In episode 088 we are making Instant Pot Carnitas for dinner. If you are not familiar with Carnitas, it is basically Mexican Shredded Pork and is super flavorful. You can make just about anything from Carnitas; tacos, burritos, enchiladas, rice bowls, etc… The nice thing about this recipe is that it makes a ton and can be kept in the fridge or you can even freeze it for up to 3 months to use later.
Transcript
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Intro: Hey, hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of Let’s Make Dinner, your audio library of amazing dinner recipes you can always get on the table. I’m your host, Susie Weinrich.
Susie Weinrich: What’s up everybody? Welcome to the show. Happy Thursday. I hope you guys are all having a wonderful week. I have had a great week here in Kansas City. The weather has been top-notch, absolutely perfect. If you’ve been following along with the Mom’s Dinner newsletter or even on this podcast, you know that we’re finishing our basement and the progress is coming along so nicely. I think they’re like two weeks ahead of schedule, which is absolutely crazy, but we’ll take it. It’s beautiful. It’s coming together. So if you want to see pictures of the basement and know more about the whole project, you can sign up for my newsletter. You go to momsdinner.net/subscribe and sign up for the newsletter there. I will also put a link in the show notes to the subscribe page, so you could just check it out there.
But let’s get to making some dinner. It’s Thursday. What in the hell are you going to make for dinner? Well, what we are making is Instant Pot Carnitas for dinner tonight. So if you make these carnitas, you’re going to have dinner for a while. You’ll not only have dinner tonight, but you can also recreate it into something else tomorrow night, the next night. You can even pop these carnitas in the freezer and then use them at a later date. I’ve got a ton in my freezer right now, and actually, instead of making them, I might just pull them right out of the freezer and use that and make carnitas enchiladas for dinner.
So if you’ve ever been to Chipotle or a Mexican restaurant, you’ve probably seen or heard of or had carnitas. Basically what it is, is seasoned Mexican pork, a Mexican shredded pork. Sometimes it’s really juicy and tender, and then sometimes it gets caramelized, so it has little crispy edges on it that are so delicious. We like the crispy edges here. It’s made with a very inexpensive cut of pork. It’s made with a pork shoulder, sometimes also known as a Boston butt or a pork butt, and it’s the same cut that is used for smoked, pulled pork. So if you go to a barbecue joint and you have pulled pork, it’s probably made from a pork butt. Now it’s not the butt of a pig. The pork butt, pork shoulder, Boston butt, it’s all the same thing. It is a cut of pork from the shoulder area. It is not the butt. I’m not sure why they call it the butt, actually. Maybe we’ll do that at the end of the episode, I will look up why a Boston butt is called a butt.
So a few tips and tricks for making your Instant Pot Carnitas. First of all, let’s talk again about that pork shoulder. When you buy pork shoulder, you’ll probably have a couple of different options. It will be called all of those different names, Boston butt. Pork butt, pork shoulder, pork roast, any of those things will work. Now, it’s also going to probably give you an option of bone-in or boneless, or your grocery store may only have one of those options.
My grocery store usually carries the bone-in option, which is great. Totally works. You can cook it with the bone in the instant pot, and then after it cooks, the bone literally just slips right out and all the meat falls off of it. Another tip about using that Boston butt pork shoulder. It’s going to probably have a large fat cap on the top or the bottom, whatever, however, you flip it, and some really big chunks of fat throughout. Now, when you’re cooking low and slow, like on a barbecue or a smoker, that fat renders down and creates really juicy, yummy pulled pork. When you’re cooking in the Instant Pot, it doesn’t have that long slow cooking time for the fat to render down. So you do want to trim a lot of that fat away and discard it, or you could save it and render it down for pork fat if you wanted to. I usually cut most of it down and then discard it because when it cooks down in the Instant Pot, it just becomes jiggly fat. It doesn’t become juicy juicy juice for your pork.
When we make this carnitas recipe, we’re going to cut the pork into large two to three-inch pieces, and then we’re going to sear it and brown it on a couple of sides. You have a couple of options for this. You can do it in the Instant Pot, but what I have found is that it can take a really long time for the Instant Pot to get hot enough on that saute mode to actually caramelize the outside edges of the pork. So what I usually do, and this is counterintuitive to cooking in the Instant Pot, but usually take my large cast iron skillet and put it over medium-high heat on the stovetop, and then I can cook that pork in two batches and it’s much faster and is way more efficient at getting that really caramelized outside edge that just lends a ton of flavor to your carnitas.
So we’ll talk more about that when we go through the full recipe. All right. A couple more ingredients that I want to talk about before we step into the recipe itself. There is an ingredient called Mexican Oregano that is in the spices and seasonings for this carnitas recipe. Mexican oregano and oregano are not really the same thing. The oregano that you get in the spice aisle is more like a Mediterranean oregano. Mexican oregano is going to have a little bit of a different flavor profile. Where I find my Mexican oregano is usually in the produce section. There’ll be a wall that has dried chilies and a lot of traditional Mexican spices. That’s where I find my Mexican oregano. It’s usually really inexpensive and it’s really delicious. It adds a great flavor to this carnitas recipe.
Now also you’re going to be using a lemon-lime soda. So for that, you can use Sprite, 7-Up, Starry, any of those lemon-lime sodas will work perfectly.
Instant Pot Carnitas Recipe: So I think those are all of my tips and tricks for this recipe. So let’s go ahead and get into making the Instant Pot carnitas for dinner tonight. You’re going to want to take about a four to five-pound pork shoulder, pork butt, Boston butt, whatever it’s called, and cut it into about two to three-inch large pieces. As I said, you do want to cut away any large fat cap or any large fat pieces and discard those before moving on. Then you want to take about one and a half tablespoons of kosher salt and one tablespoon of black pepper and season all the sides of the pork so that everything is coated in that seasoning. Then, like I talked about in the tips and tricks section, you can either brown the pork in the instant pot on saute mode, but what I like to do is use my large 12-inch cast iron skillet and do it on the stovetop. It’s so much faster. So I add about three tablespoons of canola oil to my cast iron pan, and then I brown a couple of sides and actually caramelize a couple of sides of the pork pieces. I usually do this in two batches, because like I say, with any recipe, when you want to roast or caramelize or brown, you don’t want to overcrowd the pan because then it will steam instead of brown.
While those pieces are caramelizing and browning, either in the skillet or in the instant pot, next, you’re going to make your deglazing cooking liquid. So what I like to do is take a large four-cup glass measuring cup, or you can just grab a bowl. You’re going to add in one cup of lemon-lime soda, that’s the Sprite, 7-up, whatever you want to use. Six chopped garlic cloves, half a cup of fresh squeezed orange juice. A quarter cup of fresh squeezed lime juice. One teaspoon of either ancho chili powder or chili powder, will work. One and a half teaspoons of Mexican oregano. Half a teaspoon, each of garlic powder, onion powder, cumin, and smoked paprika. Whisk or stir all that together. Then wherever you browned and caramelized the pork pieces, you’re going to deglaze it. So if it was that cast iron skillet, you’re going to pour that liquid into the cast iron skillet and scrape up any of the brown bits. If it was in the Instant Pot, do it in the Instant Pot. You’re just grabbing all of that flavor that you created when you caramelized the pork pieces.
A little warning here. Every single time I have done this though, I set off my smoke alarm. So be careful. If you have a really sensitive smoke alarm as I do, it may set your smoke alarm off when you pour the liquid into the cast iron skillet and it just billows steam.
All right, now it’s time to set everything up in the Instant Pot. So if you did your browning and deglazing in a cast iron skillet, then pour that liquid into the instant pot. Then you’re going to nestle all those caramelized pork pieces down into the Instant Pot. You’ll take one large white onion, cut it up into large chunks, nestle that down in with the pork, and then put one bay leaf down in there.
You’re going to close the Instant pot and set it to cook for 30 minutes, normal heat and high pressure. Just let it do its thing. Then at the end of that, you’re going to do a 15-minute natural release, and then at the end of the 15 minutes, you’re going to finish by releasing all of the pressure by turning that little valve to vent. Then you’re going to take that lid off, remove the meat from the Instant Pot, and just shred up that meat. You can do it with two forks. You can do it with clean hands, or I actually like to put mine in my stand mixer and run it with the paddle for about 30 seconds and it shreds it up perfectly.
Now at this point, you can take some of that liquid from the Instant Pot and drizzle it over the meat. You can use it just as it is right now. You can make tacos and enchiladas. You can make nachos, or burrito bowls, or put some shredded carnitas on top of a baked potato. The options are endless here. This is a good one too. You could make carnitas grilled cheese sandwiches. Woo. So good.
But the other option here is to turn your broiler on in your oven and crisp up the edges of the carnitas. So if you want to do that, you’ll get a really large-rimmed baking sheet. Turn on that broiler in your oven, and then take the carnitas, put it on that rim baking sheet, and sprinkle it with some of that juice from the Instant Pot. Pop it under the broiler for about three minutes. Then you’re going to pull it, and flip the meat over as best you can. Sprinkle a little more juice on it and broil it for another three to five minutes. At this point, you want to watch it and make sure that it’s not burning, that it’s just caramelizing. All right, so if you do it that way, your little caramelized carnitas are so good in a taco. You can warm up a little yellow corn tortilla. Put some carnitas down in there, some diced white onion, some pico de gallo, maybe a little guacamole, a squeeze of lime juice. Woo. So good. Such a delicious dinner. So, like I said, you can use it right away. You can store it in the fridge in an airtight container for up to five days. Or you can freeze it for up to three months.
When I freeze my carnitas, I like to freeze them in two cup portions so that you don’t have to thaw out five pounds of carnitas to use two cups. That way you have easier little portions in your freezer. So of course, no matter how you serve these, if you’re serving them taco, Burrito, enchilada, or burrito bowl, I’ve got some great side dishes on momsdinner.net, the site where I share all of these recipes. You could do a bowl of Mexican rice, you could do Instant Pot Mexican rice, refried beans, salsa, guacamole, or pico de gallo. I have an excellent recipe for this pineapple side dish. It’s fresh pineapple with this honey orange cilantro glaze that goes over the top. Delicious. I also have a really great cilantro lime slaw that makes a wonderful side dish to any Mexican dinner.
So that is the full recipe for your Instant Pot carnitas. That does it for this episode of Let’s Make Dinner. If you’re enjoying these episodes, as I said before, I would love to have you subscribe to our newsletter. You can find a link to subscribe right in the show notes.
Outro: So until next time, I hope this episode of Let’s Make Dinner makes your Dinner Time a little easier. See ya.
Double Dip: All right, guys, now it’s time for your Double Dip. If you are enjoying these episodes and they’re really helping you get dinner on the table, then always stick around every week for the double dip. That is where I tell you what we’re making next week, on Thursday, when you are out of dinner ideas, you will have somewhere to come and be like, oh yeah, that’s what I’m making for dinner.
So next week on Thursday, we’re making a Baked Caesar Chicken. This one is so delicious and I feel like I almost forgot about this recipe, that I had this delicious recipe sitting on my website. It’s a little bit older, but it is scrumptious. So this recipe is based on a really great Ina Garten, Barefoot Contessa, the Queen, one of her recipes. She has a Caesar Swordfish, and I don’t eat a ton of seafood, so I’ve kind of adapted it for chicken. Delish people.
All right. Are you ready for the ingredients that you’re going to need to make your Caesar chicken for dinner next week? All right. Obviously, you’re going to need boneless skinless chicken breasts. You can buy two large boneless skinless chicken breasts and cut them in half lengthwise, so you have four thinner ones, or you can just buy four chicken breasts. You’ll need kosher salt and black pepper. Mayonnaise, Greek yogurt, Dijon mustard, lemon zest, lemon juice, garlic, cloves, and capers and that does it. Then you’ll just need something for a side dish. Right now asparagus is hot people. It is inexpensive and delicious. Highly recommend maybe some couscous and some roasted asparagus. We will make this next week on Let’s Make Dinner. Until then, I hope you guys have an awesome week. See ya.
Recipe Mentioned
- Carnitas in Instant Pot
- Pico De Gallo
- Guacamole
- Refried Beans
- Mexican Rice
- Pineapple Side Dish
- Cilantro Lime Slaw
Next Thursday
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