illdothedisheslater

I love barbacoa – I love the name, I love the (previously blogged about) pork, and I love the London restaurant of the same name.  So when browsing around the Serious Eats website I saw a recipe called “Better Than Chipotle’s Beef Barbacoa”, I hastened to Chipotle to taste for myself.  I’d only ever eaten at Chipotle once, and to be honest it went through me like a chimney sweep.  Chim-chimeree indeed.  My husband has had similar experiences at Qdoba, so fast-casual Mexican-ish dining hasn’t been on our radar for quite some time.  But last weekend some beeper went off in the heads of every human in my hometown, signaling them that they must go out to eat.  Trying and failing (three times!) to get a table anywhere with a wait time of less than an hour, we ended up spending a romantic evening at the campus Chipotle.  (Or a romantic 20 minutes.  They are quite fast.) 

And the beef barbacoa was excellent – tender, just the right amount of chewy, with plenty of beef flavor that didn’t get overwhelmed by the sauce.  So I headed right back to Serious Eats to see what the awesome (and awesomely named) J. Kenji Lopez-Alt had to say about it.  Also we got dumped on with four inches of snow last night, so I remain housebound, still voiceless, and bored out of my gourd.  An all-day slow-cooked pot of beef sounds perfect.

Right away, I could see that I wasn’t going to be following his recipe.  Without yet another extended bitch about the availability of ingredients at my local grocery (they stopped selling garlic bulbs!  WTF?), this recipe called for a variety of peppers both dried and fresh, that I was not going to be able to find:  one whole dried New Mexico, Costeno, or Choricero chile, one whole fresh Chile Ancho or Pasilla, and one whole fresh Chile Negro, plus a can of Ancho chiles in Adobo sauce.  My grocery has bell peppers and jalapenos.  He also calls for oxtails, which are a little too spendy for this otherwise budget-friendly dish.  And while he asks for six cloves of garlic, which is basically my spirit animal, he also includes dried cloves, which is my kryptonite.  I don’t let them in the house.  He also calls for fresh cilantro, of course, but I’m one of those people (approximately 30% of the population, and 50% of the population of my house) to whom cilantro tastes like dish soap.  So here’s my adaptation of his adaptation of Chipotle’s version of beef barbacoa.

I am using:

Two 2-lb. chuck-eye roasts

One fourth pound of three mystery dried peppers

One small can of chipotle chiles in Adobo sauce

Four cups of chicken broth

Six cloves of garlic, smashed (awwww yeeeaaah.)

One eighth cup apple cider vinegar

One teaspoon of ground cumin

One half teaspoon of chile powder

(Pictured but not used:  tomato paste, crushed red pepper, anchovy paste, and lime.  I changed my mind.  Sue me.  Actually I will add some lime juice at the end to brighten it up, so there.)

These are my dried chiles.  If you have any idea what they are, please let me know.  They are for sale in bulk at the northside Walmart.  They weigh nothing, so even at $5.49/lb. it’s a deal.  I’m pretty sure I have an Ancho, maybe a Serrano, and something else.  Anyway, step one is to remove the stems and seeds, which a) is difficult with dried peppers, especially wearing rubber gloves to prevent then accidentally touching my eye, or getting a doggie kiss and burning her tongue, and b) how can a tiny little dried pepper possibly hold such a ridiculous amount of seeds?  I tear them up as best I can, and let them simmer in two cups of chicken broth until they’re somewhat tender.

Meanwhile the garlic gets smashed (with my meat hammer!) and sauteed in a tablespoon of vegetable oil in my dutch oven.  Just when the garlic starts to brown, I add the remaining broth, the vinegar, and the spices.

After 15 minutes, my pepper broth has turned an exciting maroon color and looks amazing.

I add it to the Dutch oven with the can of chipotles.  Now I have to blend it, and figure my much-loved, little-used immersion blender will be perfect for this.  It is not.  My favorite sweatshirt quickly becomes my cooking sweatshirt as broth and chile chunks go everywhere.  I can’t find an apron, so I attach a tea towel to my collar with a binder clip.  It’s still far too splashy, so I have to stop, clean the immersion blender, and pull out a real blender.  This goes far better.   It tastes a little too raw and vinegary right now, but there’s some intense spiciness going on, and I can tell it will mellow as it cooks.

My husband’s aunt and uncle sent us a whole beautiful set of multi-colored carbon stainless steel knives for Christmas, which I have found makes trimming great quantities of meat a snap.  It’s like slicing warm butter, or a young girl’s throat.  I reduce the chuck roasts to medium-large chunks and get rid of the biggest fatty pieces.  I want some fat in this, but I don’t want it too greasy.  Everything goes back into the Dutch oven, then into the oven-oven at 275 for four hours.  It doesn’t look like much right now.

I do dishes, dishes, dishes.  I experiment with a sample of dry shampoo I received in a Birchbox, which makes my head itch like crazy.  I take a long hot bath to remove the dry shampoo.  I search the house high and low for my snow boots, which I eventually find right next to the front door, where I last took them off, probably last winter.  I Netflix the two-hour Grey’s Anatomy where a gunman is loose in the hospital.  Then more dishes.  A snow day after three weeks of being sick is not the treat it should be.