Slices of pork marinated in chiles, spices and ever some pineapple juice, crisping around the edges until it’s shaved off onto a tortilla: Meet al pastor.

This is what happens when you live in Buffalo, N.Y. and have been plagued by recurring, intrusive thoughts of tacos al pastor:

You get busy.

Surely, you murmur to yourself as you see another photograph on The Great Taco Hunt that makes you want to knaw your computer, if it’s everywhere in neighborhoods 3,000 miles away, it can be brought a little closer. It’s not like, say, plutonium, or the Stanley Cup.

I’m game. I’ve got the Internet, I’m uncommonly stubborn, and awfully hungry. Besides, and this is important, my wife Kathy has proved she will not divorce me if it looks like I spent, say, several months working on what might seem like one meal.

So when you’re cooking the impossible, I find it’s best to take it one step at a time.

Problem one: can you make the pork taste right?

Answer: Yes.

After lots of poking around, I settled on a Los Angeles Times recipe crossed with a Rick Bayless recipe. Chiles and other not-in-Buffalo goods came by mail from Pendrey’s. I can’t swear it’s like that little place you love in Cancun, but a test batch, oven-roasted and crisped under a broiler, got the Mexican-traveled among us nodding.

Problem two: Where can you get one of those upright rotisseries?

Answer: You can’t, unless you’re willing to pay at least $400. But you can buy a Sunbeam Carousel Rotisserie. It’s a spinning skewer, it’s got a heating element, and though it’s a third the standard size, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Unless you need to cook 10 kilos of tacos at a whack.

Problem three: So you can make the meat and that rotisserie might work. How in good conscience can you justify filling it with eight pounds of marinated pork to test it out?

Answer: Fiesta.

Next: How to make a taco machine out of a tabletop chicken roaster.

Filed under: Home cooking, How-to, stunt-cooking