Rick Bayless Carnitas

lots of people say their favorite bite of food when they visit mexico is carnitas carnitas tacos one of my favorite things in the whole wide world and i'm going to show you three paths to get to perfect carnitas now in my way of thinking there are basically three ways to make carnitas the first way is the way they would do it in a restaurant at taqueria that specializes in carnitas and that starts with a whole pig you cut it up into primals and then you get this great big cauldron they call it a casso copper castle and fill it with lard you get it super hot drop those primal cuts of pork in there it just erupts and you start to that really hot kind of frying at the beginning but you notice that over the next couple of hours the temperature drops and then the pork coasts slowly to tenderness juicy tenderness and also brownness that's pretty much beyond most of us in our homes even though i've tried to do it in my house and i've used a turkey fryer and all that sort of stuff i'm not sure i recommend it okay so the flip side of that going completely to the opposite extreme you could do what i call the home style which is to take some pork pork shoulder in this case and sort of braise it cover it in an oven until it's tender then uncover it raise the temperature of the oven and then just turn it in its own rendered fat until it's beautifully browned that is delicious it just has a slightly different texture than the pork fat that i mean the pork that is cooked in its own fat so if you want to get that texture there is another way you can do it the third way and it's sort of well i i won't say it's very common but i can show you how to use pork fat and i call it reverse carnitas because we're just going to let it coast to complete tenderness submerged in some of that pork fat and then brown it right before serving it gives you that unmistakable carnitas texture as well as browned flavor so i'm going to work through the last two methods of making carnitas with you today so i'm going to use a pork shoulder roast this one is a boneless one because i think that is the easiest thing to to use at home to turn out the best carnitas and oftentimes those roasts will come in netting like this so first i'm just going to cut this guy in half lengthwise and the pull the netting off because i don't i don't need that for what i'm doing here it's not we're not really roasting this as much as braising these two pieces here so pull that netting off like that and then we'll get rid of that and i'm going to fit this into a pan this is an 11 by 7 pan the only thing that i will say is that you just need a pan into which this will fit tightly you want it to not have a lot of space around it so this looks like it's fitting in there very nicely now our next thing to do after this i'm just going to wash my hands off here because i put it all up put them all over that pork and the next thing that we're going to do is to have some add-ins okay so my favorite place for carnitas in mexico city puts the mexican oregano bay leaves black pepper garlic into the fat that they're cooking the carnitas in so i'm going to add those things to this but i'm also going to use for a little bit of moisture this is not a true braise but for a little bit of moisture here i'm going to do a little orange juice and i want about a half a cup here and if i wasn't using the orange juice then i would be using water just put water here okay so it's going to take me one more piece of this orange to get to the amount that i need yeah that's just about a quarter of a cup there so we've got that i need to cut these uh garlic i've got the garlic already peeled here but i want to cut the pieces in half so that i can distribute them evenly over all of the pork and i am using the bay leaf oregano and black pepper and i will say that the black pepper i like to have crushed but not finely ground so i just have the black pepper corns here that i'll put in a mortar and a little molcajete here and crush those that will that won't take very long because all i want to do is really just break them so very coarsely ground black pepper i don't know if you know this but if you put whole black peppercorns in something they won't give it very much flavor at all you really do need to crack them at least for them to distribute their flavor completely through things okay so that's about enough for me right there okay salt is a very important part of this and i'm gonna go for a measured amount i like to start here with two teaspoons of salt so i'm going to sprinkle one teaspoon now over this side of the pork shoulder roast and then flip that guy over do that same amount on the other side just to have distributed the salt nicely here okay one more douse of salt and then next we'll go on here the orange juice which i will just kind of drizzle all around the pork and then i don't want these things to dry up the little leaves of course and so i'm just going to put them kind of around where they will touch the liquid sort of the same thing for the garlic here just sort of nestling it down and then we'll sprinkle this oregano over everything and around making sure that some of it gets down into that orange juice and lastly we have the cracked pepper so it's already looking really beautiful now so i think you'll agree with that now here's the time that we have to talk about those other add-ins that you probably have all heard about there are recipes out there that call for coca-cola or some kind of cola beverage i don't know if people do the the the bickering back and forth about coke versus pepsi or whatever but i just know that there are people who put that in to their carnitas recipe other people will put sweetened condensed milk in now both of those things are sweet and yes they will kind of reduce and they will coat the outside of the pork and give it a nice brown look and especially when you're doing that real classic carnitas and in the taqueria style where you're working with the big casso a lot of people will put it in there to promote browning you can do it if you want i don't think it's absolutely necessary and i know a lot of people who don't do it okay so for this home style version of the carnitas then we have to get this pork tender so it looks beautiful i'm gonna cover it up i'm going to let it cook just gently in a 300 degree oven for about an hour and a half until it's completely fork tender then we'll uncover it and we'll brown it in a hot oven so i'm going to slide this into our oven and i'll show you what it looks like after an hour and a half okay it's been an hour and a half here so let's take a look at this that's usually the right amount of time for getting this fork tender see and you notice that some of the moisture of the pork has come out it shrunk just a little bit i want to make sure that it's completely tender so just kind of like go into it a little bit here and see if it's yeah yeah it's it's going to be fine because it's tender enough now but we've got another like 40 or 50 minutes worth of cooking here with this so i've turned the temperature on the oven now up to 450 degrees and i'm going to put this back in the oven and let it cook until the all of that moisture has evaporated it's just going to have fat in the pan that usually takes about 30 minutes at this higher temperature so i'll show you what that looks like in about half an hour now version number two the what i call reverse style carnitas of cooking it slow first in fat and then browning right before you serve it you can actually approach that in two different ways the easiest way for most people is just to use a slow cooker and it also eliminates having to have lots and lots of pork fat um i'm going to show you the sous vide version after this for those of you that have bought these immersion circulators but let's just go through the slow cooker version first so i have the same three pounds of boneless pork shoulder roast here but this time cut into large pieces they're about three inches or so i'm going to sprinkle them with the two teaspoons of salt using a pair of tongs here to turn them around and make sure that they're getting salted on all sides here i got one more teaspoon of salt to go and then for this version we're gonna need about two cups of pork lard so what do you do for that you go to a butcher that actually renders pork lard yes you can find a pork lard in little bricks a hydrogenated version of pork lard that is sold by a national brand and i don't recommend it number one it doesn't have any flavor and number two hydrogenating pork lard is probably the worst thing you can do for your health so go to a butcher go to a mexican grocery store if you go back to the meat counter and you say you want manteca they will oftentimes give you the monteca that they have left over from making carnitas in the grocery store that stuff is super delicious so you have some opportunity to get really good pork fat or pork lard now you could also save trimmings off of your own pork and then render it in a low oven in in until you get this beautiful stuff so if you're that kind of cook you may want to make your own pork flour okay so we've got the salt on here now i have already melted two cups of beautiful pork lard here i uncovered that it just fills the room with this sort of roast pork flavor this is lard that we get from the fellow that raises all the pigs for our restaurants i've got the same uh spices and herbs and and garlic that we used in the first one crushed black pepper the mexican oregano bay leaves and garlic i'm just going to put those into the lard first i'm not going to use orange juice on this one i'm going to use the slices of orange instead so i'm just cutting the orange up cut it in half first and then just slice those in about quarter inch slices and we'll put those down in here of course i store i always have a little bit of this fresh rendered pork lard in my refrigerator and so i um just brought it out put it in here when it was on high and let it melt in there that's the easiest way to do it and then you just take the pieces of salted pork and you just nestle them down in here and with that two cups which isn't an awful lot you should have enough to just barely cover this meat so we'll see how good we do i always say in the recipe about a cup and a half to two cups will usually do it and then of course you can reuse this pork lard after you're finished and okay so you can see what it looks like that's what i'm looking for there's a little bit of the pork that's just sort of sticking out a bit from the top but basically it's all submerged that was two cups of pork lard right there okay so we'll put the top on we'll leave it on high for about four hours until the pork is tender now you may be wondering if you've never done this before why would you do that why don't you just do the the braising version of it it's because the pork cooked in its own fat but if you went to culinary school or knew a lot about european-style cooking you would call the comfy method cooking in fat it gives you a different texture and it is the most succulent texture that you could have so we've now got the slow cooker version going i'm going to come back and show you how to use sous vide for the same kind of thing to even give the best texture possible so if you're one of those people that is lucky enough to have an immersion circulator and they've certainly come way down in price and i know a lot of you have gotten them because working with sous-vide can give you amazing textures and flavors so i'm going to show you how to do this same kind of reverse carnitas that we started in the slow cooker but do it with the immersion circulator here got to stand up and there okay so we've got the pork cut exactly like we would do for the slow cooker i'm going to put the two teaspoons of salt in it and turn it around i've already crushed the black pepper here and the bay leaves and the oregano are all ready to put in here but instead of submerging them in the fat we are going to put a little bit of fat in the bag and then seal it and i'll talk to you about that part of it too okay so it here i'm going to add the crushed black pepper and oregano i've got the sliced up orange that will just get mixed into all of this and the halved garlic cloves okay i'm going to do this with a latex glove on because i'll be able to mix everything well and then pack it into bags that i don't have a bag for my circulator that is big enough to actually get into the vacuum sealer that i'm going to use so i'm going to do it into two different bags here so dig in there and just mix everything together so that the pork is nicely evenly seasoned and then i have this fresh rendered pork lard here and i'm going to add about a cup of it so this version of it using the immersion circulator is i'm going to use less lard than the slow cooker version so we'll mix that in and then we have to pack all of this into bags and seal those bags with as little air as possible now if you have an immersion circulator but you don't have a vacuum sealer like the the food saver that kind of a thing then you could use just a heavy i'd like a freezer bag and you'd pack everything in there press out all the air that you can get out but don't seal the bag then drop it into the water of your immersion circulator there and then when it gets all the way in there then seal the bag because it'll press all the air out now i have a vacuum sealer so i'm going to pack this into a couple of bags here now this is a little trick that for those of you that have have worked with this you probably know that packing everything into bags like this can be really frustrating because you don't have any way to hold the bag up so if you have a one quart container like this you could just simply do it that way and put it i think this will be about the right amount for about half of it there i've turned the top of the bag down so we'll put all of this stuff in here and you have to pack it way down in here so that it's very tight that's about half of it there a few more pieces of orange on the top a couple more pieces in this one so i'm going to get rid of the of the glove now not until i pick up that one piece of stray garlic get rid of the glove pull these guys up so that i can then actually pull it out and shake it down in there and i'm going to take it over to my vacuum sealer here and lay it across and then [Music] okay so those are vacuum sealed now we have the immersion circulator set at 185 degrees which is what we're going to cook at here and lower the bags into the water yeah that's good and then i have a piece of plastic wrap i recommend this highly to keep the evaporation from happening here because we're going to cook this now for eight hours at 185 degrees and there we have it now it's just the waiting game let's check the carnitas here in the oven so that's more or less what i'm looking for there's a tiny bit of the juice for that the exude was exuded during the cooking of the pork still there but it's mostly just clear fat on the top but i think this is the time that we need to kind of break this into bigger pieces [Music] so you notice that it started browning some on the top so i'm going to flip everything over and then for the next say 20 minutes or so in this 450 degree oven i'm gonna turn it and until we have beautifully browned pieces of carnitas okay back into the oven we go okay i think we better recap here this home style version was an hour and a half at 325 degrees uncovered 450 degrees for about half an hour and now we're on our final countdown with this turning it every few minutes as the piece is brown in the fat there i'm going to put this back in for another 10 minutes or so that's what it's really going to need we've got the slow cooker version here that's four hours cooking in its own fat with all of those glorious aromatic flavorings that are in there and we've got the sous vide method in a vacuum sealed bag for eight hours and somehow by television magic these are all going to be ready at the same time so that we can present them side by side on a platter and you can see what they're like so let's go start here with the sous vide one okay the i'm going to just take one of the bags out now for those of you that work with sous vide you you probably already know this that the best way to cool this down is in an ice bath and i highly recommend that i don't not have the time to do that right now but it's way easier for you if you'll just completely cool this down you could make this three or four days ahead and then you could keep it in the sealed bags in your refrigerator and all will be good until you're ready to do that final browning of it when you open the bags if you have cooled it all down you'll notice that there will be what we call purge in the bag it will be some of the pork broth basically there and separate from that will be the the rendered pork fat that's in there and you want to keep those two things separate because you'll want to use that fat for doing the brown the final browning but just for our purposes today i'm going to let this go hot here and we'll set that one over there i'm going to pull the slow cooker around so that i can have easy access to it and you can just look at it here so there's not much going on it doesn't look very interesting at this point but you will also notice when you start getting down in here that there will be some of the pork broth at the bottom of this but of course the juices are all floating on the top here i'm going to take the easiest fat for me to get to here i mean you could also use a little bit of fresh rendered pork fat in here to do the browning with but the easiest one for me to get to right now is going to be this fat that's here so i'll take some of that off as i'm always telling you to do i was heating this pan up a little bit you can see that or you can hear that there was a little bit of that pork broth that got in there and that's what that sizzle is there we'll take our i'm going to just dry this with a little bit of paper towel to make sure that these pieces are dry enough to get a really beautiful sear on them so we've got this now over a medium heat here and i'm going to lay these pieces in they don't look very delicious at this point but i'll guarantee you that with this next step of browning they'll get really beautiful and out of the slow cooker we will take a few of these pieces and lay them down in here to brown as well [Music] so [Music] i don't think that my kitchen has ever smelled better than it does right now three different styles of carnitas we've got the home style there was a braised and then roasted and turned in its own fat we've got the sous vide version which is super succulent we've got the version that was done in the slow cooker but browned when you look at them here they all sort of look the same they'll be a little bit different textures in each one of them but man they're all good so choose your style the one that you want that you feel the most comfortable with and then set it out with some roasted tomatillo sauce i'm just telling you what i like to have with my carnitas tacos roasted tomatillo salsa some guacamole and some lime to squeeze on i always like to put out a little bit of of some cilantro just to put on top of it but this is the moment at which i can't really talk very much because the delicious smells that are here in the kitchen are just unbelievable so i'm putting a dollop of guacamole on top of each one that may seem like it's gilding the lily for pork that's cooked in its own fat but it's a really welcome gilding of the lily sprinkle a little bit of fresh lime over the top of it all a couple of leaves now of cilantro just to add that really bright freshness wow okay that is for me nirvana [Music]

Channel: Rick Bayless

Views: 212,471

Rating: 4.9066124 out of 5

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Id: kKQu_l6Fn1w

Length: 27min 31sec (1651 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 26 2021