Skip Your Crock-Pot: Cook Delicious Carnitas In Half The Time With This Method

There's nothing that revs our engine like taco night, whether we're dishing up plain Jane gringo tacos with bulk ground beef or a classier option like our recipe for grilled fish tacos with escabeche. Carnitas, or Mexican pulled pork, is an option that we absolutely love for tacos (or burritos, nachos, or bowls, for that matter!). Slow-cooker pulled pork may be easier than smoking it, but both methods take way too long to consider it an easy weeknight meal. Come to find out, however, there's a simple way to make smash-worthy pork carnitas in a fraction of the time. The answer is sitting in your pantry, and it's your pressure cooker. You may know it as an Instant Pot, but that's just one name for this miraculous device that can produce carnitas in 45 minutes to an hour. 

All you really need to do for dead-simple carnitas is cube a pork butt and let it cook up in your pressure cooker, later tossing it in the naturally released cooking liquid. We like to exert a tiny bit more effort for a lot more flavor, however, and both season and sear the meat cubes before pressure cooking, cook it in liquid, as well as pull everything out of the cooker for a speedy run under the oven's broiler for a crispy finish. Forgot to put dinner on before you left for work or school? Fear not ... delicious carnitas can be prepped and ready in less time than it takes to binge a couple episodes of your current favorite Netflix original.

Pork carnitas in the pressure cooker is somewhat open to interpretation. The sauce for the pork is quite forgiving — it can be as simple as orange juice with some raw onion stewed in the pot, or you can build layers of flavor by combining a liquid base (folks love beer for it!), an acid, and ample spices like chilis, paprika, and garlic. Want a sauce that's more tart than just OJ? Get some lemon and lime juice in there! The choice between spicy and mild carnitas is in your hands, as well as whether you pivot to sweet, tart, and/or umami-rich — keep in mind that you can also rub the pork down with spices for major flavor! When in doubt, you can even use a store-bought spice rub.

On a Reddit forum dedicated to Instant Pot cooking, a user relayed a tale of great success: "I just finished making some carnitas in the instant pot, too. Used lime and tangerine juice. Finished them in the air fryer with lime salt. So good!" Another Redditor relayed their method of using Mexican beer: "(I usually use Tecate and take a few sips first — never super precise), and then squeeze a few oranges and limes in as well and toss the rinds in on top of everything. Sometimes also add a can of chipotles in adobo sauce, sometimes a bay leaf or two, sometimes a few cinnamon sticks, just whatever I have on hand." With your pressure cooker, nothing's standing between you and a superb, low-prep taco night!