Al pastor

Based on Wikipedia: Al pastor

The Taco That Crossed Two Continents

In 1856, a whole bull was roasted on a spit in the middle of Mexico City's Alameda Central park. President Ignacio Comonfort himself attended, mingling with shoemakers and tinsmiths whose hands were covered in beef grease and the calluses of honest work. No security cordons. No VIP section. Just a nation celebrating its independence by sharing meat carved from a spinning column of fire.

This scene would have been unthinkable in the formal courts of Europe. But in Mexico, cooking meat on a vertical spit—what they called "al pastor," meaning shepherd or herdsman style—was already a beloved tradition of the countryside.

What nobody at that celebration could have predicted was how this cooking method would eventually merge with techniques brought by immigrants from the other side of the world, creating what many consider the perfect taco.

Before the Fusion: Mexico's Original Spit Roasting

The term "al pastor" comes from a longer phrase: "asado al pastor." This translates roughly to spit roast or spit barbecue over an open fire. Picture a whole animal—veal, bull, cow, or mutton—skewered on a wooden stake and slowly turned over flames. This was one of two major methods for roasting meat in the Mexican countryside, the other being barbacoa, which involves cooking meat in an underground pit.

An 1845 Mexican cookbook called the Diccionario de Cocina lists the different ways Mexicans roasted meat at the time: over fire (del pastor), on a grill, in an oven, or fried in lard, butter, or oil. The spit method was sometimes called "carbonada"—literally "over coal."

These massive roasts weren't everyday affairs. They appeared at rodeos, cattle branding celebrations called herraderos, bullfights, and the patron saint festivals of haciendas. Writers from the 1840s noted that the al pastor style was more common in the Bajío region of western Mexico, while barbacoa dominated in the valleys of central Mexico.

So the vertical spit already had deep roots in Mexican culinary culture. It just hadn't met its destiny yet.

Enter the Lebanese

During the late 19th century, something interesting was happening in the Ottoman Empire. A dish called döner—meat stacked on a vertical rotisserie and shaved off as the outer layer browned—was spreading throughout the region. The Levantine version of this dish became known as shawarma.

Then came the migration.

Between the 1880s and 1920s, waves of Lebanese immigrants arrived in Mexico. Most were Christians, which is significant because unlike their Muslim compatriots, they had no religious restrictions on eating pork. They settled heavily in the central Mexican state of Puebla, and they brought shawarma with them.

Now here's where it gets interesting. The Lebanese immigrants didn't find a blank culinary slate. They found a country that already had its own tradition of cooking meat on spits. The techniques rhymed. The flavors were different, but the mechanics were familiar.

By the 1920s, something remarkable had happened. The lamb of traditional shawarma was largely replaced by pork—cheaper, more abundant, and perfectly acceptable to the Christian Lebanese community. The Mexican-born children of these immigrants began opening their own restaurants, and they weren't just serving their parents' recipes. They were inventing something new.

The Transformation

The crucial innovations happened in Mexico City, probably during the 1960s, though nobody can pinpoint the exact moment. Someone—or more likely, many someones working independently—started marinating the pork in adobo, the rich chile-based marinade that's been part of Mexican cooking for centuries.

And they started serving it on corn tortillas instead of the pita-style bread the Lebanese had used.

The result was the al pastor taco as we know it today.

Let's talk about what actually goes into this thing. The pork is marinated in a combination of dried chiles—especially guajillo—along with garlic, cumin, clove, bay leaf, and vinegar. Many versions include cinnamon, dried Mexican oregano, coriander, and black peppercorns. The marinade often contains achiote paste, which gives the meat its distinctive reddish-orange color. And then there's the pineapple, both in the marinade and as a topping.

The marinated meat is stacked on a vertical spit called a trompo—Spanish for spinning top, which perfectly describes what it looks like in action. A flame from charcoal or gas heats one side of the meat column as it slowly rotates. The outer layer browns and crisps while the interior continues to cook and absorb flavor from the layers above and below.

When you order tacos al pastor, the taquero—the taco cook—takes a large knife and shaves thin slices off the spit directly into small corn tortillas. The meat is topped with finely chopped onions, fresh cilantro, and diced pineapple. A wedge of lime and salsa are offered on the side.

The Pineapple Question

That pineapple deserves special attention. It's not just a topping—it's often impaled on the very top of the trompo, where its juices can drip down and baste the meat as it cooks. The sweetness of the pineapple plays against the earthiness of the dried chiles and the richness of the pork fat. It's a balancing act that shouldn't work but absolutely does.

Some purists argue about whether pineapple belongs on al pastor at all, suspecting it might be a modern addition rather than an original element. But at this point, the pineapple has become so associated with al pastor that removing it feels like removing the pepperoni from a pepperoni pizza—technically possible, but missing the point.

Cousins and Variations

Al pastor isn't alone in the family tree. In Puebla, where the Lebanese immigrants first settled, you can still find tacos árabes—"Arabic tacos"—which use shawarma-style meat but serve it in pan árabe, a pita-style bread rather than a corn tortilla. These tacos emerged in the 1930s, representing an earlier stage of the fusion before the full Mexicanization occurred.

In northern Mexico, the same dish goes by different names. In states like Nuevo León, Durango, and Chihuahua, they're called tacos de trompo when served on corn tortillas. When you add cheese and serve them on flour tortillas, they become gringas—a name whose origin is debated but probably relates to the lighter color of the flour tortilla.

Along the Pacific coast, particularly in Baja California, you might hear tacos de adobada—emphasizing the marinade rather than the cooking method.

The al pastor meat itself has expanded beyond tacos. You'll find it in tortas (the Mexican sandwich), burritos, huaraches (oblong corn masa bases topped with various ingredients), and alambres (a skillet dish with meat, peppers, onions, and cheese). Some places even put it on pizza, which is either an abomination or a stroke of genius depending on your perspective.

The Return Journey

Here's where the story takes an unexpected turn.

In the early 2000s, the al pastor preparation method traveled back across the ocean to the Middle East. Chicken marinated in the al pastor style—with the dried chiles and spices—appeared in shawarma shops as "shawarma mexici." It's served Middle Eastern style, wrapped in thin flatbread with garlic mayonnaise, dill pickles, and french fries.

Think about what happened there. Lebanese immigrants brought shawarma to Mexico. Mexicans transformed it with local ingredients and techniques. And then a version of that transformation returned to the Middle East, completing a culinary circle that spans over a century.

The Geography of Flavor

Understanding al pastor means understanding how different culinary traditions collide and combine. The vertical spit is ancient Mediterranean technology—used for döner in Turkey, gyros in Greece, and shawarma throughout the Levant. Each of these dishes uses the same basic cooking method but produces completely different flavor profiles based on the local spice traditions.

Döner typically uses a mixture of lamb and beef seasoned with Turkish spices. Greek gyros often features pork or chicken with oregano, thyme, and sometimes paprika. Shawarma brings cardamom, turmeric, and cinnamon into the mix.

Al pastor takes the technique and runs it through the dried chile tradition of central Mexico—a tradition that predates European contact by thousands of years. The guajillo, ancho, and pasilla chiles that give al pastor its character were cultivated by indigenous Mexicans long before the Spanish arrived. When you eat a taco al pastor, you're eating a dish that contains influences from pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, colonial Spain, the Ottoman Levant, and modern Mexican street food culture.

Street Food Perfection

There's a reason al pastor has become one of the most celebrated street foods in the world. It hits multiple flavor notes simultaneously: the sweetness of caramelized pineapple and charred meat, the heat from the chiles, the brightness of fresh lime and cilantro, the earthiness of the spice blend, and the satisfying richness of well-marbled pork.

The textural contrasts matter too. The exterior of the meat is crispy and almost blackened in spots where it's been closest to the flame, while the interior remains tender and juicy. The soft corn tortilla, the crunch of fresh onion, the burst of pineapple—every bite offers something different.

And there's a performative element that shouldn't be underestimated. Watching a skilled taquero work the trompo is hypnotic. The knife flashing in practiced arcs, thin ribbons of meat falling precisely into the waiting tortilla, perhaps a quick flick of the blade to catch a falling piece of pineapple from the top of the spit. It's cooking as theater.

North of the Border

Tacos al pastor have followed Mexican immigrants to the United States, where they've become fixtures in cities with large Mexican-American populations. Los Angeles and Chicago have become particular hotspots, and the dish has spread far beyond traditionally Mexican neighborhoods as appreciation for authentic Mexican cuisine has grown.

The quality varies wildly. A proper al pastor requires the trompo—that vertical spit—and many restaurants trying to offer the dish without the proper equipment produce something that tastes nothing like the real thing. Chopped pork cooked on a flat grill with al pastor seasonings might be tasty, but it's not the same as meat that's been slowly roasted as it spins, layer after layer building flavor and texture over hours.

A Living Tradition

What makes al pastor fascinating isn't just its flavor. It's the fact that it represents multiple waves of human migration and cultural exchange, compressed into a single food.

Mexican traditions of spit roasting met Lebanese shawarma technique. Christian immigrants who could eat pork met Mexican ranchers who raised it. Indigenous dried chile traditions met Middle Eastern spice sensibilities. And the result wasn't a compromise or a dilution—it was something genuinely new, something that belongs to neither tradition entirely but has become essential to both.

The dish continues to evolve. New variations emerge. The chicken version that returned to the Middle East shows that the story isn't over. Somewhere, right now, someone is probably experimenting with a new twist on al pastor that will seem essential in another generation.

That's how culinary traditions actually work. They're not museums. They're living things, shaped by the people who make them and eat them, carrying history in every bite even as they move toward something that doesn't exist yet.