Carnitas!

I was gifted with 8 pounds of Manitoba Berkshire pork a few weeks ago, and I was looking to find a recipe that would show off this pork to its fullest potential. I slow roasted the first roast, but I thought I'd try somthing more interesting and complicated for the second roast. I got the inspiration to make carnitas from Chowhound.com. I found pages and pages of endless debates on the Chowhound boards over the best way to make this dish, so it seemed like a fun challenge!

It's a strange feeling to try to make an authentic version of a food you've never eaten. The most 'authentic' recipes involved slowly simmering an entire roast in freshly rendered lard. Most of the other recipes involved slowly boiling the meat in water with spices and then browning it later. I always like to try for authentic preparation, but unfortunately I don't have large vats of freshly rendered lard on hand. So I did a little experiment - I'd render the lard from the roast, and try the 'authentic' method for as much meat as the lard would cover. The rest of the meat, I'd try out the other way.

Step one: Rendering lard.
This took a few hours on its own. I had about 3/4 pound backfat with skin that I cut into 1-inch cubes and boiled it down until the skin were crispy bits of crackly goodness. Funny, I always hated crackles when I was a kid, and now I went out of my way to produce them. I salted them and ate them hot - the first two were delicious, but the next one became lard overload. Jeff ate the rest.

Step 2 - The next day: Time to start boiling hog!
The roast got cut up into large chunks - about 1.5 x2.5 inches. I had about a 1 1/4 cup of lard from the night before, which got placed in a small saucepan. I was able to cover about 5 large pieces of pork with the melted lard. This I simmered slowly for an hour, then added the juice and rind from 1/2 an orange, and about 1/2 a can of Coke. I don't know how authentic the Coke was, but since I saw it in a few places, I thought I'd run with it. It simmered for about 2 hours longer, until the meat broke apart easily.
The other meat went into the stock pot with a cut up orange, a chili pepper, mexican oregano, cumin, lots of garlic and water. This simmered down for about three 1/2 hours until it looked like the picture above. Most recipes said to boil it down until there was no liquid left, but since I cut up the meat instead of leaving it as an intact roast, it was breaking apart at this point. I strained the meat and went shopping for corn tortillas.

Step three: Time to eat!
The water-boiled carnitas still needed to be crisped up. They were a little mushy and fatty, but 10 minutes in the oven at 425 degrees got them nice and carmelized. The lard-boiled carnitas were pretty perfect and just needed to be warmed up.
A little bit of avocado, fresh salsa and sour cream on a warm tortilla, and we got the final product pictured at the beginning of this post.

Final verdict? The flavour of both preparations was really similar. The taste of the oranges really came through in both of them, and the extra spices and garlic in the water boiled version weren't too noticable. I like the consistency of the lard-boiled ones better though. Strangely enough, they seemed leaner to me - less mushy fat still attached. Maybe next time I will boil them a little longer for that fat to render out, and maybe add a few dried chipotles to the boiling pot.

I called my pork farmers today to order some more of this stuff. I think I may be hooked!