One of the greatest benefits of working from home is that I can do long slow cooks, like stews and braises, and just let them go in the oven all day long and have a fantastic satisfying meal at the end of the day. Carnitas, beef bourguignon, chili con carne, coq au vin; really the options are endless—get a good slow cooking cut of meat like pork shoulder, chuck roast, or chicken thighs; brown it off and throw some other stuff in the pot and then just let it sit. A few hours later, it’s dinner time.
Here’s a really simple technique for carnitas at home which I have refined from Kenji’s recipe (give it a shot even if you don’t work from home, on a day off when you don’t have much going on):
Get a pork roast, like a shoulder or a Boston butt. 2 pounds of meat will make about four servings / a dozen tacos (and that’s about as much as a standard sized dutch oven can handle—you can get a bigger roast, just make sure you have a big enough vessel to braise it). Salt your meat. You want about 1-2% of the roast’s weight in salt, but I usually just eyeball it, keeping in mind you need enough salt to season the whole thing, not just the surface. If you salt it the night before, and let it sit uncovered in the fridge, you’ll get better browning. Then brown off the roast on all sides. Cut it up into large chunks and place the chunks in your braising vessel (really any oven-safe pot with a lid will work). Add a couple chunks of onion and cloves of garlic (no need to dice them or anything) for flavor. If you really want to take it to the next level, add a couple tablespoons of brown sugar, a whole navel orange, and a couple cinnamon sticks as well. You can add some cumin and oregano if you want, just make sure you go easy. Next you need to add enough liquid to nearly submerge everything. You can use fat (in that case this would technically be more of a confit than a braise) or stock or just water. I use reclaimed bacon fat. Lard would be traditional, but also traditional is reusing the lard for many batches and in that way enriching its flavor, so there’s not really any point in buying a new container of lard. Stock or water works just fine because plenty of fat should render out of the meat. So then you just put that in the oven, covered but not completely covered, at 275F, for about 4-5 hours. The chunks should just barely be holding themselves together when it’s done. Discard the onion, garlic, orange, and cinnamon sticks. Put the pot back on the burner now, and boil off any liquid in there (the reason I use fat instead of water is that this step is faster), so the meat can fry a little bit, and get crispy on all sides. Then you can refrigerate it until you’re ready to eat, or at least let it cool to room temperature. Pull the chunks apart with your hands (it’s good to use your hands so you can feel any gross chunks that didn’t break down in cooking and get rid of them). This technique gives you carnitas that are crispy on the ends and tender on the inside. Steam some corn tortillas by microwaving them for 30 seconds wrapped in a damp paper towel, then build your tacos. I keep mine really simple because I really, really love carnitas. Some salsa verde or hot sauce, or sometimes some diced white onion and cilantro.
Easy enough, right?
But you can make it not so easy by obsessing over it. (For example, you’ll get a better result if you start cooking at a lower temperature, like 200F, and bump it up by 25 degrees every hour or two. It also helps to remove the meat from the pot while you’re boiling off the braising liquid, and then add it back to the fat to finish crisping. The reason these things improve the result is that meat dries out when its internal temperature is past the boiling point of water, so you can get more succulent meat by preventing that from happening.) This is what happens to me. The braise becomes the only thing I can think about. I form the intention to do a braise the night before, so I am thinking about it in the morning and then throughout the day as it cooks and fills the house with its porky aromas. Because it happens so slowly, I have a lot of time to plan and reflect on my technique and cling to my expectations. And when it’s time to eat, it’s difficult for me to enjoy it, because I am investigating the meat’s quality more than I am actually eating it. Then I will literally go to sleep thinking about it, because, of course, one of the great things about braising meat is it makes a lot of food, so I’ll be eating the leftovers for lunch and sometimes even dinner the next day.
(It’s really no surprise that Roquentin’s bouts of obsessive dissociation from reality were described as digestive distress—it’s all the same.)
It’s much like writing. The reason I write is precisely that I am so obsessive. An essay or a story begins as an obsession over an idea or an argument or an image; it permeates me and I cling to it and I think about it constantly. It will sometimes interrupt me at work or while I’m reading, and I will have to put the book down or alt-tab away from my programming and take a note. Almost all of the writing happens in my head, slow-cooking, at the threshold of my unconscious and the peripheries of my default network. I think about whatever I’m working on as I’m going to sleep or especially while driving, literally sounding out sentences in my head and rearranging the structure of the piece even before I’ve put down a single word. It will take me over, I’m ashamed to say it, even while someone is talking to me, and they will be able to tell that I’m not listening and they will have to repeat themselves. After a few weeks of this I can pull it out of the oven and sear it off and serve it and usually I am able to forget about it.
Braised meat, though, is a little different. It is difficult to forget. All that fat coats the inside of your mouth and transmits the flavor compounds to your gustatory receptors even after you swallow, lingering. This, what you’re reading, is itself an example of this. The carnitas I made last week were so pervasive, they coated the inside of my body so thoroughly, that they penetrated the mucus membrane and the blood-brain barrier and made their way into the writing part of my mind, and this, whatever this is, took over all of the other writings I had been working on.
There are times when it feels as though I exist solely to braise. If I do one on a slow day at work I may forget about work entirely. After dinner I will look back on the day and it will seem as though the braise is the only thing I did with my time. But it only takes an hour of work, max. What did I do all day? I couldn’t tell you. I only have the memory of the smell of meat, garlic, onions… I only have the impression of the braise on my mind, the rumination of it, the examination of it: how did it go this time? Was the meat as tender as last time? Was it dryer than last time? It seems like it might have been. But why? Did I buy a leaner cut of pork? I’ll have to make sure to pay extra attention in the store next time, and only accept the most heart-stoppingly marbled pork shoulder. Sometimes braises blend together, I get so caught up in one that I am still thinking about it when I start the next one. I actually still have half the pork shoulder in my freezer so I’m already looking forward to another batch of carnitas.
I’m aware of how it looks to have enthusiasm for cooking meat like this. I’ve seen that chilling video of Mark Zuckerberg smoking meats in what could not possibly be his backyard. I’m haunted by that horrible chapter in The Corrections, where Gary’s kids beg him to make “mixed grill” for dinner, but then only eat a tiny amount of the various meats, and later order a pizza.
If you believe in God, there is no need to braise meat. That is why, in the Catholic household in which I was raised, I had to eat pale dry chicken breast and pork chops for dinner. There is a promise of salvation in slow-cooked meats. The promise exists in the people you feed it to. You put all of your love into your meat and you share it with your family and your friends, and you imagine that they will be so grateful for your tender gastronomic caress, and that there, inside their mouths, you will be exalted. But the paradox of meat-based salvation is that your loved ones’ enthusiasm for your slow cook always falls so short of your own. The people around you never care about the braise as much as you do—that’s just the way it is. You are like a pastor, preaching, and believing that you are really benefiting your congregation, but if you really looked you would see that they all just show up and they aren’t even thinking about the meat when they go to sleep, and you have to wonder what is it all for?
The only way out is to give up on the pursuit for salvation entirely, and to pursue the braise for its own sake. To get your satisfaction in the act of braising, the delicate selection of your aromatics, the sincere attention paid to cooking time and moistness and fork-tenderness, the garnish you add to freshen up those deep slow-cooked flavors, the actual experience of eating it. In short you have to look inwardly, to the place where the meat becomes a part of you.