End of the World Carnitas
I remember it like it was yesterday. My daughter and I, on our usual Saturday grocery store run. We're at HEB Plus! on the eve of the end of the world.
We were fully aware of COVID-19, but trying to not freak out about things. I bet everybody thought we were idiots. We're out there, no masks or gloves. Meanwhile, they've fashioned gloves out of plastic grocery store bags, masks out towels.
The guy wearing a fucking garbage bag like a poncho.
This was a week or two prior to lockdowns and quarantines. Already planning to make carnitas that weekend, I decided to double up. Fortunately, people were panic buying everything up but the simple ingredients you need to make carnitas.
Since we freeze the left overs, these "End of the World Carnitas" helped feed the Sherman clan during the end times of the pandemic.
Ingredients
Nothing exact here, folks. Not like we're baking a cake:
- 3-4 pounds of pork (roast, butt, picnic) - cubed. If available "pork for carnitas". I like to avoid the vacuum bagged stuff, but you do you
- 1 white onion - chopped
- 6 cloves of garlic - chopped
- 2 jalapeños - deseeded, deveined, chopped
- 1 cup of orange juice. I actually prefer pre-made over squeezing the oranges myself
- 2-3 teaspoons of salt
- 1 teaspoon of black pepper (fresh ground if available)
- 1 tablespoon of dried Mexican oregano
- 2 heaping teaspoons of ground cumin
- 1 tablespoon olive oil
Also, you'll need a slow cooker. Double or triple the recipe based on the size of the batch.
Directions
- Break down the pork and/or audit it, removing bone shards and trimming up the fat cap. Sometimes I rinse it, sometimes I don't
- Toss the cubed pork into the slow cooker, add the olive oil and dry ingredients. Give the pork a good rubbin' to get the flavors moving
- Add the orange juice, toss in the vegetables, don't bother stirring it all up
- Throw the slow cooker to high and let it do its thing. Once the air starts to smell amazing, then you can give it a stir
- Let that go for 6-8 hours, stirring occasionally, breaking up the meat as it becomes more tender
Serving
There's still one more step if you want to get the most out of your carnitas. Before digging in, you'll want to fry things up in a little bit of olive oil, or even better, the rendered fat from the pork (more on that in a second).
Brown the carnitas up in a pan, toss in some of the liquid after you get a little bit of char going. Toss on a warm tortilla, eat it straight from the pan, I don't care.
Leftovers
I love bulk recipes that can provide us with months of easy throw together meals. Remember the rendered fat I mentioned? After separating the meat from the pot liquor, the fat will separate from the liquid in the fridge. Also, the liquid will basically be jelly. Yummy, yummy, pig jelly.
Once that happens, you'll end up with 3 distinct parts: meat, liquid / jelly, fat. Using 8oz and 16oz deli containers, I'll divvy the meat up in 16oz portions, and top it off with some of the fat, to use when frying them up later.
Then I'll portion out the coagulated liquid into the 8oz containers, one for each container of meat.
Everybody in the freezer and you got pork carnitas to help get you through the end of the world.
AI Notes
Robots can't eat, but they sure can puke up a lot of shit. They may regurgitate something that seems like a recipe, but I don't trust LLMs at all for food-related things.
Full disclosure, the original recipe was lifted from a food blog forever ago. I'd love to give a shout out, but I forgot to stash the original link. Also, I've tweaked and distilled and this recipe barely resembles its origins, over a few dozen delicious batches, and many leftover meals.