A simple recipe for delicious Crockpot Pork Carnitas! This Mexican classic comes together in no time using flavorful pork butt, spices, onion, oranges, and blue moon beer! With a special trick to get your carnitas tasting better than what you get at a restaurant! Perfect for filling tacos, burritos, quesadillas, and more!
Ingredients
- 4 pounds pork butt
- 1 onion, diced
- 1 tablespoon chipotle chili powder
- 2 teaspoons oregano
- 2 teaspoons cumin
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 large orange
- 1 (12oz) Blue Moon or similar wheat beer
Instructions
- Carefully cut pork butt into 4 even pieces. Transfer pork pieces to the crock. Add onion, chipolte chili powder, oregano, cumin, and salt over top pork. Zest entire orange over top the spices and juice the entire orange into the crockpot. Slowly pour the beer overtop the crockpot contents. Cover the crockpot and set to LOW for 7 to 8 hours or HIGH for 4 hours.
- Set oven to BROIL. Once pork is done (able to be easily pulled apart) transfer all the pork to a sheet pan. Pull pork apart and spread over the entire sheet pan. Measure out about 1/4 cup of liquid from the crockpot and sprinkle evenly over the pulled pork. Transfer to the middle rack of the oven and broil 5 to 6 minutes until the pork gets nice and crispy edges.
- Serve immediately. Suggested serving, for delicious tacos serve with warm tortillas, queso fresco cheese, cilantro, and red onions.
Notes
Chipotle Chili Powder is different than plain Chili Powder, use Chipotle Chili Powder in this recipe.
If you skip broiling in the oven I do find that the carnitas are really wet and mushy which isn’t great, so don’t skip the broiling step!
While I highly suggest beer for this recipe, if you don’t have beer in your house you can use broth instead.
The Pork Butt cut is also referred to as a Boston Butt, they are the same thing. This cut of meat sometimes will contain a bone, I recommend a boneless cut.
Credit to: theschmidtywife