Slow-Cooked Achiote Pork

For Christmas, my mom gave us a gift card for Williams-Sonoma. I've wanted a dutch oven for quite some time, so we picked out a 5.5 quart blue Le Creuset dutch oven. It's enameled cast iron, and is quite heavy, but works well either on the stove or in the oven.

The first thing we made in it is Slow-Cooked Achiote Pork from Rick Bayless' Mexican Everyday. This is a traditional Yucatan pork dish, usually an entire pig cooked in a pit in the ground; but a simple bone-in pork roast in a dutch oven can replicate the flavor.

First, the dutch oven is lined with banana leaves. Then the roast is seasoned with a thick marinade made of achiote seasoning and lime. The roast is placed in the dutch oven, then onions are placed on top.

The result is a sweet, non-spicy pork roast that practically falls apart. And when I say 'sweet', I'm not meaning sugary sweet, but simply not spicy. I usually associate Mexican cooking with spicy, like carnitas, but this isn't. The red color comes from the achiote, which I've used to make red colored olive oil for Puerto Rican rice and peas. The recommendation is to serve this with a salsa or hot sauce. We had corn tortillas, but no salsa. The next time we make this, I definitely think something with a bit of bite/heat to it will go very nicely with it.