Cebolla. Comino. Caldo.

Taco night in our house is serious business, and a lot of that stems from the fact that I found a great Mexican pulled chicken recipe that I have been using with tremendous success for the past few years.  From this recipe and several others, I've stumbled upon the secret holy trinity of Mexican cooking: onions, cumin and chicken stock.

Sure, onions in their many varieties are ubiquitous across cuisines of the world.  No, cumin is not unique to Mexican food and is probably more immediately thought of as an Indian staple spice.  Chicken stock is commonly used in any cuisine that features the chicken (yeah, that's right, all of them).  But somehow, when you mix the three of them together, the magic of Mexican food is born.  Add some tomato salsa and ground red chiles and you've got yourself a party, er, fiesta.

After about 20 minutes of simmering, these boneless, skinless, boring chicken breasts will hit 165 degrees and be bursting with flavor.  Take them out of the liquid and let them rest.  We all need to rest after we party.

Time to reduce.  You want to concentrate the flavor and thicken the sauce.  Water isn't welcome at this party. Water isn't really welcome at any party.  I like to squeeze in a little lime juice at this point to give the sauce a little tart kick.

Once the chicken is rested, it's time to pull it apart.  Almost every recipe I've seen for pulled anything says to use two forks.  Nuts to that.  I was picking up dinner from City Barbecue one night and saw a dude there pulling meat with a dough scraper.  I filed it away and used one the next time I made pulled chicken.  So much faster and easier.  As long as the meat is tender (which your chicken should be if it's cooking in liquid), all you need to do is drag the blade against the grain and the strands should separate without much effort at all.

Once the meat is pulled and the sauce is thickened, it's time to mix those two back together. You should have enough liquid to coat all of the chicken liberally.

While the chicken was simmering, I made some Mexican rice and refried beans to go along with our tacos.  Guess what went into those?  If you said "onions, cumin and chicken stock," congratulations: your short-term memory is just as good as your reading comprehension skills.

Create and recreate

I learned a very simple culinary rule a few years back: If what you're doing isn't adding flavor, it's probably not worth doing. Obviously we can debate that some techniques are more for textural or aesthetic enhancement and don't add much flavor (boiling pasta in water, for example), or that there's a breaking point when flavors are too complex and obscure each other as they vie for your attention. But as a general rule, if you can bolster or complement a food's flavor during the cooking process, do it; maybe you want to boil that pasta in chicken stock instead? This rule especially holds true for foods that lack naturally robust flavors, like a pork shoulder, for example.

For the competition pork, Dan and I took six opportunities to add flavor to the meat:

• Brine (pineapple juice, grenadine and smoked salt)
• Rub (Hawai'ian salt, paprika, black pepper, mustard, secret hobo spices)
• Smoke (cherry wood)
• Braise (pineapple juice)
• Sauce (we played around with a coffee BBQ sauce, but ultimately decided to omit it)
• Garnish (white balsamic & red pepper coleslaw, hickory-smoked cherries)

Good enough for a panel of foodies to give us second place; not bad for bringing in simple pulled pork and coleslaw when other contestants were slinging beef hearts and smoked ice cream.

I wanted to recreate the dish exactly, but - damn you, passage of time - fresh cherries are out of season.  I really wanted to smoke a fruit* so I settled on peaches which are at the tail edge of their ripe season right now.  This would necessitate a few changes to the recipe from the competition version.

First, pineapple juice makes a complete exit.  We had a lot of problems with pineapples during the development - they tend to want to dominate over other flavors - so we relegated them to brine and braise, where they wouldn't be as overpowering.  With peach being the featured complement, pineapple got kicked to the curb.  I started with a brine "tea" of a quart of water, 3/4 of a cup each of kosher salt and sugar, plus a few splashes of apple cider vinegar, grenadine and dried chile de arbol.

Added that to 3 more quarts of water and chilled to 38 degrees.  Pork shoulder went in and sat in the brine in the refrigerator for about 18 hours.  Probably could have used another 18 considering it was a 9 pound roast; file that little nugget away for next time.

Morning of the cook, I pull the roast out and dry it with paper towels.  It sits for an hour at room temperature and gets a slather of yellow mustard (to promote crusty "bark") and a mostly salt-less rub similar to the competition rub (the brine should have imparted enough salt to the shoulder).

Once the smoker is up to temperature - 220-230 degrees is right around magical - the shoulder goes in and stays with the lid on for 5 hours, at which point I add my fresh peaches to the smoker.  BBQ wisdom: "If you're lookin', you ain't cookin'."  While that's going, I make a peach-chipotle BBQ sauce (inspired by but not faithful to this recipe) and some side dishes (mac & cheese and a tomato cucumber salad).  After 6 hours, a few stokes of the fire and cherry log additions, it looks beautiful when I finally take it out.**

If I were in an actual barbecue competition I'd finish this roast on the smoker (adding moisture softens the bark), but since this is an attempt to replicate past glory I opt to pull the shoulder and braise it in diluted apple juice until it comes up to 190 degrees.  Problem is, I've got hungry people infiltrating my house and the shoulder's not done in time.  I slept in too long and didn't get the smoker going at the crack of dawn like I should've.  I have to make a quick fix, so I hack off a couple big chunks, chop 'em up and throw them in the oven with some of the braising liquid until they come up to temp.  Upside is I served everybody at a reasonable hour, downside is I didn't get the stringy muscle fiber consistency I wanted.  Flavor is dead on, though.  Let's eat.  Note Dan getting first dibs on the pork while my lovely wife heads straight to the mac & cheese.

There's still about 6 pounds of pork in the braise and I make sure that I get the consistency I was going for with that.  You can't rush barbecue, ever, which I think is why I'm drawn to it.  It's a throwback to a point before life got all "on-demand" and "just-in-time" and "instant gratification."  Good things still come to those who wait.

*C'mon people, it's 2012.  That's not funny anymore.
**That's still funny.