Homemade Pork Tocino
- Cuisine : Filipino
- Course : Breakfast, Lunch/Dinner
- Recipe Type : Pork
- Main Ingredients : Pork
Tocino is a classic Filipino breakfast, commonly served with fried rice and fried eggs, colloquially know as “Tosilog” – Tocino, Sinangag (fried rice), at itlog (egg). Perhaps it is another indication of the strong Spanish influence on Filipino food. Tocino means bacon in Spanish. In the Philippines, tocino is traditionally made with fatty pork slices and allowed to cure in a sweet/salty mixture. The meat is sometimes substituted with chicken or beef.
Traditionally, salitre (saltpeter) is added to the cure mixture as a preservative. It also gives the meat its reddish color. When we make our own tocino at home, we skip the use of saltpeter. When we have red food color in the pantry, we would add a few drops to the curing mixutre. The red color is just for aesthetics and doesn’t really add any flavor to the food.
While tocino is commonly served for breakfast, in our household, we just don’t normally have that time to cook in the morning. So, we would usually have it for dinner (what’s better than having breakfast for dinner?). Any leftover will be the next day’s breakfast 🙂
Ingredients
- 2 lbs pork shoulder, thinly sliced
- 1 cup brown sugar
- 2 cups pineapple juice
- 1 head of garlic, pressed
- 1 tbsp kosher salt
- 2 tsp ground black pepper
- Water
- Cooking oil
- Red food color (optional)
Instructions
- In a big bowl, combine the sugar, pineapple juice, garlic, salt, and black pepper
- use a whisk to thoroughly mix the ingredients
- Add the pork slices, then cover with plastic wrap and keep it in the fridge. Let it cure in the fridge for at least one day, up to 2 days. If you are not going to cook them after two days, you can put them in portion-sized freezer bags and store them in the freezer at this point.
- When you ready to cook the tocino, put a heavy bottomed pan in medium-low heat.
- Add enough water to barely cover the meat. Cover the pan and let it cook for about 45 to 60 minutes or until the meat is tender. If the water dries up and the meat is not yet tender, add 1/2 cup of water and keep cooking.
- When the meat is tender, remove the pan cover and continue cooking until all the water has evaporated.
- The pork would have rendered enough fat by this time to fry it. If not, just add a little bit of cooking oil. Turn the heat to medium and fry the pork slices until you see bits of caramelization in the meat.
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