How to Make Pork Carnitas Tacos: Thermal Tips

If we had to pick a favorite taco, there’s a solid chance we’d pick carnitas. Crisp yet tender pork, savory with spices and richly fatty? Sign us up! The difficulty with carnitas is that the traditional method of making them is, well, somewhat cumbersome for the home cook. But with some thermal thinking, we can turn carnitas into something that anyone with an oven can make. Read on to get the temps you need to transform your next taco night!

Carnitas: expectations, traditions, and difficulties

When you order carnitas, either as filling for a tortilla or even just on a plate with salsa and beans, you expect meat that is tender but with crisp bits on the surface. you expect deeply flavored, rich meat that is fatty and flavorful.

Traditional cooking method and its problems

The traditional way to cook a pork shoulder for carnitas is in enough lard to immerse the meat—depending on how much pork is being cooked, it can be gallons of lard. The method of cooking things immersed in fat is known in French as confit (pronounced kon-FEE). And, as J. Kenji Lopéz-Alt has said, it is to deep frying as BBQ is to grilling: “low and slow as opposed to hot and fast, low and slow versus fast and furious.”

That expectation can run into problems when it comes to tradition, however. You see, traditional carnitas are cooked in a large pot, usually with upwards of two quarts of pork lard. And while that is delicious, there is enough space in that much fat for the flavor to dilute and escape. That’s not a problem if you run a taqueria and you’re cooking dozens of pounds of carnitas a day and re-using the fat from batch to batch, allowing the flavors to accumulate and intensify over time. But if you’re trying to make fantastic carnitas in your own home kitchen from day one, tradition is not your best friend.

But there are ways to make carnitas work without the cauldron of fat. (Not that I don’t want a cauldron of fat, mind you! It’s just that it’s not what I want to haul out for a Wednesday night dinner.) Kenji has developed a fantastic method that uses only a baking dish and produces stellar carnitas. Let’s take a look at what’s going on when we cook carnitas to try to understand how we can get the same dish on more of a home-cooking scale.

Pork Shoulder: A Tough Cut

Carnitas (Spanish for “little meats,” so called because of the small pieces it is cut up into) are often made with pork shoulder. This is a heavily worked muscle with a web of connective tissue and tough protein and requires long cooking to tenderize. When it does tenderize, all that collagen turns into luscious, lip-smacking gelatin. (For more on that protein process and tough cuts of pork in general, see our post on smoked pork shoulder.)

Carnitas doneness temps

The USDA’s recommended minimum temperature for pork is 145°F (63°C) for safety. but safe and palatable are two different needs, in this case. The connective tissue needs to be heated to at least 170°F (77°C) to start to dissolve properly. If pulled at 145°F (63°C), pork shoulder will be inedibly tough. Most smoked pork shoulders are pulled in the temperature range of 195-205°F (91-96°C), and the same temperature will apply here. But a 2″ cube of carnitas is a much different thermal system than a full pork butt.

Dissolving collagen with time and temperature

Collagen dissolution is a function of both temperature and time. By the time the center of a pork butt gets up to 203°F (95°C), the meat has been at collagen-melting temperatures for a long time. But a “little meat” will get up to collagen melting temperatures comparatively quickly. If we set a leave-in probe thermometer like BlueDOT for 202°F (94°C), the meat will most likely still be quite tough when it goes off. But if we use that thermometer as guide to start timing the collagen melt, we’re suddenly on much safer thermal ground. When we get up to temp, we start a timer set for 40 minutes. When the timer sounds, our meat has been on the collagen-melt speedway for the better part of an hour, so it has just the right texture—able to be easily pulled and shredded, but not mushy.

Oven temps for perfect carnitas

So what is the method that we recommend for carnitas, if not the traditional oil bath? The oven. If we pack the meat closely in a pan or dish and cover it, we can achieve a good cooking environment in our oven very easily.

For our carnitas, we want the temperature of the confit cooking fat to be about 200°F (93°C) or a little higher. At this temperature, we won’t be drying out the surface of the meat cubes while we heat their centers. If we were doing this on the stove with a pot of fat, we might try to maintain a temperature in this range. (Though there is a wide range of oil temperatures in traditional methods for carnitas. How hot the oil is can vary from region to region, or just cook to cook.) But we can also achieve a fairly constant cooking temp by putting our meat in an oven set to 275°F (135°C).

This low-temperature range isn’t nearly hot enough for the Maillard Reaction (read more about the Maillard Reaction in our post, Thermal Tips: Searing Meat) to occur, or even to crisp the meat by dehydrating the surface (which is what crisping during frying is). For this reason, once the low and slow cook is done, there’s a second cook to give the flavor more depth, and the texture a little bit of crunch.

Broiling for crispness

Carnitas aren’t the same without the crispy browned bits, and confit/braising pork in a covered dish does not give us those bits. Rather, we’ll take the meat, drain off the liquid for another use (amazing salsa), add the rendered fat back to the meat, and crisp it under the broiler. In this way, we fat-fry the shredded surface of the meat, browning it and giving it textural contrast. It’s an ingenious way to get a fantastic result.

How much fat do we need?

The traditional method submerges the meat completely in fat, but we don’t need all of that to carry flavor or heat to our meat. Instead, we can use just a little fat and rely on the fat that will be rendered from our very fatty cuts of meat to act as a heat-transfer medium. And by packing the meat tightly in a pan, we leave less space for fat between the pieces, so we need less of it to submerge it anyhow. We can make do with as little as a quarter cup of fat (or oil, if you can’t get good, fresh lard).

NOTE ON MEAT:

We used a combination of pork butt (shoulder) and skin-on pork belly for this cook, and recommend the combination heartily. The skin on the belly gives the dish a hyper richness and the extra fat of the belly is just a joy when properly cooked. You could use all shoulder and it will be great, but this combination is a good one!

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This crispy-tender meat is best eaten fresh from the broiler and can be used to make burritos, enchiladas, tostadas, or any other dish you like as well as tacos. You can even just pile it on a plate with some rice and good frijoles refritos and salsa. Serve with warmed tortillas, salsa verde, avocados, onion, and cilantro.

There are quite a few methods out there for making carnitas—choose the one that suits you best. By all means, follow a super traditional recipe and method, but this one will by no means disappoint. Thanks to this pan-crowding method and precise temperature tracking with a BlueDOT and needle probe, it’s possible to make authentically crispy/tender carnitas without a whole pot of lard. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!) Give this a try on your next taco night, and fall in love with the results.

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Serve and Enjoy!

Resources:

No-waste Tacos de Carnitas with Salts Verde Recipe, Serious Eats

On Food and Cooking, Harold McGgee

The Science of Confit Cooking, The Science of Cooking