Pork carnitas

I made a batch of homemade pork carnitas in the sous vide. It's basically the Serious Eats recipe.

• 4 pounds boneless pork shoulder
• 1 medium onion roughly chopped
• 6 medium cloves of garlic
• 1 stick cinnamon broken into 3 or 4 pieces
• 2 bay leaves
• 1 orange quartered, with peel
• salt
• freshly ground black pepper

The recipe calls for 4 pounds of pork shoulder, but my grocery store only had 13 pound packages, which is far too much for me! Also too expensive, and would not fit in the sous vide machine.

I decided on a 4 pound half pork loin which still should have enough fat to work.

I think next time I'll make a half recipe using a 2 pound chef's prime roast, which has a combination of light and dark meat and is a better size that will fit in a single vacuum sealer bag easily.

Slice the pork into 2" thick pieces. After shredding, this is the maximum length of the pieces. Season with salt and pepper.

The vegetables.

The pork ended up needing two vacuum bags.

Squeeze two pieces of quartered orange into the bag, and also add the orange and peel. Add half of the remaining ingredients. Add half of the pork to the bag.

Repeat for the other half.

Vacuum seal.

Cook in the sous vide 12 to 24 hours at 165°F. The bigger bag wanted to float a bit, and the bags are too thick for the rack, so I weighed it down with a bowl of water.

Weighing it down did not work well, and the large bag in particular was becoming problematic. After 3 hours, I removed the bags, drained some of the liquid, and resealed in new bags. Now they're sinking properly!

I started it in the sous vide around 9:00 AM, and took it out at 4:00 AM, 19 hours later.

Remove from the sous vide and chill in a large bowl of ice water.

Remove the meat. Remove any large fat strips and shred. I just squished it between my fingers and it fell apart!

Discard the vegetables, liquid, and excess fat.

Divide into 2.8 oz. servings. Vacuum seal and freeze.

Another option would be to crisp the entire batch on a baking sheet under the broiler before dividing. This would get them nicely browned, but wouldn't actually be crispy when served, which kind of defeats the purpose. I decided to crisp each serving individually right before use in a small non-stick sauté pan.