Recipe: Venison Carnitas Breakfast Pastry

PREP TIME: 30 min. | COOK TIME: 2.5 hrs. | FEEDS: 4

While researching, I discovered a quick phyllo (pronounced feel-o) dough pastry on Instagram. It’s used all over the Mediterranean from France to Turkey for savory nibbles to sweet baklava dessert bites.

You must butter each layer, and normally a dish calls for what feels like a million layers. This recipe calls for pinching the thin sheets of dough like a folded curtain and layering into a buttered dish. Then, sliding in slices of brie and apples or pears. And pouring over some herb butter, honey, and whisked-up egg.

When studying the recipe, I thought of preparations for wild game. I’m a huge fan of Mexican cooking traditions. My first word was “taco,” after all. Naturally, I was born to cook the venison carnitas breakfast pastry.

Venison Carnitas Breakfast Pastry — A flavor-rich recipe for you and yours.

Camera — A flavor-rich recipe for you and yours.

So, I looked for carnitas recipes with venison. The resulting searches largely called for tossing meat in a crockpot with stock, which is more akin to a birria process. It’s an ideal way to tenderize pieces of meat like bird legs, shanks, or neck roasts from wild game. There’s more fat added, and things are cooked slowly to break down all the connective tissue. With carnitas, the temperature is a bit higher to add the signature crunch to the outside of the meat. There are added ingredients ranging from oranges to Coca-Cola, but the constant is meat cooked in lard until tender with a crunchy outside.

Ultimately, I’m challenging people to consider the terms they use to describe the food they’re making. In Mexican food, three processes people get confused are birria, barbacoa, and carnitas. All three result in gorgeous, pull-able meat. Birria is meat in stock, barbacoa is meat steamed over stock (both done underground traditionally), and carnitas is meat cooked in fat.

In short, you could cook carnitas and throw it on a bun with refried beans and guacamole with some salsa for a torta or served with tortillas as tacos. That’s no fun, though. It feels fancy, but once you cook the meat, the process takes almost no time, and the most expensive part was the cheese. (I’m a sucker for double cream brie, and French cheeses in general.) The honey, pears, herbs, and egg with the crunchy meat and cheese balance perfectly in this venison carnitas breakfast pastry.

INGREDIENTS

For Carnitas:

1-2 lbs. shank, shoulder, neck roast, leg roast (cut into baseball-sized chunks)
6 cups lard
4 bay leaves
3 sprigs of thyme
3 mandarin oranges (or 1 large navel orange)
2 tbsp. salt
1 whole garlic (with the bottom chopped off)

For Pastries:

½ stick butter
1 tbsp. salt
1 tbsp. honey
1 pack of phyllo dough (you need half of the sheets)
2 ripe pears (sliced thinly)
2-3 tbsp. fresh thyme, oregano, and rosemary sprigs (chopped fine)
6 eggs (whisked with a splash of water, milk, or cream)
6-8 oz. brie, gouda, or other soft-melting cheese

INSTRUCTIONS

Prepare the meat by making large chunks or pieces the size of a baseball. Don’t make them too small, or they’ll get dry and jerky-like. Salt with about 2 tablespoons of salt, covering the meat.
Melt 6 cups of lard into a medium Dutch oven or soup pan on medium heat.
Once the lard has melted for a minute or two, drop meat into the pan. It should bubble when you drop it in.
Turn the heat down to a very low setting. You still want bubbles but not too much early browning.
Stir every 10 minutes or so for an hour.
Slice your oranges in half and squeeze out the juice into the bowl. (Save the skins.)
After an hour, add in the bay leaf, some fresh thyme sprigs, a whole garlic, most of the orange juice, and two-fruits-worth of skins.
The oil should bubble again, but don’t worry, it’ll settle back down. At this point, some people add Coca-Cola, water, or pig skin. The world is your oyster, so choose your own adventure.
Slow simmer for another hour, and the meat should be super tender.
Pull chunks out with a slotted spoon and into a colander to strain and crisp up.
Chop with a cleaver until you have small ¼-inch chunks.
Mix in the cooked garlic pieces and the rest of the orange juice. Add salt if the meat needs it.
For the pastry, preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
Butter a 9- by 13-inch pan.
Bunch up sheets of phyllo dough like a curtain tied back in a window. Tuck ingredients into the folds.
Slip slices of pear and brie into the dough. Sprinkle carnitas into the fold and on top of the pastry.
Melt the ½ stick of butter. Toss in the chopped herbs to lightly toast (but not burn).
Add honey to the pan (just long enough for it to all mix together). Drizzle over the pastry evenly.
Add the whisked eggs (salt them with a teaspoon or two of salt while whisking).
Cook for 20 minutes, or until you see browning on the edges of the pastry.
Slice into portions.

While I’m calling this breakfast, I’ve eaten this dish for every meal, even after it sat on my dash on the way home from killing a buck. It’s good hot. It’s great cold. If you need to reheat it, keep an eye on the pastry, as it’ll burn quickly during round No. 2 in the oven. And that’s no bueno when fixing a venison carnitas breakfast pastry.