Beef Barbacoa: the Results

Last week I posted some recipes that I'd found online for the beef barbacoa and seasoned rice that you can get at Chipotle restaurants. I haven't made the rice yet but I did make the beef dish. I couldn't find a local or cheap source for the avocado leaves but found a suggestion online that you could substitute bay leaves and a dash of anise. It didn't indicate how much to use, so I just guessed at about 4 bay leaves and 1/8 teaspoon of ground anise.

Like most other recipes I use, I made a bunch of adjustments based on my laziness and pantry supplies. I couldn't find those guillano peppers so I subsituted 6 chipotle peppers. The only beef roast left at the store was 4.5 pounds (a little under the recommended size for the amount of marinade paste) and I left it to marinate in the fridge overnight instead of only 4 hours.

I put all the ingredients into my Magic Bullet (thanks Allison!) to make the thick paste. The directions state that you need to pass the paste through a sieve, which I also didn't do. (I didn't have the recipe printed out, only a list of the ingredients, and I didn't have internet access since we'd just cleared out the office and unplugged the modem--so I just tried to remember what to do and forgot that sieve part). Now that I've tasted the cooked meat I think I know what that sieve is supposed to do: remove the hot pepper seeds! Chipotle peppers are simply smoked jalapeño peppers, i.e., quite spicy.

The raw chunk of dead cow covered in the aromatic paste (you can actually see those pepper seeds):
A phone call to Edward gave the internetless me the cooking time/temperature the following night. I put the chunk of meat into my dutch oven and put that into my handy roaster oven. These ovens are great because they keep the moisture inside, unlike a range oven, so your food doesn't dry out. In fact, roasting a turkey in one doesn't even require basting and it cooks much faster. I set mine to only 300F and went to bed. It roasted for about 9 hours.

All night long I dreamed about eating that delicious meat because the smell permeated the house. It was heavenly. In the morning I tested the meat with a thermometer and it was definitely done. Just to make sure I poked it with tongs to see how tender it was. It just fell apart! With very little effort I was able to mix it all up to the consistency of Chipotle's meat.

The meat tastes fantastic but is a little dry. I mixed in about 4 tablespoons of canola oil and that helped a lot. I think the extra cooking time (despite the lower temperature) may have dried it out. Next time I think I will treat it like a pot roast and pour beef stock around it in the bottom of the dutch oven. Despite the slight dryness all the flavors really meld together nicely. The spicy with the thyme sounded strange to me, but it really works well.
Dave brought home some Chipotle burritos for dinner the other night and I did a taste comparison. Mine definitely tastes like the commercial barbacoa so I'm calling it a major success. I froze it in quart bags so we can make our own burritos later. We didn't eat it yet because Dave has been bringing dinner home every night. His firm lets its overworked employees have a $16 dinner reimbursement if they work for more than 10 in a day (so for him, that's been every day lately). Given the food options in a college town we're both able to eat on that. Two Chipotle burritos, guacamole, and chips comes in at $15.50 or something. Perfect for us!

Like many dishes with lots of different seasonings, the flavor improves with age. I let this sit in the fridge for two days before tasting it again--the spicyness was less intense but the other flavors came through more strongly than before. If you're going to make this, I recommend letting it "rest" like this for a day or so before using it.