Homesick Texan Carnitas

I love carnitas. Usually I like to slow roast a whole pork shoulder. It takes a long time, but it's fairly easy, and soo freakin' good. I found this recipe online a few weeks back. It was originally posted to the homesicktexan.com, but it's been recreated by a few different blogs, including smittenkitchen.com. this recipe has gotten some love online, so I thought I'd give it a try and see if it competes with my old goto carnitas. Check out my version of the homesick texan carnitas here for some pics and video. You can find the original here

Ingredients

• 3 lb pork shoulder (with plenty of fat)
• 1/2 cup orange juice
• 1/4 cup lime juice
• 4 cloves garlic
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp cumin

Directions

1. Cut up your pork shoulder into 2-3" cubes.
2. Combine pork, orange juice, lime juice, cumin and salt in a pot. Fill with water to submerge pork.
3. Bring the pot to a rolling boil. Then drop it to a gentle simmer and let it go at that for 2 hours.
4. Bring it back to a boil. Reduce the liquid until evaporated.

Here's the part that I'm a little annoyed with. I've read multiple versions of this recipe that suggest that if you follow the above 4 steps, you end up with a lot of fat rendered from the pork. The idea is that there should be enough fat to fry the pork chunks at the end of cooking. This sounded weird to me, but I went with it. After two tries (the second time I used the fattiest pork shoulder I could find) I still can't get enough rendered fat to make this happen.

At this point, I'm kinda writing this off as another bullshit internet recipe that was designed more to sound cool than to actually work. Anybody had success with this at all? As annoyed as I am, I'm totally open to the fact that I may just be doing this wrong. Either way, I just crisped the chunks up in a fresh pan with oil and it worked out alright.

I actually do really like the flavors in this recipe. I might add some tequila or something though. I still say curing overnight and roasting at 250f for as long as it takes is the better option.

bon appetit