Pork Carnitas Recipe - Crispy Slow-Roasted Spiced Pork Recipe

hello this is chef john from food wishes calm with carnitas that's right carnitas translates to little meats which i find more than a little disappointing and that it's such an underwhelming name for such an overwhelmingly delicious recipe but anyway does sound great spanish and despite the name there's nothing small about this recipe big flavor amazing texture and as you'll see produces a taco that is nothing short of fantastic so let's go ahead and get started and first up we need to cut up some pork and for that we're going to use something called pork shoulder also known as pork butt and all we're gonna do is take a knife and cut this up into large chunks and where you see natural separation of the muscles you can just trim that apart and by the way don't discard any fat we'll get to that in a minute so like i said we're gonna take that meat and cut it into nice large pieces I'm going to say about two inches but I'm not going to measure some of these might be two and a quarter some might be one in seven eighths how do I know the real key here is pick a size and stick with it as long as your chunks are relatively the same size the should cook uniformly which is what we're going for here and once our meats been chunked up we're going to go ahead and take any of the fat and just kind of cut that into small pieces see traditionally carnitas has cooked in its own fat like totally immersed in fat we're not going to be able to do that here we're doing a modified version for home use but we do want as much fat as possible so I do want you to cut that fat up into small pieces like that and then what we'll do is we'll transfer that all into a bowl and season it up and of course with something like this there's literally thousands of different ways you could season it so this is just my particular take on it but I think a lot of these are fairly typical so we'll start with some kosher salt we're also going to want some freshly ground black pepper after that we're going to do some cinnamon I'm also going to do some ground cumin and is a little bit of a surprise secret ingredient some Chinese five-spice oh yeah you heard me and if you're not sure what that is I'll talk about that on the blog I'm also going to toss in a couple dailies that I broke in half just for better flavor distribution I'm also going to toss in a handful of peel the whole garlic cloves and then we're going to introduce some orange in two different ways we're going to want to do some orange peel and I literally mean the peel all right you don't want too much of that white part so just take a potato peeler and just peel off some nice big pieces like that and then once we have the peel do margin there just go ahead and cut that in half and squeeze in the juice and that's going to add a little bit of moisture and sweetness I know Thank You chef obvious and then after the orange last but not least some olive oil and you don't need to be using your fancy expensive extra-virgin here just regular olive oils perfect the lighter the better and we will take a spoon and we will mix that thoroughly so people like to add different chili powders at this point some different dried herbs thyme oregano but for me this is the mixture I prefer but you decide you are the jefe of your carnitas so we'll mix that up thoroughly at that point we will transfer it into some kind of heavy-duty 9 by 12 or 13 baking dish or roasting pan and once that's transferred in go ahead and take a spoon or a spatula and just make sure everything's kind of evenly distributed okay it's not that big of a deal but you don't want like all your bay leaves in one spot or all your garlic in one spot just kind of mix it up and then what we'll do is we'll transfer this onto a sheet pan and then wrap it very very tightly in heavy duty foil and you know I love my heavy duty foil if you don't have that you'll have to use two or three pieces a regular foil which will work but just make sure it's really tight so what we'll do once that pans ready is we'll place that in the middle of a 275 degree oven for about three and a half hours or until that meat is absolutely fork tender let me go ahead and pull mine out and take a look and of course the exact time will depend on how big your chunks were but if you do them about the same size I did three and a half hours should be about right but you'll know because a fork will slide into that meat with like zero effort so that is absolutely perfect meat tender girl clothes and anything else in there tender and we're ready for final assembly so next up we want to separate everything we're going to transfer the meat into some kind of colander over a bowl and once that meats been removed we can go ahead and get rid of the garlic cloves and orange peels and bay leaves and of course if I was a great food stylist I would have saved those orange peels for the final shots but you know what I didn't think of that that's okay I'm over it already and then we'll go ahead and pour that braising liquid into the colander also which of course is going to leave us with two things a strainer full of amazing meats and of course the juices in fat underneath which we're going to use in a second so don't throw that away at that point we're going to transfer our meat back into our pan for the last and maybe most important step the Crispian also sometimes referred to around here is the crispa fication so all we need to do dump that drained pork back into the pan we will skim off a little bit of that reserved fat from our bowl of juice and just let over the top I try to get a little on every piece and then all we need to do is put this under a broiler set on high about five or six inches under the heat until it's crispy and if you want what you do after four or five minutes pull it out take a look at it and maybe drizzle over a little more fat which is what I'm doing here and we'll push that back under the heat for another few minutes until it looks like this that surface your crisp up beautifully and not only should it look amazing is she really sound amazing that service is going to get all crispy and crunchy yet underneath you're still going to have the softest most succulent most melt-in-your-mouth pork you've ever tasted and what will be very tempting to just eat it right out of the pan like that I decided to pile it up to something a little prettier for presentation and then another optional step which you really should do you can drizzle over some of that braising liquid okay some people even like to reduce it down and pour it over totally fine great idea but either way it's going to be magnificent and at that point our carnitas are officially done and ready to eat but before I build a taco I could eat one more pieces like this and don't get me wrong the flavors amazing but above and beyond the taste like I said the magic is really in the texture it's that combination of crispy surface and moist buttery melt-in-your-mouth pork that just can't be beat and then let's finish up in style by making one carnitas taco you're going to of course want a nice warm corn tortilla will top that with a few chunks of our pork just kind of smash them apart a little bit a lot of people like to chop this I do not I like the bigger pieces and then all you're really going to want to enjoy with this is a little bit of salsa of course we're using our fire roasted cherry tomato salsa and I'm also going to do a little bit of diced white onion just a touch let's do a little bit of freshly chopped cilantro and maybe a little fresh lime to garnish if you want a little extra acidity to cut the fat in that pork but really that's it we're strain is key here of course having said that I hate when people tell people how they see things so you put what you want in here and that is just an unbelievably amazing bite of food and I have no way of knowing if there's actually tacos in heaven I mean for that matter I don't even know if there's heaven in heaven but if there is and if they do this has to be the taco they serve okay so I really do hope you give this a try head the food was calm for all the agreement amounts and more info as usual and as always enjoy

Channel: Food Wishes

Views: 1,576,195

Rating: 4.8917627 out of 5

Keywords: Carnitas (Dish), Pork (Food), Roasting (Culinary Technique), Recipe (Website Category), Mexican Food (Cuisine), Cooking (Interest), meat, crispy, chef, john, foodwishes, Kitchen, Restaurant

Id: XUbXrOoj2J8

Length: 6min 58sec (418 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 06 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/flrancid]

Chef John is the man. love all of his recipes (from before keto)

[u/pablolanke]

From FoodWishes

Ingredients for 6 servings Carnitas: 3 pounds boneless pork butt (shoulder), rind removed, cut into 2-inch cubes 1 tbsp kosher salt (this needs to be salted generously!) 1 tsp fresh ground black pepper 3/4 tsp cinnamon 1 tsp ground cumin 1/2 tsp Chinese 5-spice 1 orange, peel and juice 8 cloves peeled whole garlic 2 bay leaves, torn in half 1/4 cup olive oil - Roast at 275 F. for about 3 1/2 hours or until fork tender

[u/luxmagnetic]

I actually made this on Sunday and didn't really love the cinnamon flavor. It's pretty overwhelming in combination with the five spice, which is also pretty strong. If you're on the fence about loving those two spices, I'd halve the amount you use! Or maybe just omit and increase the other spices. I do have to say that the flavor is much better after crisping the carnitas but still kind of overpowering.

[u/[deleted]]

His intonations are absolutely maddening.

[u/Thursday-]

I made this last night it was good, I recommend it.

I also had previously made his fire-roasted salsa that is mentioned in the video, complete opposite experience. I followed the recipe exactly (aside from only using 1 jalapeno) and it turned out awful. It was so spicy even though I used 1/3 of the amount of jalapeno and there was way too much lime (1 whole squeezed lime), beyond that there was no flavor.