need help with carnitas recipe - I want to use pork belly

I have been wanting to try my hand at carnitas for a while and I want to make some tomorrow. All the recipes online essentially call for the same thing - pork butt/shoulder cooked in rendered fat. I was putting together my grocery list and remembered that I have some skin-on pork belly in the freezer from a bacon making experiment. I figured adding some crispy pork skin to the carnitas would be phenomenal, but I haven't cooked all that much with pork belly and don't know how to do this.

My question - if I toss the skin-on pork belly in the rendered lard with the pork shoulder like most recipes call for, will the skin crisp up nicely? I'm also worried about all the fat and connective tissue in the belly - when I've made belly before, I've braised it in some liquid for 2-3 hours. I'm not sure if simmering in rendered fat will cook the pork belly such that it will lend itself well to chopping/shredding for carnitas.

I realize this is sort of a random question but googling didn't help me very much. Thanks!

I tried a bit of googling around in spanish with an image search - most references show carnitas being served with a side of deep-fried chicharron, but this blogger's list of all the stuff you can request in your serving includes all kinds of offal along with skin (combining the efforts of my limited spanish and the google-translator, I came up with something like this: lung, esophagus, something little that he doesn't know how to explain, leg, balls, skin, intestines, uterus, uterus mixed with esophagus, loin, ear, snout, cheek.) Belly I couldn't find specifically. I found another blog that referenced the belly and bacon meat (panceta) specifically, but didn't offer a recipe.

How it will turn out, I can't tell you - but carnitas as a nose-to-tail dish has precedent.

I'm sure it would come out fine, but you'd need signifcantly more belly to have enough finished product for a group of 5 or 6 as there's a lot less meat available.

As for whether the skin would crisp up, it probably would once you crank the heat as you're supposed to do after simmering the meat for a while (~2 hrs or so). The problem I had with this when I did carnitas last month was that I couldn't get the lard much hotter than 300-320 degrees as I'd added a cup or so of OJ to it so all that water had to boil off before it would get past 212-215 and by the time this happened, the solids in the lard were getting awfully dark. I told myself that the next time I made carnitas that way that I would use two different batches of lard. One for the simmering and one for the hot frying.

And as luck would have it, I am making carnitas tonight with pork butt but it a different way seen on Bayless's show where you cook it low in a covered baking dish w/ some water until tender and then remove the foil and just crank the heat in the oven to boil off the water and let it crisp up in its own fat. I figure this way will be much less messy than the last time.

Good luck !

you can also just crisp the skin in a skillet w/ a bit of lard.

I made the carnitas this weekend and they turned out okay. I ended up mixing pork belly and pork shoulder. The skin on the belly really didn't crisp up like I was hoping, so that part of the experiment was a failure I would say. I also had a tough time getting the lard up to temperature (couldn't get it anywhere near 370) so the meat did not crisp up like I wanted.

I added a sliced up orange and a coke towards the end, I'm guessing that must have prevented the temp of the lard from getting high enough to put a brown crisp on the meat. The meat did come out tender and flavorful, but just didn't get very crispy.

Last time I made carnitas, I threw the meat under the broiler for a few minutes to crisp everything up.