Taco Tuesday: Tacos al Pastor!

[Music] hi everybody and welcome to this edition of Taco Tuesday in my backyard and obviously we're gonna be doing some grilling and for this particular edition I'm going to talk about taco sauce pasta so you know taco salad pasta is my guess you've seen the great big vertical spit like the shwarma kind of spit or the garros kind of spit that is layered with pork that's marinated sometimes people will put onions in there but mostly it's just pork that's layered and then it is roasted in front of either a charcoal or a gas fire until it gets seared and crusty on one side and then they'll flip it around and slice all of that off there's usually a pineapple on the top and the dock a dome will reach up and just grab with the end of his knife just a little of that pineapple flick it off of there catch it on the taco and hand it to you can't do it at home okay no matter what you think you can't really do it at home but I can get you pretty close to it and that's what I'm going to show you today so oftentimes they will use leg meat for making this layered tacos el Pasto despit what I'm gonna suggest to you is boneless shoulder roast and here's why first of all you can get it okay the leg meats really hard to get in the United States because most of it's made into ham but if you get a pork shoulder roast and then pound it like I'm gonna show you now you can get tender and very flavorful pork we're gonna use our grill to do it but it's gonna be a slightly different approach than the big spit thing okay so this is what a boneless pork shoulder roast looks like several different muscles make up this and they all have varying degrees of tenderness so to get them all into pretty much the same place after you cut little slabs off they're a little bit more than a quarter of an inch thick we're going to pound it now you'll need a heavy pounder to do this one of those really lightweight ones will be really hard to get any kind of tenderizing going but this big heavy one you can buy them you can buy him online a really heavy mallet you want one that weighs about two pounds or so but just go around on the meat like this just pounding now I'm leaving all of that connective tissue and fat in there and I'll tell you the reason that I'm doing it because I want it to face the meat as I am cooking it so when everything has been pounded to about an eighth of an inch thick then you're ready to go on to the marinade so I think I'm gonna stop with that okay so into the blender I am going to put achiote so this is a product that you can buy at a Mexican grocery store sometimes you can find it at a very well stocked two grocery store as well this is the classic marinade for cochinita pibil the most famous dish from the Yucatan Peninsula this is a chayote with garlic and spices and herbs okay it comes in this cellophane wrapped package and this rusty orange looking mixture is what you want to break up into your food I mean into your blender here now I'm using achiote because most of the people in Mexico City where tacos all paths are very famous that's what they use but I have to get the red chile part of it in there and usually they would use a classic red chili adobo to speed things up I'm going to use chipotle chiles in adobo the canned ones and I'm going to put about three of these guys into the blender with about all of the the juice from the can because the juice from the can is really what I'm looking for it's got seasonings it's got tomato in it and it's got lots of herbs and spices as well so I'm good just put all of that into the blender jar then quarter cup of oil because I'm going to use I'm going to be grilling so I wanted to get some oil in this and some water to facilitate the grinding and help to give us the right consistency okay so that ITA which is staining my fingers right now is needs to be blended until it's completely smooth good thing is it breaks up pretty fast like that okay so this is our marinade for this mixture I'm going to take the a little bit of the marinade and smear it over the pounded pork shoulder roast slice here and then I'm going to do the same thing on the other side because I really do want this to be nicely seasoned with these classic flavors that's the way it would be in the spit okay so a light coating of it on both sides like that and we're ready now to go on over to the grill so I'll pick this guy up and we're gonna lay it on to the grill and I'm gonna cook it only on one side so that I get that texture that you get when you get the slices off of the thrombo they call it the big vertical spit and you get the charred side and then you get the soft side so I'm only gonna cook this on one side here okay so throw it down there hot grill now over here I have some grilled pineapple that pineapple part of it and onions which you oftentimes will see on the the taquitos that do tacos are paths toward so I'm gonna pull those guys off and onto this tray you'll notice here that I have done them on this grilling mat I find these really useful because nothing sticks to them and you can get beautiful char marks through them they have a metal element in them and I think that they work really good so let's go over and check out how we're gonna finish this service okay you can see it's shrunk up just a little bit I'm gonna make sure that it's okay so see the char that's what I'm really looking for I want to get that beautiful char I can see that the pork is done all the way through even though I haven't flipped it over so I'm just gonna pull it off right now and we'll take it over to the cutting board here and cut this up yeah you can see it's nicely now for this when you're making tacos up a store and trying to mimic that spit you're gonna want to slice this pretty thin and you can cut it cut the fat out if you want but I wouldn't I think it makes a really nice texture or contrast in it and it'll give you the flavor okay hunk of it out there okay so let's give this just another little sprinkling of salt which I like to do after I cut all meat give it I think it's taken me back to my favorite place in Mexico City for eating tacos out of my store we've got our grilled pineapple here so cut around the core this is just slices off of the whole pineapple and we'll cut around the core and then just cut it into small bits and then the same thing with our our onion I'm gonna cut that into smaller pieces like that we'll just toss everything together which is if you're gonna serve tacos al pastor to a party that's what I would suggest you do cut up all the meat and then the pineapple and the onion and mix everything together and then start making your tacos beautiful hot tortillas they a couple of them onto this plate here and then a song full of tacos out by stored mixture I have to say you can get pretty close to the flavor a beautiful tacos al pastor with this method just make sure you cook the pork long enough on that one side I have some salsa here could use to boat lay salsa with roasted tomatillos and garlic this is a three chili salsa so it's not just Chipotle it's also got guajillo and cascabel the nutty tasting chili like that I of course like to see something fresh on top of the tacos al pastor so I would take a few leaves of cilantro and put those over perk it up if you will with that and I will say there is no better eating than this [Music]

Channel: Rick Bayless

Views: 315,979

Rating: 4.8503852 out of 5

Keywords: Rick Bayless, Tacos al Pastor, Taco Tuesday, tacos, recipes, dinner, chef, trompo, Mexico City, chipotle, achiote, salsa, pineapple, red onion, grilling

Id: o1Hivd9AI6Q

Length: 10min 32sec (632 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 24 2018