*At The Rieger, we use pork bones and pork trim from other preparations along with carrots, onions, celery, and herbs to make a nice stock as the soup’s base. We also add in some pigs’ feet or trotters, which give a rich, gelatinous mouthfeel and a great body to the stock. If this isn’t possible at home, use chicken stock to braise the pork shoulder. Then use it for the soup. You will still have a great result.

**On our menu, we call the meat in this soup “pork confit.” It is pork shoulder that we cook sous vide with aromatics and a good dollop of lard sealed in a vacuum pouch. We poach it in a water bath at 85? C for 12 hours, and it becomes incredibly juicy and tender. At home, you can simply use braised pork shoulder that has been cooked until it is fall-off-the-bone tender and shred that up for the soup. Leftover carnitas or even smoked pork shoulder will also work well.

***Since we try to use whole animals at the restaurant, we like to make our own Chicharrones with the skins. To do this, we boil pork skin in salted water for an hour and a half, cool it completely, carefully scrape every bit of fat from it, and then dry it in a dehydrator overnight. At that point, it is brittle and glassy and can be stored for weeks. Before service, we break off a few pieces of the dried skin and fry them in the fryer, where they puff up magically, turn a beautiful clean white color, and become light, airy, and amazingly crispy. If this sounds like too much work for you, you can buy Chicharrones at your local Mexican market, other convenience stores, or supermarkets. Just look for the ones with the least artificial ingredients because we just want them for the texture – not for a lot of chile/lime or other flavors.