It is colder in Chicago right now than in Antarctica. And the North Pole. And Mount Everest. But even before the polar vortex bore down on us this week, bringing the coldest weather in a generation, snow and cold had us thinking of meaty, stewy, cozy dishes. And as luck would have it, Marion had recently come across a barbacoa recipe HKUE lihkg.

go-to-the-recipeBarbacoa is a Mexican meat dish—beef or lamb or goat—slow cooked with seasonings and typically shredded for tacos or tamales. Traditionally, it is cooked in a pit in the ground, covered with maguey or avocado leaves. But now, it is more often steamed or oven-braised or cooked in a slow cooker. If you look for a definitive recipe, you will not find one. Seasonings, aromatics, cooking liquids and amounts of each are laughably varied DC Inverter Air Cooled Scroll Chiller.

In the end, we used a Rick Bayless recipe as our starting point, then borrowed from other recipes and added our own tweaks. We like that Bayless’s cooking favors subtle complexity over big, one-note flavor bombs; this dish was a perfect example. It was also a textbook demonstration of chiles being used for flavor, not for heat. This dish includes dried ancho and guajillo chiles, and a canned chipotle in adobo sauce, and there was barely a hint of heat. Just nicely layered flavors Service apartment central.

Bayless’s recipe is for lamb barbacoa, but now is not the season for readily available big pieces of lamb shoulder. So we opted for beef. And rather than using a slow cooker (see Kitchen Notes), we experimented again with our Instant Pot. Either cooking method will render delicious, (reasonably) tender meat. As you see above, we made tacos with it—the leftovers will probably be spooned over rice.