• Facebook
• Pinterest

Jump to Recipe

When I wanted to start homesteading, saving money and being as self sufficient as possible was the goal. As much as I do love a nice juicy steak, the cost of beef in the store is much higher than other meats in the store, but one of the most cost effective options will be a classic pork shoulder. Pork is such a versatile meat, between smoking it, adding bbq sauce, use it in Asian food, or our favorite, Red Chili Carnitas. Because this pork shoulder does make so much food, I can portion it out freeze for later!

I will provide some affiliated links that will allow me to earn a small commission if you decide you want to make a similar decision as I did and purchase some of these great products (Win Win!)

Why I Love This Red Chili Pork

It’s cost effective.

We can find pork shoulder in our neck of the woods anywhere from $0.75 per pound to $1.25 when it’s on sale. That is about fifty cents to a dollar less most of the time compared to chicken and a couple of dollars less when compared to beef. We also get a lot of use out of the “waste products” like the fat cap to make and render lard and the bone used for an amazing pork stock.

The flavor.

We grow a lot of our own peppers so this is a great use of our harvest. You can use any variety of peppers to change the heat level to your taste.

Options for Meals.

The primary way we use this recipe is for tacos, burritos, or tostadas. We can change the flavors up for those by adding various hot sauces (green or red), salsas, or other toppings like fajita veggies or cheeses. When we want to be a little bit healthier, we also use this as a replacement for Chipotle and we will create a bowl with rice, our Charro Beans (click for recipe), fajita veggies (bell pepper and onions), cheese, tomatoes, lettuce and cilantro. Largely a taco in a bowl. If you ever want to be adventurous, this is also a common filling for tamales.

While the Red Chili Carnitas are inherently a Mexican dish, we have add soy sauce, sriracha, ginger and garlic to make a delicious Asian inspired pork disk.

So many meals.

This is our go to meal when we don’t want to spend a lot of time in the kitchen. I have a day job, and when I’ve driven 50+ miles a day and spent all day looking at a screen, I don’t always want to spend an hour in the kitchen to cook a meal.

This meal is great for meal prepping or take out your vacuum sealer (I use the Food Saver Compact Vacuum Sealer) and portion out the amount for your family to store for another day. We typically portion our pork for 4 oz serving per person for most tacos/bowls. So if you have a family of 4 you can expect to get 6-8 servings pretty easily.

Accessible.

I don’t want a recipe that has a lot of foreign ingredients that takes forever to use. That would not be very cost effective! This meal packs the flavor with ingredients you probably already have around including onions, garlic, oregano, cumin, salt, black pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, and chili powder. We use spicy red peppers from the garden in the sauce, but you can also use dried peppers (which will last you forever) in this sauce.

It’s Easy to Make.

It takes about an hour of actual prep work to get the meal ready to have the flavor I want it to, mainly because of the browning of the meat. I use my Instant Pot as a slow cooker in this recipe, but browning the pork will give you the best flavor. Once it’s been browned, add all of your ingredients and then you leave it in the slow cooker for 8-12 hours. An hour to make 6-12 meals (depending on your family size) sounds like a great trade off.

How to Make It

Selecting Pork

The star of the show is of course the Pork Shoulder. Consider buying one from a local farmer. If you are not in an area where you can readily find one, pick your pork shoulder based on it having good pink flesh and a bright white fat cap. This will give you the freshest meat plus the best fat for rendering down.

If you decide you want to render your lard it’s super simple! You will want to have some fat on your pork, but I remove as much as I can. If there is more than 1/8th of an inch I can easily get to, I will slice it off and leaving as much meat on the shoulder as possible and put the fat in a separate bowl reserved for the fat. After the fat cap is taken care of along with any other obvious pieces, I cut the meat into 2-3” size pieces and put into a bowl of just meat. You can also save the bone if you’d like to use it for broth later on.

Rending Lard

When I’m ready to render it, I’ll chop it up into about 1/4”-1/2” pieces so it will render. I add this fat plus about a half of a cup of water to a cast iron pan and cook on medium high until it starts to steam. Then I lower it to a very low heat for 3-4 hours or until you start to hear the fat start to fry in its own juice.

Then I remove the larger pieces of fat or meat and place them on a paper towel lined plate and salt them (or don’t and feed to the pets). They make for a good snack if they are cooked all the way through! I then pour the liquid fat through a sieve into a mason jar. I typically get 8-12 ounces from one pork shoulder.

Chop your vegetables

We will want to use 3 onions, red, yellow or white all work well here, and give them a rough chop into about 1/2” pieces and put them in a bowl or container off to the side. The onions will likely not make it to the final product, but part of this recipe will be to save the liquid after having slow cooked the meal, so the onions will give a nice aromatic flavor to the broth. If you have read my other recipes, you will know we also love garlic. I like to mince 6 cloves of garlic directly into the bowl with the onions.

Seasoning the Pork

I am a big fan of browning any meat regardless of if it’s going in the canner or in the slow cooker. There is something great about just those toasted notes that helps the flavor stick. Some recipes like to just flavor the broth, but I have never found that to be enough.

To season the meat, we will add three tablespoons of olive oil to the pork so the seasonings will stick. Be sure to mix the pork around to ensure everything is covered with oil.

Then add one tablespoon of cumin to the pork, one tablespoon of garlic salt, one tablespoon of chili powder (I use half chipotle chili powder for extra spice and half regular chili powder), one tablespoon of garlic powder, one tablespoon of onion powder, one and a half teaspoons of dried oregano (Mexican oregano if you have it!), one and a half teaspoons of black pepper, and one teaspoon of cayenne. Once you have added all of the spices, mix the pork around to ensure everything is covered.

Browning the Meat

I like to use a few dishes as possible (especially when I am also saving the bone and fat for lard) so my Instant Pot is my best friend. I set it to sauté and add one tablespoon of olive oil to the bottom of the pot and wait for it to heat up. Once it is hot, working in batches, I begin to add the meat. I do not like to overcrowd it as it will steam instead of brown and you will not get the same flavor. I brown two sides of the meat (because I do not have all day) for about four minutes each and put the browned meat aside.

I then repeat this process, adding a tablespoon of oil to each batch to prevent things from sticking or burning. I also take a wooden spatula to pull up the browned seasonings. If you find that it’s sticking very hard. You can pull the pot out carefully and wash it, but don’t do that too close to the end because we do want some of the browned seasonings to go into the broth.

Slow Cooking

Once all of the meat has been browned, then we can start assembling them back into the slow cooker. I add a layer of the pork the slow cooker and then once a whole (and relatively tight layer) is achieved, I add some of the onions on top and then add one bay leaf. Then I repeat this pattern typically three times. This ensures that all of the aromatics are not just floating at the top of the slow cooker.

Once all of the vegetables and meat is in the slow cooker I get a four cup Pyrex and add 4 cups of very hot water to the Pyrex. I then add the same seasonings as before but I do leave out the cayenne. One tablespoon of each: cumin, chili powder, garlic salt, onion powder, garlic powder, one and a half teaspoons of both oregano and black pepper. I stir all of the seasonings around and add to the slow cooker. You will likely need more water to cover, so add as much until all of the meat is fully submerged.

I set the Instant Pot to slow cooker and using the slow cooking lid, I set the timer for eight hours on medium. Once the eight hours has passed, I will move the meat around the slow cooker as I find that the hot broth does not adequately cook the meat on top. I’ll set the slow cooker again for another 4-6 hours or until the pork readily falls apart.

Shredding

Once the 10-12 hours of slow cooking has passed, the pork should be able to be easily shredded with a fork. Take all of the meat out of the slow cooker, removing the bay leaves, and reserving the broth. Taking two forks, I (or usually dear husband) shred the meat until it’s small consistency, no big chunks.

At this point, if you know you want to add barbecue sauce or save some of the meat for an Asian inspired dish, you could start packing it up now. However, where I think a lot of the flavor comes from is the red chili sauce we will add to it.

Red Chili Sauce

We did not save that broth for nothing! So if you want more flavor to the shredded pork, either get 15 dried red chili pods (I use a mix of California and Arbol chiles) and take off the stem and remove some of the seeds (if you don’t like it super hot remove all), and rinse under cool water. Add the chili peppers to a medium sized pot and add four cups of your reserved broth to the peppers. Cook for thirty minutes on low. Once thirty minutes has elapsed, let it cool for at least 30 minutes.

Once the dried peppers have cooked in the broth and have cooled, now we can blend the peppers. Add the liquid and peppers to a blender and then we will add more of our spices to layer the flavor. We will add a tablespoon of each: cumin, chili powder, garlic powder, onion powder. Then also grate or mince 6 cloves of garlic and add to the blender. Blend on high for at least 2 minutes

Making the Roux

To get a velvety sauce, a roux will help ensure that it does not run off and over the meat. We will add one quarter cup of either the lard you rendered down or the same amount of olive oil to a pot on medium heat. Then add one quarter cup of flour to the pan and mix around until you start to smell the toasted notes of the flour. Then add the liquid chili sauce from the blender to the pot and mix well ensuring no lumps form.

We will want to stir this for at least 5 minutes until the sauce is thickened can cover the back of the spoon. I will taste the sauce to get a gauge of the heat and the flavor. Feel free to add other flavors, salt or black pepper to get the flavor you like. I also sometimes grab a piece of shredded meat and dip it to get an idea of what it will taste like.

Once the consistency is thick and you are happy with the flavor, it’s now time to wrap it up by adding the sauce to the shredded pork. Mix the sauce thoroughly and ensure all of the meat is well coated in the sauce. Once that is complete it is time to put away the meat for storage (or eating!).

Because we like to eat in this house, we use our vacuum sealer to store twelve ounces of meat at a time. This makes about 8-10 meals for us. That equates to about 64 tacos, or 24 taco bowls per pork shoulder. Whenever we want to eat it that day, I’ll defrost it for 12 ounces in the microwave or put it in the fridge overnight. We will warm it up by either microwaving it for two-three minutes or adding it to a skillet. Because of all the moisture from the sauce, there is not a lot of risk of it drying out.

While this is a recipe that does take some time, the amount of volume of food it makes is well worth it to me. We get so many meals from cooking this, and most of the time is spent in the slow cooker. I have no problem starting this in the morning, shredding it in the evening, and then putting it in the fridge over night. Then I make the sauce the next day so it’s not an all day affair. It’s our go to meal any time we are burned out from the day and want something healthy and affordable.

With the quantity of food that it makes, and getting some lard, and then I save the bone and the reserved broth for stock, the cost effectiveness is very high in our family. At less than $1 pound at times, even including all of the spices, we can easily get a full meal’s worth of meat for under $2.

These Red Chili Carnitas are always stocked in our fridge and I have a hard time passing up a sale on pork shoulder because of it. If you have tried pork carnitas before, even at a restaurant, did you like them? Does this recipe sound interesting to you or do you plan on making it? Be sure you leave a comment below!