Taco Tuesday: Slow Cooker Carnitas Tacos

for this special Cinco DeMayo edition of Taco Tuesday I think you should do something really traditional and that doesn't mean a special burrito or nachos I'm talking about real traditional Mexican food here and that to me means got Nita's for tacos and not just sort of roasted pork or stewed pork and a lot of people call that carnitas but the one that's done traditionally so what I have in this slow cooker is some cubes of pork shoulder and they're cutting about two inch cubes and they roughly cover the bottom of this two pounds for a 6 quart slow cooker now the next part of this is the part that's going to surprise you but it's what makes it really traditional because traditional God needs us our main sort of like a confit cooked in their own fat so I have two cups of fat here this is a fresh rendered pork lard and I'm just going to pour that over all of the pork shoulder and it should basically cover the pork put the top on this turn it on high and let it cook for three hours on high and the pork should look exactly like what I've got in this slow cooker down here so if you touch it the pork will be super tender and juicy you may see a little Brown at the top but the next step for this is to take it out of the fat take a couple of tablespoons of the fat put it into a skillet and let it brown and this is going to give it that luscious really gorgeous browned pork flavor that we all associate with CAD amita's now to to traditional accompaniments for your classic got meat that stock goes at least I think they're traditional I don't want to eat neatness taco without these two things one is guacamole and the other is a good tomato salsa I'm going to show you an easy way to achieve that and it's going to start with roasted garlic and roasted serrano chile so I have a bunch of garlic here and I've just broken the head apart left the papery skins on and roasted over medium heat for about 10 to 15 minutes until they're completely soft these are serrano chiles and I'm going to take those with me because I already have some of the garlic down here that has been pulled out of the papery skin I'm pulling the the stems off of the serrano chiles I'm going to give those a rough chop put the Serrano's and the peeled roasted garlic into a food processor it's a small amount so I'm using the little tiny food processor pulse it until it's chopped now this mixture is going to season both my guacamole and this salsa so I'm going to take the blade out of this guy and then scrape half of this mixture into a bowl with some avocados and the other half into a bowl with some canned roast fire roasted tomatoes about right I think for those okay now both need two more things one is cilantro and the other is some lime juice fresh squeezed lime juice so I'm going to tear off the top of a bunch of cilantro chopped that up and you'll see the my chopping of cilantro is the classic way of doing it it's not really chopping as much it is very thinly slicing it here I've got some pieces over here that are not quite chopped up yet so I'm going to take half of this put it in with the avocado the other half is going to go into my roasted tomato salsa both of these preparations are going to need salt and now to finish the avocado mash and the salsa I'm going to squeeze lime juice into balance like that the other half will go into our salsa and you can see how fast this carnitas dinner of classic heavy that's tacos can come together stir up this salsa and see how beautiful that is this is sort of like a sauce that I'm going to hit back in Mexico the kind that would be together everything crushed together in a mortar with roasted tomatoes ours is sort of all chopped up okay that looks good and now to finish the guacamole I'm going to use an old-fashioned potato masher to mash this up now this is a very simple form of guacamole more like the kind that you would find down say in the southern part of Mexico and Oaxaca but since you have this roasted tomato salsa I don't think you need to add any more ingredients to that to finish this up a hot corn tortilla some of this crispy pork will go right on top of that my mouth is already watering for this one I'm going to first give a beautiful little dab Wacka mole lame but spoon of our roasted tomato salsa to go on that this is classic Mexican flavor happy Cinco de Mayo

Channel: Rick Bayless

Views: 87,054

Rating: 4.9474721 out of 5

Keywords: Rick Bayless, tacos, Taco Tuesday, carnitas, pork carnitas, dinner, recipes, slow cooker, Cinco de Mayo, party recipes, Mexican food, Mexican slow cooker, Chef Rick Bayless, party food, party, pork

Id: gBWyvB_raSE

Length: 6min 6sec (366 seconds)

Published: Tue May 03 2016