Mexican't or Mexi-CAN?

We were working on some cupcakes last night, and as Amy was adding the sour cream to the cake batter, she mentioned that Mexican food sounded good.  As is often the case she was 100% right.  To further solidify that it was time for Mexican food, I received a piece of mail addressed to my given name John Juarez.

So today is Taco Day!

Everybody knows what that means.  Ground beef, a packet of sodium and MSG, and some delicious orange cheese food product.

Not this time.

These are Braised Pork Butt Tacos.

Pork butt, as you might suspect comes from the shoulder of the pig.  Yep, right behind the head.  So why is it called Pork butt?  Well, back before modern refrigeration, meat (and especially pork) would be packed for transit in big barrels called butts.  The name somehow stuck to the pork shoulder cut so now we have a pork butt that is really a shoulder that 100 years ago used to be packed in a butt.  Yum!

As you can see, the pork shoulder is marbled with a lot of fat.  Large amounts of fat dictate that we cook our meat "low and slow."   This will allow the meat to come up to temp evenly, allow the fat to melt and baste the meat during cooking, and allow the connective tissues in the meat (that is, the tough, gnarly bits) to absorb a lot of moisture and convert from stringy collagen to lip-smacking gelatin.

In order for this conversion to happen, we need to add lots of moisture.  Water is one option, but is rather lacking in flavor.  So we'll use something even better than water...BEER!


Step one is to stem and seed some dried chilies. 2 Chilie de abol and 4 dried ancho chilies.

Chop the stems off, cut them down the middle and dump out the seeds.

Then cover the chilies with boiling water and weigh them down with a bowl or plate to keep them submerged for about an hour.  After they've rehydrated, put the chilies, a tablespoon of lime juice, a couple tablespoons of sugar and a good pinch of salt into a food processor and rev it up.  Slowly drizzle in some of the liquid the chilis soaked in until everything combines into a thick paste.

The pork butt and the paste go into a gallon size ziplock with as much air removed as possible.  Then its time to rub your butt.  Rub it good, get the paste all over your butt, then stick it in the fridge.

My butt was in the fridge overnight.  Probably a total of 15 hours or so.

I pulled my big, chilie covered butt out of the fridge to come up to room temperature.  In the mean time, chopped a red onion and a few cloves of garlic.  These went into hot oil with some cumin, allspice, oregano, corriander seed and a couple of bay leaves.

Everything sauteed until the onions were soft, then in went beer.  One bottle of dark beer.  I used a wooden spoon to scrape all the yummy bits off the pan and stir them into the liquid.  Fancy cooks call this deglazing.

Once everything came up to a boil, I stuck my butt in the pot.

The lid went on and the I stuck the pot, butt and all into the oven at 300 degrees F.  At this point it's important to review the owners manual of your new oven to make sure that you don't accidentally shut it off after the first hour of cooking.

I basted the pork every hour for 3 hours.  In the mean time I sliced some radishes, toasted some corn tortillas, chopped some cilantro, made some guacamole, pickled some red onions and put all of the accoutrements into bowls.

The traditional construction is a tortilla with the meat, onions, radishes and cilantro.