Thanks, Robert Rodriguez!

A little while ago, someone tipped me off to Robert Rodriguez’s cooking videos–they’re extras on a couple of his DVDs. I like the guy’s style anyway–and it’s great when he applies it to food.

One video is for breakfast tacos, and the other is for puerco pibil–aka cochinita pibil, a real Yucatecan standard of pork slow-roasted with achiote paste in banana leaves. It’s what I would’ve cooked at one of my cooking classes in Mexico this spring, if I’d been cooking a pig instead of a fish.

I admit I watch very little food TV, and I generally think it’s a terrible medium for learning how to cook. But watching Rodriguez’s clip, I realize the problem is not the medium (moving pictures), but the stupid time constraints of regularly scheduled TV, and the generally heinous people on said TV. With a six-minute video on YouTube from someone who’s a bit of a bad-ass and doesn’t have any corporate sponsors, I got the gist of making puerco pibil in a regular kitchen (not in a pit)–just as fast as looking up a recipe in my copy of Mayan Cuisine, and a lot more inspirational. (”You gotta eat the rest of your life–may as well know how.” Damn straight.)

So for our Day of the Dead party, when I was having visions of locusts descending on the tamales and leaving nothing but empty corn husks fluttering on the table, I decided to whip up a batch of puerco pibil a la Rodriguez, as a stopgap measure.

It worked out so well, I don’t have a photo of it. In fact, I didn’t have more than a tiny bite of it, which I sampled when I was shredding it. But numerous people came up to me goggle-eyed at the party, telling me how much it rocked.

I followed Rodriguez’s approach basically, but in lieu of whole annatto seeds, I used a block of El Yucateco brand achiote paste, which comes in a little box like bouillon cubes. It doesn’t have a whole lot of other junk in it, so it seemed like a safe choice, and I saw it at the Mexi grocery before I saw whole annatto seeds. One whole chunk of paste worked fine for about five pounds of bone-in pork shoulder.

I cut the meat off the bone for easier shredding later, but tossed the bone in, for flavor. When the pork was done, I fished out the bone and tossed it in a pot with some posole–way to make it do double-duty.

My final variation: We only had standard Jose Cuervo tequila–not so great. So I cracked open the bottle of Oaxacan mezcal that’s been gathering dust in the back of the cabinet. Mezcal tastes like tequila, but has the smokiness of a good scotch. It’s a little rough to drink straight, but the smoky business was fantastic in the pork.

Or so I heard…