Caramelized Pork Tacos With Pineapple Salsa Recipe

comment icon 304 more comments And welcome to today’s episode of Tacos Are The Best Food Ever featuring Caramelized Pork Tacos. I don’t mean to be super obvious here, but we have some really delicious things going on in the food department right now that you need to know about. Starting with thin strips of caramelized pork tucked into a soft corn tortilla, moving on to fresh cucumber pineapple cilantro salsa, and finishing with a chili mayo sauce over the top because SAUCE RULES THE WORLD. 🌎 I’m just a little obsessed.

Watch How To Make Caramelized Pork Tacos

Click here to see the step-by-step web story instructions for this recipe!

Scrappy Is Best

When I read the book Bread and Wine (affiliate link) a long time ago, one of my favorite concepts/takeaways from the book was this idea that anything can be made into a few certain super-flexible recipes.

Aromatics

One of my favorite trios – shallots, garlic, and jalapeño. Flavor perfection.

Fish Sauce

This might seem unnecessary but is VERY NECESSARY. Fish sauce adds some saltiness and a good punch of umami, and just really brings the flavors over the top.

Sugar

Sugar is the key to making things caramelized – don’t skip it!

Pineapple Salsa

Oh, this salsa is so good. A mix of pineapple, cucumber, cilantro, red onion, lime juice, and salt. Simple and perfect.

Fixings

Once your pork and salsa are ready, all that’s left is to assemble! Gather your tortillas, some chopped cilantro, squeezes of lime, and chili sauce. Soup, for example. Just about any combination of random ingredients that might happen to be hiding in the depths of the produce drawer of the fridge can probably be made into soup. It might be a scary soup – I’ll give you that. But with a little water, a little salt, a few spices… no biggie. You’ve got a basic soup. Or stir fry. Assuming you have some sort of grain or rice – or maybe not even because you’re just going to create more of a stir-fry-meets-hash situation? I wouldn’t be mad – you can almost guarantee that any random ingredient combination can become something resembling a stir fry. And that’s sort of how I feel about these pork tacos, in the most scrappy, hungry, wonderful way.

How To Enjoy These Pork Tacos

These are coming to your face today in TACO FORM. Make no mistake – taco form is the original. This is where it’s at. Warm tortilla stuffed to the brim with all those colors and textures and the Sweet Salty Spicy trifecta. But if you’re a person who sort of takes these things called recipes and runs with them into crazy food places (👋 hiii), this is an open invitation for you to reincarnate these tacos into a new food form. After we devoured the tacos themselves, I found myself bringing this combo back to life in SALAD FORM (toppings + meat over greens with the chili mayo as dressing), and then in STIR FRY FORM (toppings + meat + leftover quinoa, fried into something that resembled the most delicious sweet and savory fried rice) which was really, really good. And then there was the DIPPED WITH CHIPS form, but that’s really only for the select few who have a refined enough palate to really appreciate that kind of sacred food wizardry. Start with the tacos, though, okay? Sizzle up that meat and chop up your salsa and drizzle with spicy chili sauce – just think of it as your gateway to greatness.

More Taco Yum

Instant Pot Hawaiian Chicken Tacos with Jalapeño Ranch Slaw (you NEED!) Walnut Chorizo Tacos with Pineapple Salsa (totally vegan and so good) Spicy Shrimp Tacos with Garlic Cilantro Lime Slaw (the perfect summer dinner right here) The Best Chicken Tinga Tacos (literally though, the actual best!)

This recipe inspiration is coming to us from the extremely talented Stephanie Le of I Am A Food Blog! Here’s her original caramelized pork taco recipe and here’s her beautiful, drool-worthy cookbook, Easy Gourmet (affiliate link), which is full of recipes like dis. Mwah! 😘