Blend the water, onion, jalapeno and cilantro until smooth. Pour over the meat with the cola and salt, bring to a boil and cook at a nice, fast simmer for a couple of hours, stirring occasionally. Be watchful.
After about an hour and a half, start separating the meat into smaller chunks, using the edge of a strong wood or metal spatula. When only about a quarter inch of liquid is left, stir very frequently until reduced down to a glaze. Unless the glaze has enough grease to let the meat fry rather than stick, add the extra oil and continue working with the spatula until the meat is browned and charred and roughly shredded.
Use fatty meat. Did you not know you can buy Mexican Coca-Cola at Walmart? It's worth it; it uses cane sugar. It's best to go food shopping at Walmart when you don't actually need anything. Besides Mexican coke they have crazy stuff like Old Folks Country Sausage Patties. And, of course, bulk meat.
This recipe is a mash-up of a couple of threads in my personal headspace. One is the blended vegetables that Pati Jinich (she makes me so proud to be Jewish) uses to make the carnitas that she serves up to JuJu and the boys. The other is a gorgeous parcel of duck cured in Mexican coke, and lots else - it's quite a production - that is worth every bit of its price and fame at Cosmé restaurant in NYC. You can find an approximate recipe here, if you can get past the Bloomberg firewall.
This recipe is all about watchfulness at the end, when you're trying to get those beautiful crispy shreds of pork. I go with a heavy metal offset spatula and cast iron, but there are other ways and means, including just stopping when you still have plenty of liquid and serving it over rice and beans, which is apparently OK with JuJu.
No Mexican coke? Better yet, no Walmart? Instead of regular coke I think I'd use a little molasses and some grated Mexican chocolate.
This is a little sweeter than ordinary carnitas. The thing I want with it is tomatillo salsa, but to link up the tart tomatillos with the sweeter pork I added some ground cherries. No recipe, sorry, but you just boil the tomatillos for a minute or two and then blend them with onions, salt and cilantro. I happened to have ground cherries, aka husk cherries - which actually look a lot like tomatillos, so it's sort of an ironic salsa - but you could use just a bit of almost any fruit, including apples.
