Taco Tuesday: Cochinita Pibil

I couldn't be happier to bring this edition of Taco Tuesday to you because it's cochinita pibil you know that you could take in slow-cooked pork with achiote and all the fixings and I'm going to do it in my new toy my new big green egg so the first thing you have to do is to get the grill set up okay so the built a fire in the bottom of it and then I put the plate setter in here so that's a big ceramic piece and it deflects all of the heat and smoke up around the edges so I got that in there we got 300 degrees which is the temperature that I'm going to cook this at and we'll put this back down while we prepare the pork for the cochinita pibil now it's typically done whole hog but obviously you're not going to fit a whole hog in your big green egg or any kind of grill that you have if you've got something like a kettle grill you're going to set that up for indirect cooking and I'll talk more about that just in a second here but when I'm making smaller amounts of course you need two people I always do it with pork shoulder bone in as best you can make it with the boneless if you want to but bone-in will give you a little bit better flavor now the marinade the classic marinade in the Yucatan Peninsula is made from achiote paste so yeah you can make it yourself if you want to I have written a number of recipes you can find them online or you can go to a Mexican grocery store and buy a Gopa paste this el Yucatec o is one that you can readily find I've been to their factory they do a great job in the Yucatan and you it'll already have all the condiments mixed with the the achiote seeds those little brick-red small hard seeds it's it's fresher if you make it yourself but this stuff will really do the job okay so I've opened this package here and I'm going to cut about half of it off or break about half of it off and then break that up into this bowl now the one thing you need to know about achiote is that it stains okay you can already see it on my fingers here it was originally used as a coloring as much as a flavoring for food it's got a sort of citrusy earthy flavor to it and this I chose a paste has garlic in it and a whole host of spices and herbs next thing is to dilute it with sour orange juice now sour oranges are the ones that they make marmalade out of in the West in Mexico in the Yucatan Peninsula they use it for everything they use it in place of limes so if you want to approximate that flavor of the sour orange juice in sort of the simplest way just mix orange and lime juice together I do two parts lime one part orange juice and it gives a little of that orange flavor to another wise very tangy thing which is what the sour oranges are they're sour orange okay so I'm going to pour this mixture it's a 3/4 cup of that into the bowl and then you just use a fork to kind of mash it all together until you get it as smooth you could do this in a blender if you wanted to but if you just take a little bit of time to mash it together it'll work okay so I'm not going to be quite as vigorous at this as I would normally I would keep working it for a long time until I got it completely smooth in there but just to save some time let's go on to the working of the pork here okay so we've got our our bone-in pork shoulder roast here and I'm going to get rid of oh I missed one thing over here I need about a teaspoon of salt in this so that's how much a teaspoon of salt would be with my pinches you know this is a really interesting thing to think about if you don't want to be grabbing your measuring spoons all the time then take some pinches take a small pinch and a large pinch with your fingers and then just scoop it into a little measuring spoon and see how much your pinch is I know that if I do three big pinches I'm going to have a teaspoon of salt so then I don't have to always be getting those out okay so I've got it's mostly done here I'm not quite too careful with it but it'll work for the purposes of what we're doing for this video shoot and you put that all over the meat and you're ready to prepare the roasting pan now a lot of people will tell you that it's important to let this sit for overnight or perhaps let it sit for three or four hours that's fine it's going to cook a long time so usually when I'm cooking something for a really long time unless I am using a dry rub I will actually just put it on and go right straight into the the grill okay so get all this stuff out of our way so that we're going to have room now for the roasting pan you could do this in a 9 by 13 baking dish if you want it'll be a little bit tight but it's if you don't have a roasting pan you can think about that okay banana leaves this is a flavor it's not just a wrapping so you can find banana leaves in Mexican grocery stores Asian grocery stores a lot of really well stock sort of specialty grocery stores they're very easy to find so don't skip this step yes you can make good coach you need to without it but it just adds so much beautiful flavor to it so tear these banana leaves up now this is what they're going to look like when you you usually get them in a one-pound package and you kind of unwrap them unfold them like this you'll see that on one side of them they will have a very tough edge and that's where it connected to the central stalk there so I need another big piece of this so I'm going to take this one off off here I think this piece right here will be the best one just cut it apart there I'm outside and I'm blowing around here so all of these leaves are kind of going where they want to go and this will be my piece to go over the top of it I'm going to scoop the the pork now with the nacho thing into this banana leaf lined roasting pan and I'm going to get rid of that one oh okay so it'll look like that I want to make sure to cover it nicely with the banana leaves that I used to line the bottom of the piece and then I've got my big top piece here to go over that and then in Ex sort of classic Yucatan's fashion I'm going to pour some water around it because this is sort of like a roast in a braise okay so all of that now is in there it's ready to go into the grill and cook for what will probably be four to six hours and I'm going to say that if you really want to do this well you can see the Acho they still on my hands here if you really want to do this well then you should probably put a thermometer in there from time to time to check it or the one that can stay in there that's got the device on the outside and I'll show you that here in a second because that's what I typically use in mine so we'll open this grill back up we're still a little bit over 300 degrees if I were using your kettle grill I would by this point have pushed the two the two mounds or pushed the mound of charcoal into two mounds on the side and I would be setting this right in between them for this big green egg I just set it right on the plate setter here set it down like that and then we're going to close it up no first the thermometer probe so the thermometer on this one stays outside and it's nicely equipped with a little magnet that can go right here on the leg and then the probe of the thermometer itself I will just put right into the middle of this like that that way I can be apprised of the temperature of our pork shoulder roast as it cooks over the next four five six hours until it reaches about 200 210 degrees that's when I know it's going to be completely fall apart tender and that's what I'm looking for I'll come back to you when it's ready now when you're in the Yucatan they dig a hole in the ground they put river rocks down in the bottom of that they build a fire let the fire burn down until you've got just like red-hot rocks at the bottom of it they'll set their pan of the cochinita directly on those hot rocks then they'll cover the whole thing with a piece of corrugated ten piled dirt on top of that let that cook for six to eight hours and then unearth the whole thing so it's got an earthy element but it's not unlike cooking it in the big green egg because what we have here is all of this ceramic on the outside of it that holds an even temperature of course it's going hot it's going in hot into the hole in the ground but then there's it's just the residual heat of all of those rocks that are in there so the temperature drops we have kept it at a steady temperature all the way through and I think we've reached about 200 degrees now for the internal temperature of this beauty okay so I'm going to set the probe for the thermometer there and we got to get rid of all this stuff that's on the top here Wow oh yeah I just wish you could smell what I'm smelling right now unwrap this guy here I see it's steaming and nice now what I want to show you is the texture oh good cochinita when it's ready to pull like that look at how tender that is and see how all those are like beautiful juices that have reduced at the bottom of the pan there gorgeous stuff now that's cochinita pibil that's the real stuff okay let's make a taco out of it because I've got a lot of good stuff here so it's typically eaten with these pickled red onions simplest way to make those if you're kind of in a hurry is to slice up some red onions just pour some hot boiling water on them pour immediately off and then add vinegar or lime juice salt and you're done okay so that's kind of what I have here is the simple version of that I'm going to take some of our beautiful coat on and put that into the tortilla now on that we'll go some pickled red onions and I've got a bunch of different hot sauces so same brand el Yucatec oh you can find this in a lot of the Mexican grocery stores urban areas are picked either in the green state to make green habanero salsa or the orange state to make the orange one or now you katako has come out with what they call the burnt urban arrow salsa and this is super popular in the United States I'm sorry this is super popular in Mexico just coming into the United States so I'm going to pour a little bit of it over the top of my taco here a little goes a long way so you don't want to put too much of it in there it's going to be spicy it's going to be really deliciously robust with the flavor of that coaching eat them I can't wait this is this is like my food

Channel: Rick Bayless

Views: 129,235

Keywords: Rick Bayless, tacos, cochinita pibil, Yucatan, Taco Tuesday, dinner, recipes, cooking, food, recipe ideas, weeknight, habanero, salsa, pork, grilling, Big Green Egg, grill

Id: a8kDMWIV71E

Length: 11min 20sec (680 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 05 2016