How to make Carnitas - Mexican Fried Pork - Mexican Food

[Music] how i do carnitas is how my grandfather used to do it and he did it how his father did it and how his grandfather did it this recipe is a family tradition and i keep it the same every single time i do it now i know there's other styles of making carnitas you know the michoacan style and all the different you know that they sell like for tacos on the streets but this right here this recipe has a lot of gold behind it for me um it's a little modernized because you know i'm not going to be processing a whole pig like my grandfather used to but this right here is just pork shoulder i have about eight pounds now the weight of how many how much meat you're going to be cooking you know that's up to the size of family that you have and stuff like that but i have some guests coming over i got eight pounds of pork here and this is pork shoulder now when you cut these you want to cut these into chunks for about that big you don't want these too big because it's gonna take you probably a little bit longer to cook it so we have our meat and the only thing else we need is we need a couple limes and some salt that's all my grandfather used to make carnitas and he processed the whole pig and he would just be out there he would season the meat with salt and he would just throw it in the castle a big copper pot that he actually got from guadalajara so i'll just go ahead and squeeze in our lime okay so we're just gonna mix in the lime all around the pork now we're going to just take salt we're going to go ahead and season our pork that's all we need and we don't need nothing else now this only needs salt because we're going to be making tacos out of this i'm going to be chopping this up this is going to be a nice soft delicate piece of pork it's gonna be nice and soft you know shred apart tender it's gonna be nice so all we really need is just to get some salt on there because we're gonna be building tacos with this we're gonna be adding a bunch of flavor salsa fresh produce maybe a pico de gallo just depends on what you know what i come up with maybe some avocado or guacamole however you build your taco this makes fantastic tacos we have everything seasoned up i'm gonna go ahead and just put this in the fridge and we're going to let it sit for about a couple hours until we get out to the disco this right here is a discarder a detox that's what we call it in spanish these come in many different forms there is the cast iron ones the real thick cast iron ones there's like this one right here stainless steel i actually bought this one off of amazon when my grandfather did carnitas he did it in a big castle picasso is a big pot and it's usually made out of copper they say it changes the flavor but i've eaten carinita tacos out in mexico and they're they're fantastic all right so i'm going to start off with the flame on low for right now because we just need to melt our lard this large already soft i had it out in room temperature i ended up using four pounds of lard but that's just because i had a lot of meat usually when i do this i get i can get away with about two or three pounds now you could do this on the stove if you don't need a disc to be able to make this recipe you could do this in a pot on your stove this is just i bought this for that reason we do a lot of get together i do fried chicken in this i do carnitas this is actually an awesome outdoor thing for for events it cooks up a lot of food and i just love having one now as this is melting the temperature that you kind of want to be at starting off is about 350 degrees i'm about 100 degrees away this actually gets hot really quick this burner is a really good burner the reason why we want to be at 350 degrees is because the beginning of the cook we're actually going to be getting a nice crust on that those carnitas we want to seal them you want to get a good color on there because you know this is like a fried and then once we achieve that where they got a nice exterior crust on there then we're going to lower down the temperature and let it slowly cook that way we can finish them off so right on the money a little over 350 but you want to be at least 350 degrees turn it down just a tad bit now the pork meat has been sitting in the fridge for about a couple hours i took them out about 45 minutes ago so these are kind of room temperature go ahead and drop in your pork we're gonna go ahead and make sure that all your pork is submerged so right now the the oil is not so hot because we shocked it we just hit it with a bunch of you know colder ingredients so we're gonna let this come to temp and then we'll just keep moving things around now that we got it back to temperature go ahead and move things around since this one being a stainless steel this one's not as thick as say some of the you know the cast iron ones so it kind of does burn on the bottom so be real careful if you have one of these as you can see like right there it starts to burn just a little bit but it's fine just you know move things around so all we're really doing at this point is we're just going to be cooking this until we get a nice color on the outside of the pork and then we're going to just you know turn it low and just let it do its thing this usually takes about an hour hour and a half depending on how how much pork you have i got a lot of pork in here you know like i said i got family members coming over you know my mom and pops uh see if my dad likes my carnitas like like how my grandfather used to do them just want to move things around you don't want things to burn up on you you know since this is a thin layer of stainless steel but they still need a lot more time you know when i do carnitas it's all about look and it's all about feel so you're going to hit them at high temperature until they look right and then you're going to lower it and then that's when you just let it go and then that's when you go by filth that's all that's how my grandfather's always done it and he's made some fantastic unitas back in the day it's been about 15 to 20 minutes or so we're starting to get a little bit of color on the carnitas but they're still not ready as you can see there's still a lot of pale pork they need more time you know carnitas usually comes out like a nice dark color basically like how this looks right here but all throughout the carnita that's what you want it to look like but yeah these still need more time this is a long process and it can be especially you know depending on how much food you're cooking i don't have the whole eight pounds in here this is probably about five to six pounds i'll just do two batches to finish off that other one but basically all i've been doing is just moving them around little by little as you can see you know this is kind of like the color that you want you know we don't have no sugar or anything this is just seasoned with just salt and lime so maybe the caramelization you know that we're getting is probably from the sugars and the lime but other than that this is just pork and salt really and how when we build our taco that's what's going to add all the extra flavors all the different you know the salsa the the produce if you you can use cabbage you can use a pico de gallo you could use a salsa mandera so many things you can put on the taco to add more flavor to it but with this right here how my grandfather has always done it is just salt and just nicely cooked pork so as these are continuing to cook i'm gonna just let them do the thing keep things moving you know because i don't want things to burn up on me you know i'm starting to see the the color on the pork you know once we get to a certain point then we'll just you know lower everything down and let it slow cook and then just get that beautiful juicy carnita that you know you're used to so it's going to take a while for it to adjust but it's not going to be such a high heat temperature where it's going to keep frying it then it's basically what you kind of want to shoot for is like about 200 and about 200 degrees you kind of just want to let the oil calm down just a little bit now this style carnitas this is how my grandfather did it he's from guadalajara but i know there's you know the style of michoacan you know my uncles and i think that was more like a trend type thing because at this point what they would do is once they get that good color then i would add in all kinds of different things like coke oranges the juices from oranges lemons onions garlic all kinds of different things into it even condensed milk and then they would just you know let it slowly cook like that and that's good i've done that before but uh that's for another video i'm gonna be actually doing that in a castle which is the copper pot so as you can see though the lard is calming down a little bit we're going to just let this cool down for just just a tad bit you know and then slow cook these now from here what we're looking to do is get these nice and tender kind of like the same thing with barbecue you know you you you get a nice bark on your pork on your pork butt and then you you basically just let it do its thing until it hits like about 200 and something degrees internally and it's like really pull apart really tender and it's kind of like the same concept except for we're actually cooking this in lard so this is about what the color you want now when i say that you know go by color and then fill you know once you got the nice golden brown color on the pork then what we're going to be doing is actually lowering the temperature slow cooking it and this happens literally like quick you know all of a sudden it'll look all pale look at some of these pieces they're nice and uh you know dark you know what happens really quick you just gotta eye it as soon as it gets that nice golden brown color you know then then we're ready to just start slow cooking it so at this moment i'm gonna go ahead and lower this down so this part right here actually takes a while you know i'm still probably going to dial this down a little bit [Music] yeah probably about right i got like barely just a tiny bit of flame i'm actually gonna go down about right there so this right here will take about 45 minutes or so to get these nice and tender so just let these slowly cook and then once you get a soft pork then they're done as you can see the lard's calmed down it's not so aggressive we got it on real low temperature let's go ahead and check the temp on this so the temp of the oil is like i said you want to be close to the 200s range [Music] it's about 218. it dropped down quite a bit it's still over 200 but uh that's still low where i can get a nice low cook time on it so uh you don't want this really hot because you don't you know it'll end up drying out and burning so you just want to slowly cook this and this is going to give you a juicy carnita all right so let's go ahead and check for tenderness all right that's that's done yeah it's soft i could be able to shred this apart like nothing so i'm gonna go ahead and take these off we'll get inside and make some tacos so we're gonna start off with our tortilla then we'll get a lot of this chopped carnitas right here [Music] now we're going to go ahead and add a salsa verde with avocado i have been on a salsa verde kick for a couple months already now the condiments you could do pretty much whatever you want on top of it i like to add cabbage to my tacos so we'll go ahead and lay down a little bit of cabbage a little bit of onion and cilantro then just to finish it off just a squeeze of lime [Music] and don't forget your beer this is some good stuff right here cheers y'all this taco is phenomenal these tacos are fantastic you got to try this if you're new to my channel consider hitting the subscribe button that way you can see future videos just like this as always i'll leave the link in the video description and in the comments section so that we can go to my website cookingwithkirby.com to get the full printable recipe i had these recipes they're really good just try them out now y'all be beautiful and take care you ready to get your fat pants on here everyone's a bite you already took the vitals yeah baby try it damn now your daddy almost bit my finger out what do you think what's up i can't even talk

Channel: Cooking with Kirby

Views: 166,054

Keywords: carnitas, Mexican food, how to make carnitas, cooking with kirby, carnitas tacos, carnitas recipe, carnitas estilo michoacan, tacos, pork, pulled pork, pork shoulder, comida mexicana, easy recipes, cinco de mayo

Id: sQ_bqNly8MI

Length: 13min 25sec (805 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 28 2020