Tacos al Pastor | Rick Bayless Taco Manual

foreign [Music] the next page in our Taco manual takes us to the iconic tacos al pastor I know you've all seen them they're done on a vertical Spit with layers of marinated pork they're charred on the outside that charred pork is sliced off and made into tacos well that is beyond what most people could even think about doing in their home so I'm going to show you the easiest way to get to the flavor of tacos al pastor at home and the first thing that we have to do is to make a special variation on the red chili adobo marinade that is so common in Mexico and I'm going to show you two different ways in if you are really comfortable with ancho chiles the dried ancho chilis then I suggest you start with that because it'll give you the lightest and brightest flavor of course when you're working with ancho chiles you have to open them up pull out the stem end of it dump the seeds out and these should be quite pliable if yours are not pliable it means that they're a little old and they won't have as much flavor and then you just tear your Chile ancho into flat pieces I've got five of them already done over here I'll clean up the board here and we'll continue on because we need to toast and soak these guys so it's adding another step in the process of making this if you want to avoid all of this then I'm going to ask you to work with ancho powder this is about a half a cup or two ounces of the ancho powder I'm going to show you how to work with that too but before we finish um they are before we get to the place where we can actually soak this I'm going to just lay some of these ancho chilis into an ungreased skill it's just a dry Skillet here use a spatula that like a metal spatula here to press them down and start toasting them so we're doing this over about a medium heat here and it'll take about a minute or so sometimes if your pan is quite hot it'll take less time than that but I'm using my nose to detect this beautiful toasty dried chili Aroma but I'm also using my eyes to see when they're ready here so as I press these down on the inside they will turn to a lighter color like that that says that they're toasted but they should smell beautifully aromatic at this point okay so there's a one batch of them there and I've got one more batch before we cover them with hot tap water so I'm going to lay these guys right in here and then press them the pan again is medium hot you don't want to get it too hot or they will blister but the pan has gotten a little bit hotter recently here so this toasting is going to go faster than our initial one did I can smell that beautiful toasted chili aroma scoop them in I'm going to take them to the sink and do hot tap water on them and then once they're covered I'll just put a small plate there press it down to keep them submerged so that they will evenly rehydrate now if you're using the ancho powder here now this is not chili powder okay chili powder has salt and sugar and spices and so forth in it and so I'm going to rehydrate this pure chili powder very quickly with a cup and a quarter of boiling water so there we've got our cup and a quarter I'm going to put it into this blender jar here and then the water put the top on that and then I'm going to put the top on but but I'm going to release this Central plug in the middle here because you don't want to trap all that hot steam in there it'll blow the top right off so then I just put a towel over the top and blend it just to mix doesn't take much time now while the that is cooling off some while our chili pods are roasting here I'm going to also roast some garlic I have eight uh nice looking um uh dientes they would say in Spanish cloves of garlic and I'm putting it in the same pan ungreased over medium heat and I'm going to turn these for it'll take around 15 minutes and all this will come out at the same time basically but I want these to be completely soft on the inside they will have a little black blotchiness on the outside but that's what we're looking for is that beautiful roasted flavor garlic is roasted I have rehydrated the ancho chilis we've got our Chile powder that has been reconstituted with boiling water cool down now but I'm going to show you this last step with the chili pods I'm going to put these guys in here with a little bit of their soaking liquid looks like it's about half of their soaking liquid there and then we're going to make a puree out of these guys so put those back up here on the blender and we will start that and we're going to let this go until it is a smoother puree as we can get it good this has stalled blades so I'm going to put a little bit more of our soaking liquid in there like that and then continue to blend until it gets really smooth [Music] so there you have it the reconstituted powdered ancho Chile or the reconstituted and Blended Chile puree from the Chile pods now I'm going to choose to just work with one of these bases that we've created here and I'm going to work with the one that's made from the chili pods and we're going to turn that into the really classic red chili adobo that's used for marinades on all kinds of things in Mexico that always has a variety of spices in it I have here a quarter teaspoon of cumin and a quarter teaspoon of black pepper a whole teaspoon of Mexican oregano I'm just going to dump all of that together here and give it a very quick crush this is the molcajet thing I love having a small mocha you can't really make salsa in it but it's great for grinding dried spices like this it's a kind of too small for salsa so I like to use it for grinding these kinds of things okay so I think I'm pretty well done there I'm going to use a little brush I always keep beside this so that I can scrape everything in here we have a half a teaspoon now of Mexican cinnamon I usually grind that in an electric spice grinder and then I keep a little half jar of it ground at all times so I'm going to put the half teaspoon of that in there so those are our four five four spices that go in there and then I'm going to add to that a quarter of a cup of vinegar I'm using apple cider vinegar you could use any kind of vinegar really that you want for this we're just looking for some nice acidity and then I'm going to add a couple of teaspoons of salt to it remember this is a marinade so it's heavily seasoned and we're going to blend that and that will give us now the classic red chili adobo really except of course I forgot all of the roasted garlic so we got to throw the roasted garlic in there I've peeled it I left one to show you once it's cooled down the peel will come right off of it like that that papery skin will come right off of it so we'll put that in there and then I have noticed also that some of my black pepper looks like it didn't want to go down in there so I'm going to just scrape it down in there and then put the top on and again blend it until it's as smooth as I can get it [Music] now if you have a high speed blender this will look velvety if you have a regular standard issue kind of blender you might notice some of the chili skins in there I would push it through a sort of medium mesh sieve just to catch those skins and give it that really velvety texture but I don't really have to do that with this okay so I'm going to take half of this okay so I am coming to a right around two cups there so I'm going to take about a cup of it out of this blender jar I think I've got that about right there and we're going to turn this other half of it now into a very special adobo that is for making the tacos al pastor and that changes in a couple of ways one is that if you're like in Mexico City a lot of people will they you can just use this one the way that it is but a lot of people would put a little bit of achiote when you go to the Mexican grocery store this is the achiote package that you're going to be looking for so we've got about a half of one of those containers and I'm just going to break it up and put it in here you'll notice that it's a very it dyes food really and your fingers really a lot so I tear that up and I put that in there I'm going to want just about a tablespoon I like to put this in there about a tablespoon of agave syrup you could use corn syrup you could use honey for this but this will make the the marinade Brown the meat a little bit better so I like to put about a tablespoon of it in there but I'm not sure I got a tablespoon so I'm going to just do a little bit more there and then the last unusual ingredient for this well I I could say and not so unusual ingredient that we're going to use for this is to put a quarter of a cup of oil you could use regular vegetable oil I'm using some good olive oil because I like the flavor of it in this but the last thing is going to be our pineapple pineapple is a part of tacos al pastor everywhere I like to put a little bit of it in the marinade when we're working with this red chili adobo this classic red chili adobo customize it for tacos al pastor by blending in a little bit of Pineapple as well so I'm going to take the top and bottom off of this pineapple and cut it now into quarters and then we're going to use about a quarter of this for making this preparation not for the all of it for the adobo most of it not for the adobo I like to cut the the core out like that and when you go to the places where they have the beautiful field ripened pineapples you will notice that their cores are very very tender but most of what we get in the United States is not decors are not tender at all I don't cut a whole lot of the edge off of this a lot of people cut real deeply into it but I do it sort of a light one and then I go back and cut the little eyes out of here so um the you can just use the tip of a knife to kind of go down in there and cut those guys out [Music] okay clean up our little mess here and then one slice off of this here is going to go into the adobo we're ready to blend this again until it is all Incorporated [Music] this piece we are going to cut in half inch slices and then we will grill or pan sear that along with the pork that brings us to the pork this is pork shoulder roast so I have about a pound and a half of it and I'm going to slice this if you don't feel comfortable slicing you can usually buy thin pork steaks um also cut from the same pork shoulder so it'd be a pork shoulder steak you could buy something like that and then it's probably going to be too thick and you're probably going to need to pound it a little bit to get it a little bit thinner so you're trading off one thing for another I'm going to cut mine up here just take it off of that and I'm going to cut crosswise strips that are about they're going to look sort of like short pieces of bacon and they're going to be about a quarter of an inch thick [Music] okay that's all done I'll just move this to the side here I had it a little piece of damp paper towel there just to keep that flexible cutting board in place and we'll put this here and we're going to lay these guys out tightly and then brush them with our special marinade on both sides [Music] thank you okay now at home you can finish your al pastor taco meat in two ways you could finish it either on the grill which is my preferred way of doing it or in a hot Skillet I'm going to show you both ways so grill or heavy Skillet I got my 12-inch cast iron skillet I actually have it sitting here over this Grill pretend it's on a burner in the house but I just wanted to show you this sort of side by side here the first thing that I'm going to do is to spray about half of the meat because I'm going to cook half of it on the grill with some oil and put a little coating a light coating of oil in this hot Skillet here um that's for the second half of the meat and I am going to the stuff that I didn't Grill I mean I didn't spray with oil I'm just going to lay here in the sand the other part of it will go on the grill and we will Grill it doesn't take very long for any of this [Music] that looks so beautiful it smells so beautiful I wish you could smell it now with the pineapple here um I put it all in the skillet because this was ready first so you can sear your pineapple in the skillet if you want or you could Grill it if you're going to grill it then my suggestion is that you lightly spray it with oil before you put it on the grill but you can see they're gorgeous seared ones here in this Skillet now I'm working with a Hot Grill and a hot pan okay that's really essential if you want to get this beautiful end result that will just make everybody's mouth water now let's go on to the making of the tacos this is what I'm sure all of you have been waiting for I know it's what I have been waiting for so I'm going to cut up some of the meat I like to just cut crosswise leaving it in slightly longer pieces of course when you eat it in Mexico it's usually in slightly smaller pieces than this at least lengthwise if you want to you could run your knife down like that take one of these pieces of seared pineapple cut that crosswise and then into small pieces we've got some onions and cilantro here a chopped white onion that has been rinsed and then mixed with chopped cilantro warm corn tortillas of course which are a must for these beautiful al pastor style tacos even though they're not done on the big spit and so we'll put the meat down like that I did forget one thing here which is not which is critical and that is that we do need to put a little bit of salt on this meat here top it off with some pineapple which doesn't want to come up off of the board like that seared pineapple is just so good now we'll put on that onion and cilantro which is super classic in Mexico I've got some Chipotle salsa here to go over the top of it and whether you like it or not I'm not going to wait another minute I'm gonna have taco salad Pastore [Music]

Channel: Rick Bayless

Views: 131,969

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Id: GS7g2l6t_Ug

Length: 19min 20sec (1160 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 03 2023