Cochinita Pibil, Pickled Red Onions

Hello foodie friends, guest bloggers from the fine nuclear weapons free zone of Iowa City, IA checking in on AtWaiOK (or however else you care to abbreviate it).

We had a little dinner party with some of our classmates from grad school and thought that we would share a couple of our dishes with the faithful and devoted readership.

We will cover dessert, a spiced carrot cake with white chocolate cream cheese frosting in a future post. In the meantime, we're hoping that you might find some inspiration via our main course for the night, a slow-cooker adaptation of a traditional pork dish from Mexico's Yucatan peninsula, Cochinita Pibil.

Extremely devote foodies may recognize the dish as a favorite of Rick Bayless that is frequently featured on the menu at Frontera Grill and has been prepared in several permutations on his PBS show, Mexico: One Plate at a Time, as well as on Top Chef: Masters. In its most traditional preparation, Cochinita Pibil is prepared by cooking an entire suckling pig in a deep, brick-lined pit over an entire day's time. However, since we have neither a backyard nor a readily available suckling pig, we've created a fusion of several recipes from the web to craft a reliable and delicious slow-cooker method. The beauty of this recipe is that it is both intensely flavorful and an extraordinarily cheap way to feed an army.

Recipe:

One Pork Shoulder, roughly 3-4 lbs.
1/2 cup + one splash of sour orange juice
1/2 a brick of achiote
1 white onion
Kosher salt
Banana leaves

Achiote, sour orange juice, and banana leaves should all be available at your trusty local mexican grocer and should cost less than 10 dollars, total:

Achiote:

Sour Orange:
Banana Leaves:
Bust out your slow cooker and defrost the banana leaves. Trim the leaves and criss-cross them in the slow cooker, as pictured below. You'll be using them to wrap the pork shoulder.



Combine the orange juice, achiote, and about 2 tsp of salt in a bowl and mix to create a marinade.

Put your pork shoulder in the slow cooker and pour the marinade over the shoulder, using your hands to make sure that it is rubbed all over the pork (wear gloves - achiote stains!!). Add water to the sides of the slow cooker so that it rises roughly halfway up the sides of the pork shoulder (about 1/2 a cup in ours).



Fold the banana leaves to wrap the pork as tightly as possible. What you are looking for here is to keep the flavors sealed in as much as possible and to intensify the braising action of the slow cooker. This is, however, an inexact science and not one that you should get too worried about. This dish is (nearly) impossible to mess up.



Set your slow cooker for six hours on the low setting and go do something else for a while.

Once the pork is fall-apart tender (160 degrees is a good benchmark for done), remove it from the slow cooker and shred it. Have your trusty kitchen partner/sous chef/roommate/whomever skim some (but not all) of the fat from the liquid that remains, transfer it to a saucepan and reduce it to a consistency of your choosing (I typically reduce it by about half). Mix, and enjoy!!