How to make carnitas

Every culture seems to have its own variation on slow-cooked pork. Porchetta, red roast pork, pulled pork and the now-ubiquitous braised belly are all worthy entrants in the porcine hall of fame. I've become a big fan of one of Mexico's contributions to the genre: carnitas.

Carnitas is a delicious dish of pork shoulder, braised, then shredded, then roasted and served in a taco. If the thought of tender, crispy pork in a fresh tortilla does not appeal to you then you are not a person I want to know.

Mexican cuisine has nearly-infinite regional variations, as with any great cuisine, and they each seem to have their own variation on carnitas. Homesick Texan tells of Michoacan carnitas which are cooked in vats of their own fat (ie. lard). Apparently it's common in some areas to braise the carnitas in beer, which I'll definitely try at some point. Pork, beer, yes please.

The recipe I use is by David Lebovitz, with a couple of minor changes incorporated from other recipes I've read. This dish is very, very easy to prepare but obscenely tasty. It's also fairly cheap to cook for a crowd; the free range pork shoulder pictured below is $13/kilo at Mondo's wholesale outlet in Osborne Park (more about that place later).

Carnitas

2 kilo piece of boneless pork shoulder (also called the "butt"), cut into rough, large pieces like in the picture above

About a tablespoon of salt, but no more

2 tablespoons or so of vegetable oil or another oil with a high smoke point

1 cinnamon stick

2 teaspoons chilli powder (use 1 tsp ancho chilli, if you have it, along with 1 tsp regular)

1 bay leaf

1/4 teaspoon cumin

2 cloves garlic, thinly sliced

1 or 2 oranges, juiced

1. Preheat your oven to 180c.

2. Rub the pieces of pork shoulder with salt. You want to try and salt every surface of the meat, but don't be tempted to over-salt at this stage. The liquid is going to reduce while you braise the meat, and it will get very salty if you're not careful.

2. Heat the oil in an enamelled cast iron pot or similar over a medium-high heat. A decent roasting pan would do, you just want something that can go on the hob and in the oven and is reasonably deep. Brown the meat on all sides. Make sure you're not crowding the pan; if you are, your meat will sweat and boil rather than browning. Brown the meat in batches if it won't comfortably fit in one layer.

3. If you like, remove the pork from the pot and blot away the excess fat. Alternatively, don't bother.

4. Put the pork back in the pot and add enough water to cover about 2/3 of the pork. Add the spices, garlic and bay leaf. Add the orange juice. I add the orange juice because it will help the pork to caramelise later on.

5. Place the pot in the oven, uncovered.

6. Leave for 3-4 hours, until the pork is falling apart to the touch and there isn't much liquid left. Turn the meat over every now and then, as the top of the pork will get quite brown as it peeks above the waterline.

7. Remove the pork and shred it with forks. Some people chop their carnitas into chunks, but I like the stringiness of shredded braised meat.

8. Put your shredded pork back into the pot with the little bit of liquid left in it. The liquid will be dark, intense, spicy, fatty, salty and a little sweet from the orange juice. Roast until the pork is nicely crispy on the outside. This will take anywhere from 10 to 40 minutes, mostly depending on how much liquid you have left in the pan and how crispy you want your carnitas.

That's it!

I like to serve carnitas with a side dish made of finely shredded red cabbage, red onion, julienned carrot and coriander that has macerated in a bit of red wine vinegar. I mix a couple of tablespoons of red wine vinegar with a pinch of brown sugar and a pinch of salt, toss well with the cabbage mix and leave until the cabbage has been lightly pickled. It might seem slightly strong, but remember you're not eating it as a salad, it's going on a taco with your porky, fatty, salty carnitas. A tomatillo salsa is also a delicious accompaniment (it's just a shame that we don't have fresh tomatillos here as far as I know, and tinned tomatillos are ridiculously expensive).

Ezra Pound (Small bar - Northbridge/Perth)

Ezra Pound is my new favourite small bar in Perth. It's small, simple and not too slick. It specialises in classic cocktails (like the Tom Collins in a jar shown above in a shitty iPhone photo), but you can also get a longneck of Coopers in a paper bag or with glasses for $10. My kind of place.

I like a good cocktail, but I'm not really into the posturing that sometimes goes with it. Elsewhere it seems to take about 20 minutes to make a drink, with each Negroni accompanied by redundant Tom Cruise-style gyrations. Here the approach is more laid back, but the drinks are still of a high quality.

The bar looks great, with a vintage cash register in pride of place behind the bar, next to a (functional) record player playing an assortment of Motown hits. I like the amount of effort that has gone into Ezra Pound: it doesn't feel slapdash or thoughtless, but it's not overwrought and slick either.

The only potential drawback is that the bar is in an alley way off William St between James St and Roe St, meaning it's pretty much at ground zero as far as horrible weekend Northbridge stuff goes. 399 is far enough away from James St and Aberdeen St that it feels separate from Northbridge proper, but Ezra Pound is right in the middle of it.

Talmage, the co-owner and bartender (previously of the West End Deli) tells me that they plan to close the gates to William St on weekends to try and minimise the number of people who mistakenly stumble in on their way to the Paramount. I hope it works, this place is great.


UPDATE 16/11/09: Ezra Pound finally has its laneway license, just in time for summer! Awesome.

Ezra Pound
189 William St
Northbridge WA

Tannic Teeth has some great photos of Ezra Pound. 

The best restaurants in Perth?

Gourmet Traveller released their annual restaurant guide earlier this week, which includes a Michelin-style three-star rating system, a top 100 list for the country and top 10 lists for each capital city.

Anyway, the Perth list is pretty solid, if mostly predictable:

1. Restaurant Amusé
2. Star Anise
3. The Loose Box
4. Jackson’s
5. Nahm Thai
6. Must Winebar
7. Maya
8. Fraser’s
9. Divido
10. Lamont’s (East Perth)

How can restaurants that do not have stars (Fraser's and Maya) beat a one-star restaurant (Divido)? I can understand how this might happen if the stars and the regional lists were compiled separately; different critics might be involved in the separate processes, or maybe the restaurants could be assessed by different criteria. This is one guide, with Divido scoring a star yet ranking lower than two no-star restaurants! (EDIT: Jane Cornes, the WA editor of Gourmet Traveller, confirmed via email that an error was made in compiling the WA list, and Divido should be placed above Fraser's and Maya).

I'm pleasantly surprised to see Amusé top the list after eating two spectacular meals there in the last few months. I can still vividly recall their rabbit, ceps and thyme dish, a small individual lasagne with an intense, earthy porcini flavour, served as part of their standard 12-course degustation.

Amusé scored two stars, making it the only two star restaurant in WA. The second star for Amusé is well deserved, but does Perth really only have one two-star restaurant?.

If you compare Perth's list to those of other cities, you can definitely make a case for Perth being slightly underrated by the GT critics. Star Anise in particular surely deserves a second star; it was rated 4/5 by John Lethlean in the Australian last weekend and would likely have kept its second star if it was in Surry Hills rather than Shenton Park. I'm not quite sure why Star Anise went from two stars to one. Perhaps Amuse's promotion exhausted Perth's quota of stars.


Still, even allowing for Perth being slightly hard done by, and controlling for our smaller population, it's clear that we're miles behind other cities, even Adelaide. We've got a few great fine dining places, heaps of decent, cheap Asian places and not a hell of a lot in between. I can't work out why.

A few high-profile chefs interviewed by WA Today suggest that Perth diners need to stand up for themselves. There's definitely something to that, people are too accepting of mediocrity (and expensive mediocrity at that). But why would that be? The issue that comes up whenever Perth is discussed, our isolation, might be a factor, but I'm not so sure. Are we less well-travelled than people from Adelaide? I doubt it.

Great mid-range places like Cantina fill me with hope, as does the mini-boom in small bars that we're experiencing. Maybe things are starting to turn around. I'll be interested to see if there's any movement in next year's list.

Meat Class #1 with the Prince of Flesh

"Pork fat... is just delicious" - Vince Garreffa

Vince Garreffa, butcher to the stars, is a master of the porcine arts. He's the sort of guy who gets up at six o'clock on a Sunday morning to boil three pigs' heads to make brawn for his charcuterie class.

I've been looking around for decent cooking classes in Perth, and Mondo di Carne's meat classes seemed like a pretty good bet. I booked in for five classes: two on charcuterie, two on boning and cooking lamb, and one on breaking down and cooking poultry.

I really wanted these classes to be good. I recently took a class on seafood cooking at another local cooking school, and it was disappointingly rudimentary, as if it was designed for people who have never been in a kitchen before.

The first Mondos class was exactly what I was looking for! There was not a single shriek at the sight of the boiled pig's head (above), and everyone seemed to be pretty into food and cooking.

Vince Garreffa first explained to us about the role of sodium nitrate ("pink salt") in curing meat. He then showed us some partially-cured pancetta and demonstrated the 'massage' or 'kneading' process that must be completed daily. We were shown how to make duck prosciutto and smoke our own chorizo, and the main part of the class revolved around making brawn.

He'd started the morning by boiling a massive vat full of three pigs' heads, a few beef tongues and various other lovely animal parts, which he spread out on huge roasting trays and asked us to chop.

The chopped meat was then mixed together with a few handfuls of capers, some salt, pepper, parsley, garlic and red wine vinegar, ladled into plastic containers and topped with a bit of the boiling liquid that had become rich and gelatinous from the trotters that were included in the mix. Next week we each get to bring home our own little container of brawn that we helped make!

As well as teaching us all sorts of valuable little meat-related tips (his method for creating an improvised hot-smoker was particularly revelatory for me), Vince taught us all about the difference between good meat and bad meat. At various points he would teach us how things should be done, and then tell us about the way supermarkets do things. All hams, it seems, are not created equal.

I appreciated getting a bit more information about the distinctions between well-prepared and poorly-prepared meat. Sometimes it can seem as if avoiding the supermarket is just a bit of foodie prejudice, or a culinary fashion statement. Vince's descriptions of supermarkets' meat preparation techniques confirm that there is a world of difference between smallgoods prepared by respectable artisans and mass-produced stuff injected with water and chemicals.

I've already done a fair bit of reading about charcuterie, mostly the writings of my favourite food writer Michael Ruhlman, but this is definitely an area of cooking in which it pays to get some hands-on instruction before trying things yourself. There's no way for a book (or a TV show) to tell you how a partially-cured duck breast should feel, or how hard you should massage your pancetta.

I think the classes on boning and breaking down lamb and poultry will be informative in the same way: instructions to "slice the knife along the saber bone to the joint" are all well and good, but what does that look like? How much pressure should I use? What angle should my knife be held at? What the hell is the saber bone?

I'm excited about my remaining four classes, and I hope to start applying some of my newly acquired knowledge at home. If you're in Perth and looking to acquire a bit more skill in working with meat, I highly recommend the classes at Mondo di Carne.

Strawberry & Vanilla Friands

It seems like I have not baked in a long time. Friands always seemed like a big deal, more complicated than your average cake or muffin (not that I would ever cook a muffin) for some reason. I guess the words "egg whites" are to blame. But it turns out, they are not! They are easy! Last week I bought a friand pan when I saw it going cheap, and today I christened it with this recipe from delicious.P.S. These came out really well. Recommended for eating same day, as they lost the nice crispy edge once kept over night, but stayed moist for a few days after anyway.