Tacos de chicharrón guisado in the slow-cooker

Chicharrón guisado is an easy, flavorful dish made from crunchy, fried pork skin stewed in salsa, and it makes incredible tacos.

The best part about this dish is that it’s incredibly easy to make, packs a ton of flavor, and using a slow-cooker means it’s mostly a hands-off recipe.

There’s a taquería in Los Angeles I really love called Guisados, and lucky for me, they have a location right near where I work. They make a taco de chicharrón guisado that’s very similar to this recipe, and they serve it on a corn tortilla over refried black beans, and topped with a little dollop of avocado salsa verde, which is how I served them here as well, but you can serve it without beans (or different beans) and whatever kind of salsa you like on top.

There are lots of recipes out there for chicharrón guisado—mostly in Spanish—and there’s one key departure in my version aside from using a slow-cooker: I use chile morita, which is a small, dried and smoked chile. I also like to serve these on smaller tortillas (about 4.5 inches round instead of the standard 6 inches) because it makes you feel more like you’re in a taquería.

WHAT IS CHICHARRÓN?

For the uninitiated, chicharrón is fried pork skin rinds, and it’s used in many ways in Mexican cuisine. It can be served as an appetizer, such as chicharrón botanero, or also used in place of a chip with guacamole. It can be used as a garnish, crushed and sprinkled on top, as with frijoles charros. And it can be turned into a guisado by rehydrating it in a salsa or sauce, as with this recipe, just to name a few options.

There are also several variations of chicharrón. The one used in this recipe is sometimes known as chicharrón delgado or chicharrón duro. In some parts of Mexico, chicharrón like this is also called duritos de puerco.

This is what it looks like when sold in large sheets:

And this is what it looks like sold in smaller pieces:

And here’s what it looks like when you break it up into bite-sized pieces:

PRO TIPS FOR PREPARING CHICHARRÓN GUISADO IN A SLOW-COOKER

If you know a day or two in advance that you’re going to make this dish, toast and rehydrate your chiles and keep them in a glass jar with a lid in the refrigerator. This allows them to get really soft, pliable, and also will impart a really nice, deep, smoky flavor to the water they rehydrated in. You can use some of the water to add extra flavor the salsa, or reserve it for adding to other dishes as well.

I typically toast and rehydrate more chiles than I need for the recipe and just keep the jar in the fridge for adding to other dishes.

Make sure you’re buying fresh chicharrón to make this recipe (pretty much always available Mexican grocery store or Latin American market). Stuff you’ll find in the snack aisle among the bagged chips and pretzels is not going to be very fresh and sometimes also has a distinct, old, fried oil taste. Freshly fried chicharrón shouldn’t stink, either. (If it smells weird/fishy or too oily, move along.)

When you break the chicharrón into pieces, keep in mind that they’re going to grow in size once they’re stewed in the salsa. You may want to make the pieces slightly smaller than what you think of as bite-sized so when they rehydrate and plump up, they don’t get too big.

And finally, don’t be a martyr when it comes to the beans. While homemade refried beans are great, if you don’t have any, just use your favorite canned refried beans. I buy La Costeña brand black refried beans.

If you’re not a meat-eater, you might be interested in making chicharrones de harina as a snack instead, or the popular cheese version called chicharrón de queso.

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