Smoked Pork and Green Chile Pozole

Brief history: My dad, Jay Gardner, ordered green chile pozole at a nice mexican restaurant in Phoenix, AZ called Sierra Bonita. He loved it and asked the chef for his recipe, who obliged him with a basic sketch of how to make it. His first attempts included things like using just chicken broth as a stock and experiments with different seasonings.

The big breakthrough was using a smoked turkey carcass (after thanksgiving, most of the meat gone) to make the stock. He also relied on the local mexican market for roasted green chiles until he started doing it himself. Later he experimented with different chiles to test their heat level. He found that using different peppers did not drastically change the flavor of the green chile sauce (some have slightly different aftertastes), but some, like pasilla peppers, were much more consistent in spice level.

One important discovery is that many places that sell smoked pork intend it to be used shredded, so they smoke it until the meat loses self-cohesion. This soup is better with solid chunks of pork; the shredded pork leads to a more homogenous texture, while with the chunks, you get nice big pieces of meat.

One note is that this recipe is always changing; my dad experiments with different things. One year he just used ham chunks instead of pork shoulder because he couldn't afford the latter. It wasn't quite as good, but it was still good. There are also a few tricks he hasn't taught me; he wants to keep some things secret. They are minor, and possibly WIP features.

Good luck. It can be a lot of work, especially the first time, but the most time consuming part (other than boiling the broth or smoking the pork, which don't require attention) is roasting the peppers and chiles. This can take a half hour to an hour.