Hello friends of Steemit, today I want to share one of the most famous dishes of the southern region of Mexico and well, one of the favorites of my home.
La Cochinita is traditional Yucatan, a state in southern Mexico, is prepared with pork marinated with achiote, sour orange and spices, baked with banana leaf and enough lard, and when I say "enough" I mean enough ... this is an ancestral dish, the word "fit" is not allowed in this type of recipes.
Well, in my house I do not have banana plants and sometimes I do not have sour orange, so I have learned to substitute some ingredients and even if the result is not exactly the traditional "Cochinita", the taste is delicious so it goes well .
Once I prepare it, keep half in the freezer, so I have it on hand when I do not want to cook. We eat it in cakes, sandwiches, toasts, tacos or burritos.
Well, let's go to the ingredients:
1 kilo of pork, I use leg, but you can use loin, rib or any part that is of your preference, if it is much better fat, because fat adds a lot of flavor.
1 purple onion
1 cube of achiote paste (in some countries they call it Onoto, onnato or rucú).
Half a cup of sour orange juice.
3 cloves of garlic
1 tablespoon of oregano.
2 bay leaves.
1 tablespoon ground cumin.
1 tablespoon ground black pepper.
Salt to taste.
Oil or lard.
In case you do not have sour orange you can substitute the following mixture: 1/4 of white vinegar, 1/4 of orange juice and the juice of 3 lemons.
To prepare it we will need.
Oven or stove.
Pan or refractory suitable to enter the oven.
Knife.
Cutting board.
Preparation
To start, we wash the pork and place it inside a fret.
Chop the garlic cloves, julienne onions and add the orange juice to the pork along with the salt.
Here I already added the mixture to the meat.
Add the tablespoon of ground cumin.
The spoonful of black pepper.
We add the bay leaves.
Oregano, if they have it whole, can crush it with their hands.
The annatto pulp is likewise broken by the hands and smeared on the meat.
Chop the onion in julienne and add it, let marinate 5 hours in the refrigerator, after the time of marinade add oil or butter to a pan where we will bake our cochinita.
Transfer the meat with the marinade, cover and take to the oven at 180 ° for 3 hours.
When the 3 hours have passed, we turn off the oven and let the casserole cool down, when they uncover it, the meat releases more fat and the color changes from red to yellow or orange. With two forks, they undo the pieces of meat and that's it. You can eat your cochinita now.
It really is a very simple recipe, you do not need expensive or strange ingredients, maybe the hardest thing to find is achiote pasta.
I hope you enjoyed it and are encouraged to do it, and afterwards they tell me how they fit and if they modified something.
I send you a kiss and have a happy week.
The photos I took with my cell phone, a Huawei GW Metal ... I hope Santa brings me a camera or a new cell phone to improve the quality of the photos, cross our fingers :)
regards