'll see the onion that we used to braise the pork with that's going to go into our salsa so you don't waste that at all it adds flavor get our tomatillos split in half whenever i cut like this i've been teaching my daughter how to use a knife um since she was like two years older so whenever i cut like this where you know because normally you do this hand where you make a claw and you rest your knife against your knuckles so you don't get yourself sometimes i do for certain things i do this like bridge bridge the vegetable and then cut pull the knife through whenever i do that my daughter's like papa you gotta you gotta make the claw um which is uh generally good advice but there are there are exceptions as there are and everything all right i got my tomatillos on there let's get a jalapeno you could use a serrano you could use a anaheim you know a hatch chili or whatever you want a few cloves of garlic smash smash smash smash skins come off all right now this is just gonna go straight under the broiler meanwhile i'm gonna take my red onion split it in half [Applause] pull off that outermost layer um i i usually [Music] starts feeling kind of gloomy [Music] it won't take long to sing this song and you know just what to say good morning good morning i won't you come with me doesn't that look great all right let me get my knife away um and you know what i apologize i realized i i didn't know how to pronounce ethan's last name and so i kind of just made up uh pretended i didn't instead of learning how to spell it i just kind of and instead of learning how to pronounce it i just kind of made fun of it which is a thing that i shouldn't have done so i apologize ethan um i will try and learn how to pronounce your last name if you give me a pronunciation guide or call me or something and we'll figure it out all right buddy nothing but love for me so we got our tortillas let's get our pork here i need those oh yeah juicy tender get that hint of orange flavor some salsa some pickled onions you can of course just do you know regular uh chopped white onions grilled onions whatever kind of onions you want or no one in onions is a perfectly reasonable approach to this as well let's grab a pinch uh i do like cilantro so i'm gonna grab grab some here i like actually bolted cilantro like this where it gets these little curly leaves it's cilantro that's about ready to give give it seeds it's these curly leaves that are extra soapy in flavor so if you don't like that soapy flavor don't look for cilantro without those you see those different there's these kind of frilly leaves versus the bigger wider you know more traditional looking cilantro leaves all right what do we think of this i think it looks awesome hmm um tell me where you think come on good boy oh man carnitas are the best easy and delicious economical impressive sorry buddy makes people think you did way more work than you actually did right that's a good thing all right my friends guys girls non-binary pals and we'll see you next time bye bye don't worry shabba you get something too here's it [Music] you

Channel: J. Kenji López-Alt

Views: 831,164

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Id: JRlmQdRN0G8

Length: 17min 2sec (1022 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 13 2021