"Slice tofu into steaks" is basically the worst phrase in the English language, I just want to note.
I made carnitas last night! If anyone is not familiar, it is basically Mexican pulled pork, flavored with an abundance of cumin and thyme rather than slathered in barbecue sauce and smoke. Carnitas is made from the pork shoulder. Where the best pulled pork comes from the shoulder butt, you can make carnitas out of either the picnic side or the butt side of the shoulder; we used a picnic shoulder roast that came it at about 5 1/2 pounds. I did an initial google search for recipes, but I guess people are obsessed with bland fucking food - the recipe I found had laughably small amounts of spices for the actual amount of meat being cooked, so I upped the dosage considerably to the following:
1 TBSP cumin (would actually go with more next time, most likely)
1 TBSP salt (3x more than the original recipe called for, and this was just barely enough. Another half tablespoon would have only improved the finished product)
1 TSP Oregano
1 TSP Thyme
1 TSP Chili Powder
1 TSP Crushed black pepper
1 TSP Garlic Powder
1 TSP Onion Powder
A teaspoon of MSG couldn't hurt if that's your thing. Normally I add this to everything, but I skipped this time. Anyway, I mixed all of that together and applied a generous coating of the spice rub to all the sides of the meat. If you're a BBQ aficionado, you may be puzzled by the absence of sugar - no brown sugar, no honey, no maple syrup, etc. Again, this isn't pulled pork, and this isn't going to be cooked in any kind of dry heat, so trying to get a glaze on here is pointless. Once the meat was coated, I let it sit and got the slow cooker ready. We have a slow cooker that comes with three different dishes - a 2 qt, a 4qt and a 6qt. The picnic shoulder fit about perfectly in the 4qt. I dropped a few bay leaves in the bottom of the slow cooker, added the meat and filled up about 2/3s of the way up the sides of the meat with beef broth. Stock would work better, but we're really cheap here.
Cook time was 5 hours, flip, 5 more hours on the low heat setting. After 10 hours, I pulled the meat, and stripped out all of the fat and skin, which had now turned into a sort of gelatinous, rubbery mess. Not really what I'd call good eats. Once the fat was out, I shredded down the meat (which was literally falling apart on it's own) with a pair of forks, spread it out in a hotel pan, and coated it until it was slick with the broth/drippings mixture from the slowcooker. I then popped the whole mess of meat in the oven for 20 minutes at 400 degrees, pulled, flipped all the meat over, reupped the broth and baked for another 20 minutes. When you bake it like this, the surface dries out ever so slightly, while the meat pulls in the drippings and retains moisture on the inside. It gets the perfect texture. Normally, restaurant style carnitas are fried after they're braised, but this might be logistically difficult for you in a home setting - I find frying to be a pain in the ass, and I would pit my carnitas against most of the restaurants I've been to in the area any day of the week.
The total cost of this was about ten dollars, and it produces around 4-5 pounds of shredded carnitas, which you can add to tacos, burritos, eggs, fajitas, put on a sandwich, or just eat as a protein item with your dinner on it's own.
