You have to eat the rest of your life, might as well know how

Robert Rodriguez is badass. He started his career with a $7,000 movie that made it to theaters and HBO, helping to usher in the 90's independent film era. He built his own studio in Austin, Tx and has gone on to make a handful of completely original films outside of the studio system. One of my favorites is Once Upon A Time In Mexico, starring Johnny Depp as a CIA agent who travels across Mexico hunting gangsters and eating puerco pibil. One of the special features on the DVD is a short piece showing Rodriguez making the dish and I knew I had to try it.

Puerco Pibil

My grandpa always used to tell people they didn't know how to eat. There were echoes of that in the comment I stole from the DVD for the title of this posting. I don't know whether or not Art would have liked puerco pibil, but I do. And if you don't, that proves one thing: you don't know how to eat.

Ingredients:

5 lbs pork butt
5 tbs annatto
2 tsp cumin seeds
8 allspice, whole
6 cloves, whole
1 tbs black pepper, whole
1/2 cup orange juice
1/2 cup white vinegar
2 habanero peppers
2 tbs salt
8 cloves garlic
5 lemons
Tequila
Banana leaves (if you can find them)

The list seems a little intimidating at first, but it's not a big deal. You're really just mixing it all up in a bag, not too complicated.

Start by cutting the pork into chunks about 2 inches square. Throw the pork in a 1 gallon bag or large bowl with a lid.

Now you're ready for the spices. Annatto is made from the pulp that surrounds seeds in the fruit of the achiote tree. By the time it makes it's way to a grocery store shelf from South America it's been dried into a tiny, rock hard little nugget of flavor. Start off by throwing the annatto, cumin, allspice, cloves and black pepper into either a coffee grinder or a blender. Grind it all until it's powder. I don't have a coffee grinder, but the blender set to liquefy works fine, and you're going to need it for the next step anyway.

Chop the tops off of your habaneros and take out the seeds and veins. You can leave them in if you want, all depends on how hot you like it. I usually get rid of the big clump in the middle and leave everything else, including whatever stray seeds manage to stick to the inside. The dish cooks slow, so it has time to absorb the bite.

Throw the peppers, orange juice and vinegar into the blender with the spice powder. Apparently the earliest known form of this dish is made in the Yucatan using bitter oranges, but good luck finding them in America. The OJ and vinegar performs the same task.

Toss in the salt and garlic and blend until it's an even consistency. Squeeze in the juice from the lemons and pour in a splash of tequila. I use at least 3 shots of tequila, quite a splash, but 1 just never seems like enough.

Grab your bag o' pork and pour the mix over it. Mix it up and toss it in the fridge to marinate for at least an hour. I've left it in overnight with no problem, so adjust to your dinner schedule.

When you're ready to cook, heat the oven to 325. If you can find banana leaves, line a baking pan with them. I can't ever find them in a convenient location, so I've never used them. His dish in the video is a little more green than mine has ever turned out, which I figure has to be the leaves. I don't know if they effect the taste or not but they do look cool if you can dig them up.

Pour the meat into the pan and cover it with two layers of foil. Wrap the foil tight around the pan so it will trap the steam from the meat and the leaves, helping cook the batch. Toss the pan into the oven and walk away for four hours.

Well, 3 and a half, to be exact. You should make some rice to serve it with. I made an attempt at homemade corn tortillas the last time I made pibil, but they were a complete failure. I think I know what I did wrong, they should work out next time.

Also, cut some limes into slices to serve with the rest of your tequila. Tequila is to pibil what wine is to good Italian. More than a compliment, somehow it makes the meal.

Okay, when your rice is done, it's been about four hours and you can take the pibil out of the oven. Take off the foil and serve the meat on a bed of rice with corn tortillas, fresh jalapenos slices and the liquor, salt and lime.

Porkalicious!

Post-Script: Trying my first restaurant pibil

The one cuisine New York has never been known for is Mexican. Growing up in Kansas we ate a lot of Mexican and Mexican-inspired meals, from tacos at roadside stands to local fast food joints to Mom's version of the steaming plate fajitas. As New York got more Mexican people over the last 15 years, we also started to get more Mexican restaurants. Even in the six years I've been here I can name a bunch of places that have popped up in the 40's and 50's on the West side.

Naturally, this trend suits me just fine. I stopped at a restaurant I'd never been to recently, a place called Taco Taco with a menu that was much more dignified than it's name. At the bottom of the specialties of the house list was Cochinita Pibil, the original title for the dish. Cochinita means 'little pig', so the name was changed when people started buying butt at the market instead of wrapping the whole bugger in banana leaves and dropping him in a hot hole.

The dish was served on a piece of banana leaf but didn't have the distinctive color of Rodriguez's pibil. I suspect they cook it in a pan like I do, saving the leaf to look cute on the plate. The pork was as tender and juicy as any competently roasted meat and the pickled onions were a nice cold side to go with it.

But pibil is all about the spice and tequila mixture, and this one wasn't nearly as distinctive and bright as the recipe above. It wasn't that anything was missing or different, it just wasn't as good. There was definitely less habanero and it's likely that they aren't grinding their own spices every morning, this being a business.

Don't get me wrong, I ate well and left happy. But it was a reminder of why shortcuts rarely turn out 'just as good'.