Spicy Pork and Pineapple Al Pastor Skewers

Hi, I'm Celeste Rogers, and I'm excited to cook with Good Cook today. I'm a professionally trained chef, and I've also worked in magazines and television, but my real passion is making accessible, home-cook-friendly recipes, and today I'm gonna be taking one of my all time favorite foods, tacos al pastor, and turning it into an indoor grilled skewer recipe. We're going to be using our cast iron grill pan by Good Cook, and we're going to build these pork and pineapple chili marinated skewers into the perfect indoor summer entertaining treat. To begin, we're going to start with the pork. So pork butt is a cut which is sometimes misnamed, because it's actually the pork shoulder, that is full of connective tissue and a fair amount of fat, so it can come across as chewy.

It's really important how we handle it and how we cut it, as well as how we marinate it. So I took pork shoulder that would almost be too kind of loosey goosey, so to speak, to slice into really thin pieces, and what I did was I cut it down into blocks. These are approximately one inch this way and two inches this way. It could be however long we wanted this direction, and what I did is I put them on a plate and I froze them briefly. I don't want them to be frozen rock solid.

That would be a problem, but the colder meat is gonna be easier to cut into nice thin slices. 30 minutes, I find, is the perfect amount of time for that. So I'm gonna use a nice sharp chef's knife. I prefer this eight inch length. It's gonna give me plenty of length to get through my food, and I'm going to rely on the sharpness of the knife rather than my downward pressure to cut through.

This is why you have an eight inch long knife. See how I pushed all the way through to get this nice thin piece? So working quickly with our nice semi frozen meat, I'm gonna cut this down into one inch by two inch thin slices. Now, I grew up in San Antonio, Texas, and I also spent summers going to interior Mexico, the state Guanajuato especially, Michoacan, Zacatecas, and what I remember, my favorite thing about that that I would look forward to was going to the markets and eating tacos al pastor. The traditional recipe is thin slices of pork, but we're talking slices about this big, and they're marinated, and then they're skewered onto a large rotisserie, so this is not something that you would necessarily eat at home.

It's something that you eat out, and especially in the markets, so these stacks of meat are then rotating around a flame, and only the edges are cooking and kind of charring up and crisping, and what's so delicious about that is that as you order your taco, they take only that shaved meat that's crispy on the exterior and cut it off, and my favorite thing as a child was the theatrics around it, so you would order a taco and somebody would hold a tortilla out as far as they could away from the actual rotisserie, and then using some giant knife, like a machete, they would cut and allow the meat to go flinging into the tortilla, and at the very top of the rotisserie is a pineapple, and so it's kind of slow roasting, not getting as much of that direct heat as the pork is, and so it's just getting juicier and juicier, and the crowning glory of that taco is that they give you a couple little slices of pineapple on top, so I would always make my parents take me to the market to order that for the show, as well as for the delicious treat. So once you have all of this meat sliced, you can see exactly how really marbled it is, so that's what I was talking about, about those kind of chewier pieces of connective tissue. If we were to just grill this, it would still have a fair amount of chew back to it, and I mean not so much in a good way, so we're going to use a chili and vinegar laced marinade to really build flavor, as well as modify the texture of this meat. So now that we have our meat cut up, we can talk about building our marinade. I'm gonna go wash my hands.

So now we're ready to marinate our meat, and there are much more complicated ways to do this using the traditional method that might require ingredients that you can't get in your typical grocery store, but I'm gonna show you how to use basic spices from your regular grocery store and still evoke all those same flavors. We're gonna use chili powder. Understand that the average chili powder is blended with lots of other ingredients. That is fine, and I'm not talking about just chilies. I'm talking about other spices.

That is okay, but if you can find a single origin chili powder, do keep in mind that some are spicier than others, so be careful about maybe chipotle, being twice as spicy, three times as spicy, cayenne being even 10 times as spicy. I would avoid those, 'cause traditionally al pastor is kind of a medium to medium-low level spice. I'm going use ancho, or if I can find it, even pasilla or guajillo chilies, so these are kind of more the fruity chilies. This is a single chili powder. If I can't find this, I can go ahead and use the blended chili powders.

The average blended chili powder that you see that's meant for making ground beef chili is not gonna be too spicy. I'm just advising you to steer clear of those spicy ones like chipotle or cayenne. Next up, we're going to include our smoked paprika. Paprika is a red pepper that is not, it's made from red peppers that are not spicy, and smoked paprika is very common in Spanish cuisine, and it evokes this kind of wood fire grill smoke, and since we're doing an indoor grilling recipe, I really wanna maximize any of those flavors that I can bring the outdoors in, or the outdoors into this recipe. Don't worry.

It's not gonna smoke up your kitchen. It's only going to provide a nice smokey aroma and flavor to your food. Next up I'm including garlic powder or granulated garlic. So this is a good idea to use versus fresh garlic in this particular instance, because chopped up pieces of garlic have a tendency to burn, especially over high heat, at extended high heat, which is what we're gonna have here when we go to grill these skewers. Next up is cumin.

Cumin is a common flavor in a lot of Mexican cuisine, and so it's gonna kind of provide an earthy base note, not a spicy note. Next up is dried oregano, and I would say this is the most commonly used dried herb in Mexican cuisine, so again, it's gonna evoke those kind of flavor profiles that we expect if we're trying to make a nice Mexican grilled recipe. And then finally, black pepper. Yes, this will also kick up the heat just a little bit, but not too much, not too much like a real chili would. And then finally we wanna incorporate salt.

All marinades need salt. The spices are almost optional. The salt is not optional. So salt is going to do two things to our food. It's going to season it all the way through if we add it now versus if we wait to add it later.

The other thing that it's going to do is it's actually gonna give us a final juicier end product. Salt is one of the few things that is water soluble, meaning that it can penetrate into the flesh of meat. So most meats are full of water, so we are actually gonna be able to get this pork seasoned all the way through instead of just on the surface area, and the salt is actually going to help it maintain its juiciness, sort of thinking like brining a Turkey, perhaps, if you've done that before. And then the liquid ingredient that we're including in this is white vinegar. You can certainly use other vinegars, but I'm showcasing that you can use even kind of an inexpensive, basic vinegar.

The thing that we want about this right now is its acidity. The acidity is what's important. I'm mixing this together using a whisk. The reason we care about acidity is that acid is going to help denature, I know that's a fancy science word, but it's gonna help break down some of that tougher collagen and fat that's in the meat here. So this is a thick paste.

That's what we want. We're gonna go ahead and scrape. This is one of my favorite things about this whisk, is that it comes with a scraper, so we can get every last little bit off, and we're gonna get this all over our pork. Now, the only way to fully, fully work this in is to stir a lot either using bare hands or using tongs. I'm gonna start with the tongs, and then if we need to really get our hands in there, don't be afraid to get messy.

The goal here is for this to kind of get evenly coated in this thick spice rub. It looks really dry right now, but when we cook this, there's going to be a ton of fat from the pork that starts to melt out, so if we added a bunch of oil right now, we'd end up probably getting some flames when we go to grill it, so if I was doing something leaner, like say chicken breast, I might wanna include a little bit of oil in this, but we do not need it here. This pork butt, or AKA pork shoulder, has got plenty of its own natural fat. So I'm continuing to stir until it looks like everything has seen the spice rub, so sometimes I find, like here's a little naked piece. I want to keep coating that, so I'm breaking, I'm using these tongs to kind of lift any of the slices of pork that are stuck together so that I can rub them around and get them fully, fully coated and saturated in the spice mixture.

So quick little lesson on marinades. They do their best work when you give them ample time. Now, the thinner your meat is cut, the faster your marinade is gonna penetrate. Lucky for us, we cut this meat very thin, but if you have time or if you just wanna work ahead, this is something that could be done up to two days ahead, and the flavor is in fact only going to get better. Obviously you'd want to transfer it to the refrigerator and not leave it out at room temperature if you're waiting two days.

In our case, we are only going to wait while we move on with the next steps. It's probably gonna end up getting maybe 20 minutes of marination time, and because this is so thin, that's still going to be quite effective, but like I said, if you have the time, go for it. This is a marinade that you could swap out some other proteins on, but be careful, because of all that vinegar in the protein, or sorry, in the marinade, you wouldn't wanna put this on something more delicate like shrimp. You'd up with kind of mushy shrimp. The vinegar would denature them, would break them down and tenderize them so much that they might even taste pre-chewed.

In the case of this pork, we don't have to worry about that at all. It is just very effectively tenderizing it as it sets. So to me, that's looking fully saturated. Oh, I just found two that were hiding stuck to each other. Excuse me.

All right, it looks like now we are fully, fully coated, so if we were making traditional al pastor, this is sort of what the pieces would look like. However, traditional recipes call for a much more complicated way of making the marinade. I just showed you an easy way to do it using grocery store ingredients, and also using tools that are easy to find and very accessible by Good Cook. So we're gonna set that aside. Next up, we need to butcher our pineapple.

Now, fresh is definitely best, and don't be intimidated about breaking down a pineapple. I'm gonna show you the best way to do this, the most efficient way, and again, you're really gonna wanna use an eight inch chef's knife. You don't wanna be going at this with some tiny little knife. So first what I wanna do is break this down into manageable pieces. If you look at the fruit, the fruit is a kind of cylindrical shape.

I don't want to have kind of a rolling edge when I go to try to cut and peel this, so instead I'm gonna place it on its side, cut off straight near the top with confidence. Now, this can be set aside. We can talk about a thousand uses for that if you're into making your own tepache or other things, but for most people, that is gonna be scrap for compost, and we're cutting another piece off. Again, scrap or perhaps use it if you're into some other recipes. When I go to peel this, I wanna think about making a slight angle with my knife, and then I'm going perpendicular to the cutting board, before angling my knife back down towards, so it's like I went 15 degree angle and then down.

And so we're gonna overlap. Now, there are very finicky ways of cutting a pineapple where you cut along each eye and only remove that. What I'm gonna show you is the most efficient, quickest way to break it down. It might have a bit of waste, but I'm okay with that if it's saving me 20 minutes. So all of these pieces, again, are great for compost or garbage.

And once I have this cleaned cylinder where I can't see any green spots left, I wanna clear off my cutting board entirely. This is where your bench scraper is a great tool. I'm not gonna use this part. I'm gonna use this part that's built for lifting, and so I'm gonna scrape all of this and get it either into a bowl, compost, garbage, and I'm also gonna kinda clean up my cutting board a little bit of any of the kind of residue if there were some of the eyes of the pineapple left behind, and now I'm gonna break this down into four pieces. There's a core, it's circle shaped, cylindrical, that runs down the center.

It's a little bit tougher than the rest of the flesh of the pineapple, so I want to go ahead and get rid of that. The best way to do it, so I cut it in half. Now I'm gonna cut this piece in half again, so now all I have is an exposed quarter of that central core, so here I can just make a cut straight down, and this is my core that I'm gonna go ahead and get rid of. There's nothing inedible about it. I sometimes save these to freeze and then add to my smoothies.

It's just a bit tougher, so if you're eating the actual pineapple, not in smoothie form, I prefer to core my pineapple, but if I'm blending it, the core has all the same flavor. All right, so we're cleaning this up, and now from here, we wanna think about cutting our pineapple into one inch pieces. Now, let's not be so obsessive that we end up with a bunch of waste. You could cut an exact one inch cube, but instead what I'm looking for is more of a one inch length, and on a lot of us, this joint here on our thumb is approximately an inch, so for me, I'm looking at this and I'm saying, I could probably break these down like this, so now I got a one inch piece, and then I'm gonna go ahead and break it down one inch as we go down. So we try to be as efficient as possible with our knife skills here in the kitchen, to make as few cuts as possible, but at the same time, I didn't want this to be unwieldy.

I wasn't gonna try to do all three of these at the same time and ending up having pieces flying around on my cutting board. So we're gonna get a bowl to add all of these perfect chunks to, and carry on with these last three pieces. So again, I'm cutting it lengthwise, and then cutting it across into approximately one inch chunks. Notice that the pineapple is ultimately gonna be a bit larger than the pork, but pineapple has even more water content than the pork, so it's gonna cook faster on the grill, so if we made tiny little pieces of pineapple, we would run into some trouble as far as our pineapple getting so cooked that it falls off the skewer before our pork has enough time to catch up and build up some char marks on it, so that's why we're keeping these guys just a bit thicker. All right, so we have our perfectly cut pineapple, and we have our marinated pork.

Next up, it's time to build our skewers. When you're ready to cook, step one is going to be preheating your grill pan. So this is a heavy cast iron preseasoned grill pan by Good Cook. Heavy is important. When you're grilling things, you actually want something that is quite massive.

If you remember anything from physics class, mass is directly related to heat transfer, so the heavier your pan, the more likely it is to actually mimic that heat of an outdoor grill, and what we're trying to do is bring those grill flavors into your indoor kitchen. So I'm gonna begin to preheat this. The heavier it is the longer it takes to preheat, which is why I'm starting now. Now, I'm gonna build my skewers. We're using bamboo skewers here, which sometimes have a tendency to incinerate on your grill and burn the tips especially, so what I've done ahead is I've soaked these in water.

The longer you soak them the better, great, but I would say at least 30 minutes. This is a lot more skewers than I'm gonna need, but I always like to have a few extra, because I can always dry these again later and reuse them again if I didn't get them dirty. They are, however, one and done once you've actually grilled them. So we're gonna set some of these aside. I'm thinking I'm gonna make fewer than this, so I'm putting all of my things in the same zone that are gonna require me to touch kind of raw meat.

I have my pineapple. I have my meat. I have my skewers. I have my tray. Set yourself up like this for success so that you're not running around the kitchen later with chili covered hands touching all of your cabinetry.

So when I go to build this, I want to take a piece of pork. Notice that we cut these kind of longer. I'm folding it in half, so one piece is getting skewered twice through. Okay, so with our next piece of pork, we're folding this over again. We're gonna do a few pieces of pork before adding a piece of pineapple, so we almost want it, remember our pineapple's a little bit chunkier, we wanna make sure that we don't just have a pineapple skewer.

What we're aiming for is a pork and pineapple skewer, so keep folding, keep skewering, and we definitely wanna make sure that the meat is nice and tight on this. If it's not tight, then we're going to A, have exposed skewer, which is wasted space that could have been used for delicious meat, but also you won't really get the effect of tacos al pastor. Tacos al pastor only have some of the meat that's getting exposed to that rotisserie, and so we kind of want that variety of some pieces that are really crispy and some pieces that are nice and juicy, so we wanna make sure to build this with a nice variety like that. If they're tight, then there's still gonna be some of that pork on the inside that isn't completely charred, so we'll have juicy pork, we'll have charred pork, and we'll have that nice juicy pineapple, cooked pineapple. I'm threading these down to where I only have a little bit of a handle, basically enough handle to hold.

I don't wanna leave this with four inches. I'm basically gonna keep packing this on until we get maybe two inches from that end, maybe even an inch, whatever it is that you can reasonably hold. Very important thing, when you're doing indoor grilling like this on a grill pan and using skewers, you wanna make sure that you choose the right length skewer to fit inside of your grill pan, so you don't want a skewer that is so long that then when you go to put it on your grill, it actually doesn't fit, so be sure that you're choosing an appropriate size. All right, we want to start and end with meat, so I'm gonna consider this particular skewer finished, and we'll set that one aside. We'll carry on with the next.

This is definitely the kind of thing that if you were doing it for a larger party, you might wanna ask somebody to come help you. Even people that are not professional cooks can definitely help you build skewers like this. Do understand, if you're doing this for a party, pineapple has something interesting about it, as does a lot of other tropical fruits. It has an enzyme in it that actually breaks down protein, so if you built these skewers with the pineapple on them and left them in the fridge for two days, you would notice that your meat kind of gets hyper tenderized, and I mean that in not such a good way. The unkind word for it is pre-chewed, and that's not what we're after, so definitely be careful about building these skewers too far in advance.

You really wanna be building them like this pretty much before you're ready to cook. Some other fruits that are like that that have those kinds of enzyme properties, they mostly tend to be tropical fruits, I know kiwi does, I believe papaya, so bear that in mind, that sometimes when we're cooking our food, it's actually cooking itself or each other, and sometimes that's something we want, and sometimes that's something we definitely wanna avoid. The more you understand about your ingredients, the more you can kind of play and riff off of these recipes. If you don't like pineapple, you don't want pineapple, I believe that a good substitute for this would be stone fruits like peaches or nectarines, but in keeping with Mexican tradition, tacos al pastor is always pineapple. All right, another skewer that I would consider done.

So we're gonna keep doing this until all of our meat is gone. You will end up having some leftover pineapple, so you could have set some aside for sure. I believe that you're gonna end up using more or less half of a pineapple for this, so we could have set it aside, or you could make a few just pineapple skewers that you could then serve for dessert, but understand that if I'm putting my raw meat hands in this, this pineapple is now destined to be cooked. It is no longer able to be eaten raw. I personally love grilled pineapple just by itself.

All right. So story time about Mexican flavors. Tacos al pastor are definitely a recipe that is one of those hybrid culture recipes. After, certainly after the Spanish conquistadors, but more like in the 1800s, there was a big group of Lebanese immigrants to Mexico, and what they brought with them was this method of cooking on a spit, and so tacos al pastor, which means it's about the shepherds kind of style of cooking, a lot of the Lebanese were shepherds, and so it was a nod to their culture and acknowledging that. Sometimes when you see other rotisserie meats in Mexico, they're called tacos alambres, so meaning like Moorish, and tacos al pastor would be one example of that.

All right, moving on to a new skewer, notice that I'm always trying to give myself just a little bit of space on the end, but I am not spreading this out. I want it to be packed in, not like an accordion, meaning not like a loose, not like an open accordion, but like a tight accordion. If you wanted to vary this and use other proteins, be real, real careful about fish, because like I mentioned, with pineapple, pineapple having that enzymatic reaction, where it starts to break down your proteins, it happens so, so fast with something like shrimp. In fact, I feel like I've tried building skewers with shrimp and pineapple, and of course I was doing it in a restaurant, so I was doing it, I think for a catering event, and I needed it for 30 people. By the time I finished skewering all my meat and I went to the grill, immediately to grill, some of those first ones that I had built, the shrimp were starting to fall apart, and they were real mushy, so not recommended with that, but I would recommend maybe playing with chicken thighs if you're not a fan of pork.

All right, we are nearing the end of our pork. In the spirit of waste not want not, I literally have just a few pieces, I'm gonna push onto these skewers that look like they have just enough space, 'cause rather than building a whole new skewer with only two pieces of meat on it, I'd rather fully, fully stack these guys. All right, this is looking good to me, so see how nice and stacked tight that is, tight that is? That's what's important. We can maybe let these sit for another 30 minutes, but you don't wanna let this sit in this form overnight.

I'm gonna go ahead and wash my hands, and it's time to hit our grill. I'm already feeling that heat radiating. That 10 minutes or so that it took for me to build these skewers was enough time for this pan to heat up. Had I waited to heat my pan, I might actually be letting my skewers potentially set a little bit too long, so that's why you wanna be preheating it as you're building your skewers. And now we are ready to grill.

Our grill pan is truly radiating heat back at me, so this nice heavy cast iron pan was able to get as hot as an outdoor grill so that we can now bring these al pastor flavors into our indoor kitchen. I'm going to, before adding these skewers, even though these grates are actually preseasoned, I'm still going to oil them. I'm using a high smoke point oil like avocado. You could certainly use something like sunflower oil, canola oil. This is not your place for extra virgin olive oil.

When I go to add these, I'm adding them against the grains, so you see the lines here? I want as much of that to come through. That's why I didn't put it on this way. I kinda wanna get grill marks across it. If you were doubling this recipe, I am so sorry.

You are going to have to cook this in two rounds. It's very important that the pork come into contact with the pan. We wouldn't have wanted to stack additional skewers on top. They would end up steaming, and that's not the point of this recipe at all. I'm gonna set this aside while we talk about some of our garnish ingredients that we're gonna add.

I always like to have fresh lime juice that I can squeeze at will when I eat, so I'm preparing this lime for a garnish, not necessarily to juice. When I do that, I love to use a technique that I've noticed in Mexico when you order a bucket of beers or a bunch of tequila. There's cut lines that come out, and they're cut this way. Rather than cutting straight through the center, see how there's kind of like the belly button here on the blossom end? I'm gonna cut just off center of that, so I'm gonna cut straight down here.

This is going to ensure that I have a seedless piece. See how it's just exposed flesh? And then I'm gonna do the same thing right here on the other side. And then I'm gonna cut just off center, 'cause it's almost like I'm coring it. And just off center again.

Now, I don't have exactly the same size pieces, but what I do have is pure flesh, ready to squeeze, no seeds involved, so if I wanna break this down further, because I want it to be ready for more pieces for more people, I can certainly cut this so that now I have more individual pieces for my guests to squeeze. So that's one garnish that I love. Another ingredient I love to use is cilantro, and cilantro is full of kind of this herby grassy flavor. It's going to play really nicely with the otherwise rich meat. I wanna get rid of any tougher stems, but some of these stems are perfectly fine.

I wouldn't obsess over getting every last little piece out, and honestly I have more cilantro than I need here. We're gonna use about half of that, and in order to take this down quickly, rather than using my knife, and while I might have the knife skills to do this rapidly, if you're intimidated by mincing herbs, this is an excellent tool to use. What you're gonna do is roll back and forth over the surface until you have nice, chopped cilantro. This is perfect for parsley as well. This is my preferred way to make short work of a garnish that I tend to use over and over.

I love fresh parsley and fresh cilantro in almost all of my dishes. All right, let's take a peek at this pork. My guess is we built up some good char on this first side. We wanna rotate it and get some on the other. Nice.

If when you lift up, this just happened, this piece kind of rotated and changed, you can reorient them. That's the benefit of tongs. Tongs are your fingers that you can use on a grill. I don't recommend doing this bare handed, but if you really don't mind the heat, you could certainly try doing it from both ends, but this is really your safe tool. So do you see how the pineapple is even picking up a little bit of char, but definitely the meat?

The meat is what we're after here. I'm actually gonna think about these as being four-sided. If I was grilling, say, shrimp or chicken, chicken breast, I would just be turning it once. In our case, I turned it 90 degrees, or sorry, 180 degrees, but I'm also gonna get those 90 degrees sides as well as we go. So there's lots of reasons to own a grill pan.

One might be you don't actually have access to a grill. Maybe you live in an apartment. Another great reason is you might not want to go outside. Maybe it's too cold. Maybe you don't wanna leave your children inside alone, so there's all kinds of reasons to do this, and it also is very easy in comparison to having to heat a large grill if you're only doing a few skewers like this.

The things to look for in a grill pan and that I love about the Good Cook grill pan is that it's made from cast iron. That's vital. If it's not heavy and it's not made from cast iron, it's not going to get hot enough to actually give you this kind of char mark that you see here. You're gonna end up seeing something that's kind of blonde or lightly golden, so that's not the place to be choosing your lightweight pan. The other things that I like about this one is that it comes preseasoned.

What on earth does that mean? So cast iron has the ability to rust if it's not seasoned properly, and so this one starts with a nice coating of preseason, oil effectively, on it, so it's this kind of buildup patina that you're looking for. If you perhaps inherited your grandmother's cast iron skillet and she took good care of it, you know what I'm talking about, where it's kind of got that glistening sheen to it, so that's a buildup that protects it from rusting. Good Cook starts that way. You do want to take some precautions with this when you go to wash it, clean it, care for it.

When you wash a cast iron skillet, you have two choices. You can either completely avoid using soap, and you can use something really abrasive to clean it down with. You can use something like steel wool. You can use something like even kosher salt and a dry rub to kind of clean it up with, or you can go ahead and use soap, but then you need to repeat seasoning it, and what that means is you'd rub it with a light layer of oil with a towel and put it back on the heat. You could put it in your oven or you could put it on the stove top, and in cooking that oil onto it, you are re seasoning it, re protecting it.

So this one comes preseasoned. If you don't lose the seasoning by using dish soap on it, you will will never have to worry about going through that process, and that is one of many benefits of this particular Good Cook grill pan. All right, let's take a look and see if our second side has also developed some char. I'm not gonna rush this, so if I peak and it's not there, guess what, this one is, look at how gorgeous that looks, I'm now getting to the third of four sides, but if I peak and let's say, I still can't find one that's not ready, if it's not ready, just keep cooking it. What I am noticing here on the end is that I'm not getting full contact, so this particular skewer is probably gonna take longer than some of the other ones.

Another thing you can end up doing is trading and rotating. You could rotate your orientation of your pieces. So now we're on side three out of four. My guess is we're gonna need another two, two and a half minutes here, and we'll flip it to its final side, another two and a half minutes there. Total cook time should be in the range of approximately 10 minutes, but the things that you're looking for visually, you wanna see some char.

You definitely wanna see the meat flesh here that's starting to kind of pull apart. It's like you can see the grains of it, versus over here is very much still raw, so we wanna see it turn fully opaque. Those kind of muscle fibers kind of start to show through, and if you do have a thermometer, you can check. The doneness here is gonna be 145 degrees Fahrenheit. However, if you cook it over that, because this is such a juicy product, or such a juicy cut of meat, you don't really have to worry about overcooking this pork.

If it climbs up to 165, that would be very well done. That is perfectly fine. It's very similar to the difference between say short ribs and a beef tenderloin steak. You really wanna hit medium rare with a beef tenderloin steak. With a short rib you want it well done.

Pork shoulder, pork butt, is in that realm of being like a short rib, so being well done is perfectly fine, but we want to make sure it hits at least 145 to make sure that you're not eating raw pork. Something that I look for in tongs is that I can use them when my hands are potentially dirty, so I love that these do have a lock feature, but I can even hit it to open it, so that makes my life easier when I'm trying, let's say this hand was dirty or vice versa, I can open these without actually having to push this open. All right, we're rotating onto the fourth and the final side. I wish you could smell this. It smells amazing.

It smells like my childhood memories of eating tacos al pastor in the market, and yes, I'm able to do this at home. It didn't require me to go out and buy a giant rotisserie, or to make enough servings to feed 50 people. I'm able to do this inside, in the comfort of my own home. When we're ready to finally serve these, we're gonna wanna choose a platter. In this case, we're gonna use a plate, and we would wanna have our garnishes nearby.

We're set up and ready to go. These could certainly be turned into tacos. I'm showing you how to eat them in skewer form, but you could cook them in skewer form and then set out a bunch of tortillas and allow your guests to kind of pull off the meat and the pineapple and build their own taco. You could set the cilantro to the side, the limes to the side, maybe even chop up some raw white onion and put out some salsas, but in our case, we're gonna build this as just beautiful skewers that can be eaten. This is four perfect servings right here.

If you notice that the center skewers are cooking faster than the side, that's probably the most likely, it's usually the center, not the outside that's cooking faster, you can rearrange the orientation of these so that now what was on the outside is getting a turn kind of in the hotter center, and that way we make sure that these are all kind of coming up to doneness, getting cooked at the same time. Now, these are mostly looking beautifully charred and golden, I'm seeing meat that kind of comes apart, but another test that you can do is truly taking a fork and knife to it and kind of peeking inside, so we can try that out as well. All right, so what's a piece that I'm curious about? I'm not curious about this. I can tell that that's raw.

Do you guys see that? This guy still needs more time. That's the skewer that I moved from the outside towards center, but what about these that have been on longer? Are they finished? So you can kind of poke in there and take a glimpse and see what's going on.

We are not done yet, guys. We still need more time. So if you have gotten to all four sides but you feel like your pork may or may not be done, I would recommend kind of shifting around. Well, which is the side that has a nice amount of char? That's the one we want facing up, 'cause that means we could build some more char on maybe some of the blonder sides, the ones that have not gotten as much heat.

And have you noticed the way that the meat sort of looks lacquered? That's a lot of its own natural fat that's coming to the surface, and again, that's why I don't think it was necessary, and we chose not to put any additional oil into the marinade. There's plenty of natural richness in this pork, and that's what's gonna come to the surface. Again, if we had added a bunch of oil, we'd run the risk of the oil beginning to pool in our grill pan, and maybe even risk getting some flare ups or flames, especially if we were on a gas range, so another reason to avoid that extra oil when it's already kind of self coating, self-lacquering here. All right, when you think you've achieved proper doneness, this is what you're truly looking for.

Char, check, that's flavor, but true doneness, meaning nobody wants to be eating raw meat, we wanna look around and see, does it look like there's any meat that didn't get fully cooked through? Meaning, let's separate some of these accordion pieces, is there anything that looks like it is still translucent? That would be a sign of raw, no. What I'm seeing, in fact, are these muscle fibers that look like they're almost starting to pull apart. I don't see anything that is truly translucent or raw.

That's what we're on the lookout for, meaning on the lookout for in a it-still-needs-more-time way. I'm gonna say that these skewers are ready. When we're ready to serve, we're gonna get out our platter or plate, and we can arrange these artfully. Definitely wanna turn off your grill at this point. Bear in mind that because it's so heavy, it's gonna hold a lot of heat, so this is going to stay hot for quite some time, and sometimes what I even like to do as a warning is even put a towel over the handle or something like that, as a reminder to myself to not go grab it, 'cause we don't wanna get any injuries in the kitchen.

So here are perfect skewers. They're good as is, but everybody could use a little zhuzh, so we're gonna arrange our lime slices around the plate, and we're going to then sprinkle with our cilantro. Voila. And there you have it, grilled pork in pineapple al pastor skewers. We took something you normally have to go to a Mexican restaurant for, and we found the ingredients easily accessible at a grocery store, and used the indoor grill pan by Good Cook to make this into a recipe that you can easily enjoy at home without too much time or without having to search out any specialty tools or ingredients.