A bit early to be calling my favorite cook of the year, but this one hit all the feels in the right way. I’ve had the trompo in the arsenal for awhile and after a failed attempt and it being loaned out for a little bit, it was time to try it again. Not gonna lie, had a little bit of nerves when I went to cut this, but all went away real quick.
The Prep Table
Not a lot of your al pastor recipes are going to call for bone-in shoulder steaks. But when the local shop has it for sale twice at a signficant price reduction, you adapt and overcome. $7.81 in this economy for a week of meals, done. What we’re going to do here is build out or marinade, let it sleep overnight and start the cook the next day.
I mentioned a mishap in the opening paragraph – I used pineapple juice in my overnight marinade for my first go around. Cooked it all up and watched it dissolve away. Everything had broken down so badly, it was a mush. So lessons learned, chill out on the acid. Life lessons for the kids too.
We’re going to get a pot going and start our flavor fun. We’re going to get a saute on the onion/garlic and then add some chicken stock. We’re going to let that stock hydrate our ancho peppers. The addition of the chipotle pepper will give us a nice flavor and color and you’re going to wonder why you haven’t done this all your life. Speaking of color:
That achiote paste is what you see when you get your al pastor. It’s what comes to mind when you think of al pastor. I used more than I needed to (it had been in the cupboard for quite some time – honestly, I don’t know if it was still good or not, but I did it anyway).
When you’re marinade is good and cooked in the pot, kill the heat and let it cool down before you add it to the food processor. Get rid of those ancho stems.. the seeds too if you wish. Get it blended and get this result:
I’m reading an American history book, and I learned about the word ‘effluvia’. Sure, it has no place in a food blog AT ALL, but I do what I want over here. Let’s try that again – the smell of this marinade was delicious! Let’s throw this in a bag with our pork shoulder and let it marinade for a little while.
The bone-in pork steak shoulders took a little bit of fine tuning. I took each one and cut around the bone. I was left with quite a bit of solid sliced meat and some weird smaller slices. You’ll see in the trompo picture below, we’re going to take that long thin “weird” slice and skewer that and let it hang over. The bigger pieces go on just fine, we just have to make it all look nice and that thin cut was weird.
If you have a boneless shoulder that you sliced up just fine, this doesn’t matter to you. Hey, $7.81. Well worth another 15 minutes of my time. Once your slices are cut, what I did was throw a nitrile glove on and put a slice in the marinade bag. Make sure it got coated, and do it with the next slice. If you dump the marinade over the sliced meat, no doubt you’ll get some stickage and some uneven coating. You spend a TON of time effluviating (now I’m just making words up) your kitchen making the marinade, use it all!
I promised the good people over at Trompo King I’d have some cooks up soon, and I totally lied. I was gun shy after that first “oops”, but I knew I had to get back on that bicycle. As I’m typing this, I know I have another cook coming up using it. Knowing what I know with this one, I can’t wait to use it again.
The Process
This where it gets f’n fun. (For those that know me in person, you know I type like I speak. There’ll be some swear words and slang.. probably too much ain’t and y’all, but deal with it). The fun part was taking these pieces out of marinade and stacking it up on this trompo. What I did was start with a few pineapple rings at the base and start layering the meat. My RecTeq Bull pellet smoker does NOT fit the full-sized skewer, but it does fit the smaller stake. As I’m looking at their site now, I’m seeing you’re getting three sizes now.. and a grate?! Pretty cool – head over to TrompoKing.com and get one!
Once you get a layer of meat established, throw another slice or two of pineapple and start the process again. Once your meat is all used up, throw a pineapple on top we’re going to wait for the cook. I had two extra rings left, so I was going to just throw those on the grill for a few, but the star was the al pastor, so let’s see how she turns out. The picture above is beautiful. Was so juicy. Take your favorite basting brush or mop and just throw that back on the top. I went out and checked 45min or so and just kept throwing what had collected in the pan back onto the meat. I also kept a reserve of a little bit of pineapple juice from the can that I threw on there as well. We’re looking about 250F for 4 hours, so we’re going to be here for awhile. Take your time and save your flavor.
When the temperature was a steady 145F it was time to get it out of there. Smelled great, looked great.. I needed to get that first cut out of the way. The same first-cut that ruined my cook on my first go around. This cut was not like that other cut.
The Result
The elusive smoked al pastor has finally come to the ForensicBBQ kitchen. I took my big knife and cut down and when I saw actual meat and not a mushy disaster, I was relieved. I ate a piece and I was so happy. The flavor that this had one had was unbelievable. Let me really showcase it.. slice all this down thin, and give that Trompo King a proper plating
Pineapple, al pastor, some lime wedges. This was everything I was hoping it would be. We’re going to quick cook some corn tortillas and make tacos. I also used Herdez’ Guacamole Salsa as a topper. A young ForensicBBQ thought he had the market when he added avocado to his salsa verde and called it “Salsaguac”.. but turns out I was probably thousands of years too late on that one.
And there ya have it. See ya on Monday for the return of MrsForensicBBQ!