Good food takes time. While the prep for this dish is not labor-intensive, it takes days to complete. The good news is that, while taking days to complete, the flavor of the dish are so good, it’s completely worth it.
Carnitas is traditionally a Mexican dish. “Little meats,” as the name means, is made up of braised pork which is slow cooked, simmered, then fried of crisped. And, this is the inspiration for our dish; we were recently in San Francisco, eating burritos in the Mission, when we came up with the idea of altering the traditional carnitas recipe. Asian carnitas was born.
We used David Lebovitz’s carnitas recipe as a reference for the RTT (Ratios, Times, Temperatures), and he most certainly didn’t disappoint! The ingredients for our recipe are below:
3lbs Boneless pork shoulder
Marinade
1 Tbs. Five-spice powder
1 Tbs. Salt
1/2 Tbs. Pepper
1 Tbs. Sesame oil
1 Tbs. Ginger
3 Cloves garlic
1 Scallion
2 Tbs. Mirin
2 Tbs. Honey
Braising liquid
1/2 c. Sake
Honey, to taste
1/4 c. Soy sauce
1/4 c. Mirin
1 Tbs. Sesame oil
3 pieces star anise
1 Tbs. Garlic chile paste
1 Tbs. Five-spice powder
1/4 c. Chinese Shaoxing cooking wine
A splash of sherry vinegar
Toppings
Scallion
Pickled red onion
Drizzle of honey
Cucumber
Jalapeño
Ginger lime creme fraiche
Braising is an art, not a science. And, the braising liquid is incredibly important in how your dish comes out, the meat not only becoming tender from hours of cooking in a liquid, but that liquid seeping into the meat and becoming a rich, tasty flavor.
Like David Lebovitz suggests, we marinated the pork two days before we planned on making the carnitas. This let the flavors begin to penetrate the meat. And let me tell you, the smells coming from the fridge every time we opened the door were pretty intense. It was hard waiting so long, but I knew it would be worth it.
Instead of braising in the oven, we opted for the slow cooker. Mostly because it being so incredibly hot right now in New York, the thought of having the oven on all day is enough to make you want to order take out and call it a day. After the meat was super tender and falling apart, we did throw it in the oven to crisp, but that was a much shorter cook time than the braising itself.
Finally, we made up the whole dish, 2 days and 20 hours after we began, the Asian carnitas were ready to eat. We served the meat on homemade, fluffy,
steamed gua bao, topped with scallion,
red onion that we quick pickled, a drizzle of honey, cucumber, jalapeño, and some
homemade creme fraiche that we flavored with ginger and lime zest. They were as good as they seem to be.
this was lovely, and so was your company. thanks for being such a lovely host.