Tacos Al Pastor (1)

Makes 4 servings

Tacos al Pastor is perhaps the best taco you could ever try. The problem is that good tacos are hard to find the United States since the recipe is such a secret. In Mexico city there are taquerias dedicated mostly or even exclusively to tacos al Pastor. Tacos al Pastor are made from pork meat that has been marinated in a secret recipe and then cooked in a rotisserie with pineapple on top. The tacos should be very small (almost like 2 bites size) and garnished with cilantro (coriander), chopped onion and the pineapple. Add your favorite hot sauce.

ingredients

10 chiles Pasilla
10 chiles Guajillo
1/2 garlic bulb
1/4 litter White Vinegar
1/4 tsp. Cumin
5 cloves
salt
pineapple (fresh or canned)
2 lbs thin pork meat
1 onion
Fresh cilantro (coriander)
1 Beer
2 Limes
Cut the pork meat in thin stakes or slices if necessary. Normally each stake would rest on top of each other while marinating and cooking.
The following is the recipe for the marinade, this is a lot so you won’t have to make it very often.
Take the seeds out of the chiles, cut them in little pieces and mash them together with the garlic, cloves, and cumin, avoid touching the chiles and vinegar with your bare hands if possible. The vinegar and chiles can “cook” your hands, trust me. A food processor would help here.
Boil the ingredients from the above step in the vinegar until it makes some sort of a heavy paste. Making sure that it won’t burn, so mix it often.
Once fully cooked drink the beer while you let the marinade cool down.
Apply the paste to the meat putting one steak on top of the other. At a real taqueria they would form a top that eventually goes into the rotisserie. Since we do not have the rotisserie you simply pile the meat together and store in the fridge for at least 6 hours or overnight.

directions

1
In a taqueria they would roast the “top” of meat with pineapple on top of it so that the juice gives the meat some of its flavor. The meat would be rotated constantly as the cook cuts very small slices of meat and pineapple to be served in a taco.
2
Chop the cilantro and onion.
3
Without a rotisserie, our only choice is to cut the pork in small bits so that it can be eaten easily in a taco.
4
Use a frying pan and cook the meat with small pieces of pineapple making sure the pork is fully cooked and just about to burn in some cases (well roasted).
5
Cut the limes in quarters.
6
Serve the tacos with chopped cilantro, onion, and the limes.