Slow Cooker Pork Carnitas -- Six Hours on Low and My Mom Said It Tastes Like Abuela Rosa Is Standing in the Kitchen

It’s a hundred and two degrees in Tulsa and I’ve been thinking about my grandmother.

Not Grandma Whitehawk, up in Tahlequah — but Abuela Rosa. My mother’s mother. The woman who drove from McAlester every Christmas with tamales wrapped in newspaper inside a cooler, who called everyone mija including me, who is eighty-one years old and has arms that look like they were built for holding people. She called last Sunday and talked to my mother for an hour and a half, the way she does every Sunday, and when Terry told her Luna’s name there was a long pause on the phone and then Abuela Rosa said, in Spanish, that Luna was a name for a girl who was going to be something.

My mother told me this while I was driving. I didn’t say anything for a second because I didn’t want to crash.

Luna is four weeks old now. She looks like Hannah around the eyes and like nobody I’ve ever seen anywhere else in the other half of her face. She’s got this way of frowning when she’s hungry that breaks your heart and makes you laugh at exactly the same time. Kai has appointed himself her official narrator. “Baby crying,” he announces, in case we couldn’t hear it from eight feet away. “Baby sleeping.” “Baby doing that thing.” He’s three and he takes his responsibilities seriously. Hannah is doing better than okay, though she wouldn’t say so. The sign with her is when she picks up a book again, and she picked one up on Thursday. She’s coming back.

I went back to the pipeline job this week. Twelve-hour shifts, five in the morning start, and the heat index on the job site has been sitting at a hundred and eight. I come home smelling like weld smoke and sunscreen and something deeper than both, the way the body smells when it’s been running too hot for too long. I walk in the door and Hannah is nursing Luna on the couch and Kai runs at me like I’ve been gone a year.

Last Monday I set the slow cooker before I left. Five in the morning, dark kitchen, everybody asleep — and me, standing at the counter putting a pork shoulder into the pot with dried chiles and garlic and orange juice and a whole quartered onion, turning it to low, walking out the door into the dark. There is something about that act — leaving food to cook while you’re gone, trusting the house to take care of itself — that feels more like hope than anything else I do in a day.

I learned to make carnitas from my mother. Terry learned it from Abuela Rosa, who learned it from someone before her, in a line going back into the Texas-Mexico borderlands where my mother’s family comes from. The chain is imprecise. That generation didn’t write things down. You watched. You helped. You absorbed it through your hands and your nose and eventually you could do it yourself, more or less, and the “more or less” was part of what got passed down too — the permission to trust yourself, to adjust, to cook by feel rather than measurement.

I called Terry on my lunch break, standing in the shade of a job trailer while my coworkers ate sandwiches out of coolers. She walked me through the whole thing again, even though I’d made it before. That’s what she does. She likes the process of talking through a recipe. I think it’s her version of being in the kitchen with you, and I’m not going to tell her that’s what it is because she’ll deny it, but that’s what it is.

“Did you salt it the night before?” she asked.

I had not salted it the night before.

“Jesse Ray.”

“I know, Mom.”

“It won’t be as good.”

“I know.”

“Your grandmother always said you have to let the salt have time to get to know the meat.”

I stood there in the dust and the heat and I felt something I don’t have a cleaner word for than: like the world was smaller and safer than it looked from the outside. That’s what food does sometimes. That’s why I keep coming back to it. You’re standing in Oklahoma in August with a welding hood around your neck and your boots full of sweat, and your mother says something your grandmother used to say, and for one second the distance between here and McAlester and whatever is on the other side of McAlever collapses into nothing.

My mother’s family is Mexican-American, which means that side of my heritage sometimes gets flattened under the weight of the Cherokee side — not intentionally, just the way it happens when you grow up in a place where one part of your identity has a name people recognize and the other part is harder to explain. I’m Jesse Whitehawk. That name tells you something. But I’m also Terry Morales’s son, and Abuela Rosa’s grandson, and there is a whole lineage in that half of me that deserves the same care and attention I give to anything else I’m trying not to lose.

Luna is a Spanish name. Hannah and I talked about it. Hannah is full-blood Cherokee and she was the one who said it, actually — “Luna,” in that way she has of saying a word like she’s been holding it for a while — and I said yes immediately, because it was right. It was right for this daughter, and it was right for what she carries. Both of it. All of it.

Here is what I want to say about carnitas, which is technically what this post is supposed to be about: it is the most forgiving thing I know how to make. You put pork in a pot with fat and citrus and chile and you walk away from it for six hours, and the pork does the rest. It doesn’t need you. The collagen breaks down into gelatin, the fat renders into the meat, the dried chiles open up in the liquid and give you this depth that you didn’t put in there consciously. The transformation happens on its own. You assembled the conditions and then you trusted the process.

I think about that sometimes. Especially with Kai, who is three and becoming his own person in ways that are sometimes wonderful and sometimes alarming and always a little faster than I’m ready for. You put in what you can. You salt it the night before if you remember. You turn it to low and you go to work and you trust that what you started will become what it’s supposed to become.

When I got home Monday the house smelled like orange and pork and chile, underneath the baby smell and the particular smell of a house where people have been indoors all day in August, and Hannah looked up at me from the couch and I could tell by her face that the smell had done something for her too. That’s the slow cooker working while you’re not there. That’s the whole trick.

I pulled the pork out and shredded it into the cast iron pan with a few spoonfuls of the cooking liquid and ran it under the broiler until the edges crisped and caramelized and went dark in the good way. That step is where carnitas becomes carnitas. The slow cooker gives you tender. The broiler gives you the bite, the crackle, the contrast that makes it worth going through the whole process. Don’t skip it. My mother would tell you the same thing.

We ate it in corn tortillas with diced white onion and cilantro and lime, standing over the kitchen counter because the table was covered in baby gear and neither Hannah nor I had the energy to move it. Kai ate three tacos and said they were “pretty good,” which is his highest available praise. Hannah ate two and looked at me and said, “Call your mom and tell her thank you.”

I texted Terry a photo of the plate instead. She texted back inside of two minutes.

It looks right. Abuela would be proud.

That’s the whole thing right there. That’s the whole reason.

Salt it the night before. I mean it.

The recipe that made all of that happen—the tacos eaten standing up, the text from Terry, the feeling that something real had been passed down and kept alive—is pretty straightforward, which I think is exactly the point. This isn’t a dish that needs to be complicated to mean something. Here’s how I made it.

Slow Cooker Pork Carnitas

Ingredients

• 3 to 4 lb bone-in pork shoulder (Boston butt), cut into 3 or 4 large chunks
• 2 tsp kosher salt, plus more for overnight seasoning
• 1 tsp black pepper
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 1 tsp dried Mexican oregano
• 2 dried ancho chiles, stems and seeds removed
• 1 dried guajillo chile, stem and seeds removed (or an extra ancho if you can’t find guajillo)
• 6 cloves garlic, smashed
• 1 large white onion, quartered
• Juice and zest of 1 orange (about 1/2 cup juice)
• Juice of 1 lime
• 1/2 cup low-sodium chicken broth
• 2 bay leaves

• Corn tortillas, warmed
• Finely diced white onion
• Fresh cilantro, roughly chopped
• Lime wedges
• Salsa of your choice

Instructions

1. Salt the pork the night before. Season the pork chunks generously on all sides with kosher salt. Wrap tightly in plastic or set in a covered dish and refrigerate overnight. Pull it from the fridge about 30 minutes before you’re ready to cook. This step matters. Don’t skip it like I did.
2. Layer the slow cooker. Place the quartered onion in the bottom of the slow cooker. Set the salted pork chunks on top. Add the smashed garlic, dried chiles, cumin, oregano, and bay leaves around the pork.
3. Add the liquid. Pour the orange juice, orange zest, lime juice, and chicken broth over everything. The liquid should come about a third of the way up the pork — you’re braising, not boiling. Cover and set to low.
4. Cook low and slow. Cook on low for 6 to 8 hours. The pork is done when it shreds easily with two forks and the meat near the bone pulls away clean. Don’t open the lid before 6 hours — leave it alone and let it work.
5. Shred and reserve the liquid. Transfer the pork to a cutting board and shred it with two forks, discarding any large pieces of fat and the bones. Strain the cooking liquid and skim the fat from the top. Reserve about 1/2 cup of the liquid.
6. Crisp the carnitas. Set your oven to broil on high. Spread the shredded pork in an even layer in a cast iron skillet or on a foil-lined sheet pan. Spoon a few tablespoons of the reserved cooking liquid over the top — just enough to keep it from drying out, not so much it stays wet. Broil 4 to 5 inches from the heat for 5 to 8 minutes, until the edges are dark and crisped. Watch it carefully. The difference between perfect and burnt is about two minutes.
7. Serve immediately. Pile the carnitas into warm corn tortillas. Top with diced white onion, cilantro, and a hard squeeze of lime. That’s it. Don’t complicate it.

Nutrition (per serving)