pineapple — Annie & Alison: A Food Blog

I’m from Southern California, and I’ve experienced the true delight of the same L.A. street tacos that Alison is trying to replicate in this recipe. Alison’s right: no one can perfectly recreate the crispy yet tender al pastor tacos of L.A. Those street vendors know pork better than anyone. But dang, Alison’s impostor al pastor tacos get pretty darn close. Taco bout a good taco!

Heads up – this recipe isn’t a-whip-it-up-in-an-hour type. The meat really benefits from a few hours of marinating, and the marinade itself is somewhat labor intensive. But if you have the time, it’ll be well spent on this recipe.

I prepared the marinade in the morning before the work day started. Notice my coffee next to the pineapple :). The marinade also serves as a fabulous sauce to drizzle over the tacos, chips, romaine lettuce, etc. The sauce is a blend of white onion, pineapple, spices, guajillo peppers and pepper water. The pepper prep includes toasting the peppers in a skillet until they look charred and puffed up by the heat. Then they need to have their seeds removed and cut into thick rings. The rings of peppers sit in hot water for 10 or so minutes to soften. Then the peppers are transferred to a blender with the other aforementioned ingredients, along with a cup of the pepper water. The whole process took about 20 minutes, with another 10 minutes of cleaning up. I cut the pork into 1-inch thick slabs and placed them in a large bowl to marinate with two-thirds of the sauce.

After work ended, it came time to cook the pork! This took a little while. Alison recommends cooking the pork through once, cutting it into smaller pieces, and then doing a second round of cooking to get a slightly crispy exterior. I was not able to achieve the level of crisp like in L.A., but the flavor was pretty darn close! FYI – the pork did a number on my cast iron skillet. It was very hard to clean. I might try a non-stick skillet next time.

Now, for the fixings. I followed Alison’s recommendations almost to the letter, including chopped tomatillos, cilantro, limes, cotija, and pineapple salsa. The marinade only calls for half of the pineapple, and Alison includes a recipe to combine the other half with onion, cilantro and lime juice for a salty-sweet taco topping. I received rave reviews from Madeline, Sam, and Jordan. All of them openly admitted that this one falls in their top meals from the project – and they’ve had a lot of them!

123 recipes cooked, 102 to go.

Themed birthday parties were my childhood idea of “BEST BIRTHDAY EVER.” I would spend days and days dreaming up the theme, possible decorations, any necessary costumes, the games we would play, invitation design, etc. Thankfully, my parents were totally on board, costumes and all. I had several themed birthday parties, at least two of which were “Hawaiian Luau’s.” Both parties had tiki torches lit in the backyard, fake flower leis doled out at the door, plastic flamingos and grass skirts, the whole sha-bang.

I recently thought about how fun it would be to throw another luau party, but make it more “adult.” There would still be tiki torches, lei’s and a plastic flamingo. There would also be some sort of delicious spiked punch and a pineapple juice, rum cocktail. And instead of serving hawaiian pizza (which no one actually likes), I’d serve this sticky chili chicken. 3 large platters of it, with extra pineapple spears on the side.

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Here’s the process for making this fabulous pineapple chicken. First, marinate the bird! I used a 4lb. organic chicken from TJ’s. I patted it dry, and seasoned it with salt and pepper before placing it in a gallon-sized Ziploc. Then I assembled the marinade – the most labor-intensive step (which is hardly labor-intensive at all). The marinade includes: brown sugar, chili paste (Alison suggest sambal, but I used harissa), fish sauce, lime juice, red pepper flakes, garlic, and rice wine vinegar.

I cannot, for the life of me, find rice wine vinegar anywhere. I own rice vinegar, wine vinegar, and mirin (sweet rice cooking wine), but the specific rice wine vinegar combination is nowhere to be found. Alison uses this mythical substance in multiple recipes, so it must exist. But alas, I got creative with this recipe. To replace ¼ cup rice wine vinegar, I used ⅛ cup rice vinegar, 1 tablespoon white wine vinegar, and 1 tablespoon of mirin. It seemed to work great!

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I let the chicken marinate for about 4 hours. In the meantime, I peeled and cored a small pineapple, and cut it into spears. The spears joined the chicken and all of the marinade on a sheet pan to cook at 425 for an hour. My chicken took longer than usual to cook, I think because we left another sheet pan in the oven underneath the chicken, and that blocked some of the heat. (Why did we do that? I’m not sure. I wasn’t thinking.) The bird was ready in an hour and 20 minutes. While roasting, the pineapple released its sweet juices, which bubbled and thickened perfectly with the hot and sour marinade. A bite of roast chicken with a piece of spicy pineapple? It brought me right back to my luau.

I served this dish as part of, what I am now going to call, an “ALL-OUT-ALISON” meal: