Pernil is The King of Christmas Roasts

“We would wake up with the smell in the air of the pernil already cooking,” said Maricely, my colleague at America’s Test Kitchen. “And it’s just torture because you’re waiting for that moment when you can actually eat it.” 

Pernil is a behemoth—both the roast itself and its prominence for Puerto Ricans and the diaspora. Prepared with a sense of pride and the spirit of generosity for holiday meals and other festive gatherings, the hulking pork picnic shoulder (or sometimes Boston butt) is seasoned to the core with garlicky adobo and roasted for hours until the meat turns tender and its thick, rubbery cuero (skin) puffs, browns, and crisps like a porcine crown that crackles between your teeth. (“Cuero,” as well as the term “cuerito,” can also refer to crispy pork skin specifically.)

Carved into hunks and often plated with shards of crunchy skin for the luckiest guests, pernil almost always appears alongside a mound of arroz con gandules (rice with pigeon peas) and often pasteles (plantain dough parcels stuffed with pork) and any other accompaniments that complete a family’s feast. 

“Everything was out, full spread, by one, maybe two [p.m.] at the latest,” recalled Maribel, who rises at five a.m., just as her mother always did, to get the pernil in the oven for her own midafternoon Christmas celebration. “You ate, you rested, and then you went back in for dinnertime.”

Pernil is easy to make because the cooking is largely hands-off. The bulk of the job is simply to prime the pork for seasoning and prepare and apply the adobo.

Picnic shoulder is a grand and complex bone-in cut comprising a traffic jam of well-used muscles hugged by a generous fat cap and thick skin. (For more information, see page 27.) To turn it into pernil, cooks start by smearing and stuffing it with adobo.

Versions of this aromatic seasoning exist in cuisines around the world, but to Puerto Ricans it means a heady, wet paste of garlic, dried oregano, salt, and black pepper that’s usually loosened with oil and further seasoned with vinegar or citrus juice and/or the umami-rich salt-and-spice blend known as sazón. (“Adobo” stems from the Spanish word “adobar,” meaning “to marinate.”) 

“The key to pernil is the seasoning,” said Von Diaz. The Puerto Rican native and North Carolina–based food historian and author of cookbooks including Coconuts and Collards: Recipes and Stories from Puerto Rico to the Deep South (2018), said that the adobo is ideally applied to the meat at least 24 hours or up to 48 hours before cooking. (Some cooks supplement the adobo with sofrito, the ubiquitous Puerto Rican flavor base made by chopping onions, garlic, culantro, other seasonings, and peppers including aji dulces.)

But as both she and the Cora sisters pointed out, getting adobo deep into the roast is a challenge because the skin covers so much of its surface. Every family has its own strategy: Some run a knife under the skin and peel it away to apply the seasoning before replacing it for cooking; others pierce the roast all over (including through the skin and fat) and then shove adobo into the slits. 

“When I was a little kid, this was one of those early tasks that I could be given,” said Diaz. “I had little, little fingers, so I could really get the adobo deep into the cuts.”

I mixed up a typical adobo with garlic, oregano, salt, pepper, oil, and sazòn and added Manzanilla olives, riffing on a suggestion from fellow test cook José Maldonado, whose father buries whole olives deep in the pork’s incisions for their flavor and moisture as well as the visual appeal of olive cross sections in the sliced pernil. I wanted their savory depth and brininess in every bite, so I chopped and mixed the olives into the paste for even distribution.

Then I worked on getting all that seasoning into the meat, experimenting with classic approaches and and eventually devising my own: Instead of peeling back and replacing the skin (required patience; caused the skin to shrink during roasting) or piercing through it (faster, but tough to push the adobo past the firm cap into the meat), I made deep slits everywhere the meat was exposed, including on the sides beneath the skin and on the underside.

Then I pressed most of the adobo into the cuts, saving about 1 tablespoon to smear over the exterior, and arranged the roast skin side down in a rack set in a roasting pan. Overnight, many of the seasonings diffused into the meat, imparting rich, fragrant savor. The salt also helped it retain moisture throughout the long cooking time.

Many pernil recipes suggest roasting the meat at a moderate temperature (roughly 300 to 350 degrees) for at least 5 hours, during which time the muscles that are rich in connective tissue convert much of that collagen to gelatin and soften to fall-apart tenderness, while those with less gelatin-forming potential retain meaty resilience. Ideally, at the same time, the once-dense skin transforms spectacularly into its pinnacle form: a chicharrón-like crown that’s “crisp with a juicy gush of fat,” according to Diaz, who considers properly cooked cuero “the icing on the cake.” 

To ensure that both muscle types cooked thoroughly without drying out, I roasted the meat at 325 degrees so that it crawled to the 180-degree target over roughly 6 hours. Midway through cooking, I flipped it skin side up to evaporate some of the cuero’s moisture.

But even by the end of the long roasting time, precious few patches of it were crisp enough to pass the wooden-spoon test. (In a ritual as venerated as pernil itself, cooks tap the cuero with a wooden spoon. When doing so produces a hollow sound, the roast is pronounced perfect.)

Some cooks return the whole roast to the oven in pursuit of peak cuero; I took a divide-and-conquer approach, cranking the oven to 450 degrees, lifting the skin off in a single piece like the breastplate in a suit of armor, placing it on a foil-lined rimmed baking sheet, and returning it to the oven for a second blast while the meat rested. Ten minutes later, it was chip-crisp.

After cutting the meat from the bone in a few big hunks, I sliced it against the grain (shortening the muscle fibers maximizes tenderness) and piled it with crispy pieces of cuero on a platter alongside a heaping bowl of arroz con gandules, recalling how Diaz had emphasized this partnership.

“The Puerto Rican Christmas plate—with your superjuicy, flavorful pork; if you’re lucky, a piece of crispy cuerito; and this mound of composed rice con gandules—tells the story of a people.”