Cuban Lechon Asado Recipe

Cuban lechon asado is pork marinated in mojo, a sour orange and garlic marinade seasoned with cumin, oregano and bay leaf, then roasted low until the meat pulls apart and the skin crisps. In Cuba the classic version is a whole pig over coals (source). At home, though, it is a bone-in shoulder in the oven.

Why Cubans roast a pig for Nochebuena

In Xaibe we killed a pig for a wedding or a big feast, not for one night on the calendar. But Cuba does it different. Lechón sits at the center of Nochebuena, Cuba’s Christmas Eve dinner, and it has been described as a national dish of Cuba, the Philippines, Portugal, Puerto Rico and Spain (source). Several countries claim it. Cuba is only one of them. Still, Belize keeps its own roast for the season, the ham that goes on a Belizean Christmas table, and it owes nothing to this one.

The word itself carries the whole animal. Lechón means a roasted baby pig, a piglet still nursing when it went to the fire, and the dish it names is a whole suckling pig cooked over charcoal (source). That is not what goes in your oven tonight. Instead, what follows is the cut cooks reach for when a whole pig is not happening: a bone-in shoulder, carrying the same mojo the piglet gets.

Anitas Delights, a cook born in Cuba (source), says it plain about the season: “we eat pork on christmas eve new year’s eve we pretty much eat pork all year round.” She calls the shoulder in her own kitchen “this is kind of like our special recipe for the holidays.” Still, a Miami cook told NPR that a Cuban Noche Buena plate is roast pork, black beans and rice, bread, and that’s about it (source). Receta Cubana, though, calls the same meal the year-end dish, any excuse will do, and puts congrí, yuca con mojo and salad next to the pork (source). Congrí and yuca con mojo are their own dishes, and both are built here now: congrí, black beans and white rice cooked together in one pot, and yuca con mojo, boiled cassava dressed in hot garlic oil.

Because I raised the yard birds, I know what dripping fat does to a fire, from my own fogón. I know whole-animal cooking. That much is mine. Nochebuena is not. Still, I have no Cuban family, and I have not cooked this dish. What I recognize here is the fire. The holiday belongs to Cuba.

What I recognize here is the fire. The holiday belongs to Cuba.

Cuban mojo is not Puerto Rican adobo

The seasoning is where it separates from Puerto Rican pernil, which takes vinegar, sofrito and achiote. So Cuban mojo takes none of those three things. Four differences, and none of them is a gesture.

Is very important the acid. Cuban mojo runs on naranja agria, sour orange, and every cook in the corpus treats it as non-negotiable. Pernil, instead, runs on white vinegar. Sour orange is Citrus aurantium, called naranja ácida, naranja agria or naranja amarga in Spanish, and its juice is valued for ade and as a flavoring on fish, and on meat in Spain during cooking. In Yucatán it is employed like vinegar (source). That last part is close to home for me. So in my kitchen the same fruit that this Cuban mojo depends on is what stands in for sour orange in a Yucatecan marinade, doing the job vinegar does somewhere else.

The aromatics, and this is the cleanest difference of the four. The Cuban marinade has no achiote and no sofrito. Cuban mojo is garlic, onion, cumin, oregano and bay. Pernil, though, is garlic, oregano, achiote and sofrito. Mojo, in Cuban cooking, applies to any sauce made with garlic, olive oil or pork lard and a citrus juice, traditionally bitter orange juice, and it gets used to marinate roast pork (source). In my tradition the sour orange marries the achiote. That is cochinita pibil. So the Cuban version leaves the achiote at the door.

The Cuban marinade has no achiote and no sofrito.

The application is the third difference. Cuban mojo is a liquid. So it goes into knife slits and, in two of the four cooks I watched for this post, straight into the meat with a jeringuilla, a marinade syringe. Pernil, instead, is a thick paste, worked by hand into deep cuts. Liquid against paste. Injected against packed.

The equipment is the fourth. The asado en púa, a whole pig on a spit, and the caja cubana, a charcoal box, have no equivalent on the pernil post. More on both further down, in Tips and variations.

One more thing, so nothing here reads like an argument with the pernil post instead of an answer to it. That post already makes this same point about the words: lechón is the whole animal over fire, pernil is the leg or the shoulder in an oven. The classic Cuban lechón asado is the whole pig over coals (source). What sits below, then, is the same mojo on a shoulder, for the nights a whole pig is not happening, and that is Cuban practice too (source), not a compromise this post invented.

One caution, because a Cuban cook already went past it on camera. A cook born in Cuba titles her own shoulder video Pernil Asado (source). The two words travel across this whole region. Still, what holds this post apart from the one down the hall is the marinade and the method, not the name.

Ingredients

No achiote here. No sofrito, no vinegar. What replaces all three, instead, is the sour orange and the garlic, in quantity.

For the pork

• 1 bone-in pork shoulder, picnic or Boston butt, 8 lb (3.6 kg), skin on

For the mojo

• 1 1/2 cups (355 ml) sour orange juice (naranja agria); or 3/4 cup (180 ml) fresh orange juice plus 3/4 cup (180 ml) fresh lime juice
• 20 cloves garlic (about 1/2 cup, 70 g), peeled
• 1 medium white onion (about 7 oz, 200 g), roughly chopped
• 1/3 cup (80 ml) extra virgin olive oil
• 2 tbsp (36 g) coarse sea salt or kosher salt
• 1 tbsp (6 g) dried oregano
• 2 tsp (4 g) ground cumin
• 2 tsp (4 g) black pepper, coarsely ground
• 1 tsp (2 g) ground bay leaf, or 3 whole bay leaves crushed fine
• 1/4 cup (10 g) fresh cilantro, chopped (optional)
• 1/4 cup (10 g) fresh parsley, chopped (optional)

For the skin

• 1 tsp (6 g) fine salt

The sour orange swap is not mine. Instead, it comes straight from the cooks who make this every year. “If you can’t find that either do half orange juice half lime juice,” Anitas Delights says (source), and Receta Cubana gives the same fix in Spanish (source).

So twenty cloves is not excessive for eight pounds of shoulder. The garlic, it goes in by the handful here, not by the clove: one cook in this corpus uses a full cup of peeled garlic on a fifty-two pound pig, and this recipe scales the same ratio down. Olive oil and lard both work. Cuban mojo gets made with garlic, olive oil or pork lard, and a citrus juice, traditionally bitter orange (source). Still, I use the oil most nights. Whichever one you use, it is not more Cuban than the other.

Instructions

1. Blend the mojo. Garlic, onion, oregano, cumin, pepper, ground bay, salt, sour orange juice and olive oil, in the blender until it pours easy. The cilantro and parsley go in last, if you use them.
2. Cut deep. Knife slits, several inches into the meat, angled toward the center, so the mojo has somewhere to go.
3. Loosen the skin. Slide the knife under the skin and separate it from the meat without taking it off. Leave it attached along one edge so it lifts like a lid. “We don’t want to actually remove the skin, we just want to detach the skin,” Anitas Delights says.
4. Pour the mojo into the cuts and under the skin. Open each slit and get the liquid inside, then rub what is left over the meat under the flap. Lay the skin back down.
5. Dry-salt the skin. Pat the top dry and rub the fine salt over it. Marinade on the skin keeps it from crisping.
6. Marinate cold, 12 to 24 hours. “Ideally you would let this marinate minimum 12 hours,” Anitas Delights says. Don’t go past 24. The citrus starts working on the texture past that point.
7. Take it out of the refrigerator an hour before it goes in the oven.
8. Roast covered at 325°F (165°C), tented with foil, about 3 1/2 hours for an 8 pound shoulder.
9. Pull the foil. Raise the oven to 400°F (205°C) and give it 20 to 30 minutes, watching it, until the skin blisters and goes hard.
10. Check the temperature. 170°F (77°C) at the thickest part, away from the bone. “Make sure it reach 170 degrees fahrenheit,” Anitas Delights says.
11. Rest 20 minutes under foil. Then pull or slice. Break the skin into pieces and serve it next to the meat so it stays crisp.

170°F is the number this recipe uses, at the thickest part of the shoulder. Two other Cuban cooks in this same corpus run their pigs hotter, because they are cooking something else. Cocina Con Fujita measures 180 to 182°F in the hams of a whole pig (source). FOGO Premium Charcoal takes a shoulder past that, to 203°F, because he is pulling the meat apart for sandwiches. So neither number belongs to this recipe.

Nutrition

These numbers are estimated, per serving, from a recipe that serves 12 off an eight pound bone-in shoulder.

• Calories: 560 kcal
• Fat: 43 g
• Saturated fat: 15 g
• Cholesterol: 150 mg
• Carbohydrates: 3 g
• Fiber: 0 g
• Sugar: 1 g
• Protein: 40 g
• Sodium: 720 mg

Sodium here assumes most of the marinade salt stays in the pan rather than in the meat. Eating the skin raises the fat and the sodium noticeably.

Storage and make-ahead

• Marinate ahead: 12 to 24 hours in the refrigerator is the recipe. Not a shortcut.
• Leftovers: refrigerate up to 4 days, sealed, with some of the pan juices.
• Freezing: the pulled meat freezes up to 3 months. The skin, though, does not. Eat that the same day.
• Reheating: covered, at 300°F (150°C), with a splash of the juices.
• Leftover mojo: if it touched raw pork, cook it down before it goes near the meat again. Boil it hard 5 to 10 minutes if you want to pour it over the pulled pork later.

Equipment

• A heavy roasting pan with a rack
• A sharp boning or paring knife, for the slits and for lifting the skin
• A blender or food processor for the mojo, or a mortar and pestle if you’d rather crush the garlic by hand
• Aluminum foil
• An instant-read thermometer
• A marinade syringe (jeringuilla), optional. Two of the four Cuban cooks I watched inject the mojo rather than only rub it in.

Tips and variations

The whole pig on a spit, asado en púa. This is the classic version, the one Nochebuena is actually about (source). Receta Cubana skewers a pig of about seventy pounds on a pole of guava or guásima wood, over a pit dug 20 to 30 centimeters into the ground, and turns it slowly for four to six hours (source).

Already the fire needs to be coals, not flame, and she says so on camera: “lo que necesitamos es vapor no fuego directo,” what we need is steam, not direct fire. She keeps the marinade off the outside of the skin too, the opposite of what the shoulder method above does, so the cuerito crisps clean. At the end she throws guava leaves on the coals for the smoke: “echar unas hojas de guayaba a las brasas” (source). Still, that is her trick, not a rule for every Cuban cook.

The caja cubana, the China box. A box of plywood lined with aluminum, four feet long, two feet wide and twenty inches deep, the whole pig inside, and the lid doubles as a metal tray that holds the charcoal (source). Cocina Con Fujita cooks a fifty-two pound pig this way in about four hours (source), and the fat dripping onto the coals underneath is where the smoke comes from. It sounds old. But it isn’t. The commercial La Caja China started in Florida in 1985, after Roberto Guerra’s father saw boxes like it in Havana’s Chinatown in 1955 (source). A Cuban-American invention with a Havana memory behind it, not an old island tradition.

Buying a whole pig, if that is the route you take. Cocina Con Fujita’s own rule: buy a female, or a male castrated young (source). An uncastrated boar develops an off flavor in the heat that ruins the meat. That is his rule, from his own kitchen, not a general Cuban law.

Injecting against slitting. Injecting spreads the salt unevenly if you’re careless with it, which is the warning the cook who uses the syringe gives about his own method (source).

Do not trim the fat. And do not let the skin get wet before it goes in the oven. Wet skin does not crackle.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Cuban lechon asado?

Cuban lechon asado is pork marinated in mojo, a garlic and sour orange marinade seasoned with cumin, oregano and bay, then roasted until the meat comes apart and the skin turns hard and crisp. In Cuba, lechón is the centerpiece of Nochebuena, the Christmas Eve dinner, and it has been described as a national dish across several countries, not Cuba alone (source). This recipe, though, is the oven version, a bone-in shoulder standing in for the whole pig.

What is the difference between Cuban lechon asado and Puerto Rican pernil?

The marinade, and how it goes on. Cuban mojo is sour orange, no vinegar, and it carries no achiote and no sofrito, both of which are in pernil’s marinade. Cuban mojo is a liquid, poured or injected into slits. Pernil’s marinade, though, is a thick paste worked in by hand. See Puerto Rican pernil for the paste version side by side.

Can I make mojo without sour orange?

Yes. Half fresh orange juice and half fresh lime juice is what the Cuban cooks in this corpus use themselves when sour orange isn’t sitting on the counter (source). Bottled naranja agria exists too, if your store carries it.

How long should pork marinate in mojo?

12 to 24 hours, no less and no more. Less, and the citrus hasn’t gotten into the meat. More than 24 hours, and the acid starts breaking down the texture instead of just seasoning it.

What is a caja china?

A plywood box lined with aluminum, four feet long, two feet wide and twenty inches deep, built to hold a whole pig, with the lid doing double duty as a charcoal tray (source). It reads old. It’s a Florida invention from 1985, built after a Cuban immigrant’s father remembered boxes like it from Havana’s Chinatown in the 1950s (source). So Miami’s own holiday write-ups call the same pig lechón or pernil interchangeably (source).

What do Cubans serve with lechon asado?

Roast pork, black beans and rice, bread, and that’s about it, one Miami cook told NPR about her own Noche Buena table (source). Receta Cubana’s own plate from Cuba, though, is congrí, yuca con mojo and salad alongside the pork (source). Congrí and yuca con mojo both have their own recipes here, and that is what goes next to this one.