What's The Best Cut Of Pork For Carnitas?

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Carnitas is practically legendary in Mexican cuisine. This tender, perfectly seasoned pork dish is great for anything from tacos to salads and everything in between. Perfecting the flavor, however, is only half the job when it comes to this delicious dish. You also have to choose the right cuts of pork in order to get the tender, melt-in-your-mouth results that make carnitas an unequivocal favorite. 

Rick Martinez, the James Beard Award-winning author of "Salsa Daddy: Dipping Your Way into Mexican Cooking," spoke exclusively with Chowhound to share some expert advice on the subject, so you can cook an unforgettable version of the dish. For one thing, Martinez recommends multiple cuts of meat for carnitas, starting with pork shoulder. "The shoulder has a lot of really great fat," he says. "It also has a lot of flavor, and it kind of melts into this beautiful, velvety texture after a long period of cooking." He also likes to toss in some cubed pork belly, which not only adds to the flavor but helps create the perfect mix of textures when you fry up the pork belly to get a nice crispy skin. "When you bite into a piece of that kind of fried, crackling pork skin in a pork belly, plus that really, really soft unctuous shoulder, that to me is kind of perfection." It's the combination of cuts that gives carnitas what Martinez calls "heritage pig farm flavor," meaning that when you mix different cuts of meat, especially from a pig that is free range rather than industrialized, you get the complex porcine flavors that Mexican carnitas are known for.

Another cut that Martinez likes to cook with is one you might not automatically think of. Pig's feet, an underrated cut of pork, bring a unique flavor to the dish. He likes to add them in with the shoulder and belly because "the foot adds a lot more of that velvety, unctuous texture and umami, but it also gives you that little hint of what you would find in Mexico."

Martinez also has some great advice for cooking them. "You could use a pound of belly, one small foot, and then one to two pounds of shoulder," he says. "And you could even go a little leaner on the shoulder because you've got a lot more fat from the belly and the pig foot." He also suggests cooking the seasoned meat in a Dutch oven at a low temperature — around 250 degrees Fahrenheit — for anywhere from four to seven hours, or even overnight. "Basically, you're cooking it until everything is literally falling apart," he says. "You push a spoon into it and it's like soft butter."

When it comes to the feet, Martinez recommends removing the bones before cooking and making golden fried chicharrones with the skin. He also avoids using additional fat, like lard, because the meat itself provides plenty of fat on its own (which he likes to skim off and use for later, much like with duck fat). He also seasons judiciously, preferring to stick with basics like salt and pepper, but acknowledges that additional ingredients like orange, garlic, onion, cinnamon, nutmeg, and chili can all add to the flavor profile.