24/08/2024
Beef birria, done! Who wants to buy a tub? £20 for 550g of shredded beef shin, and a tub of birria sauce.
instead of a spice pouch, i decided to try making the sauce separately in the pressure cooker, blending it all up, and then cooking the meat in it (2kg of beef shin)
onion, tomatoes, garlic
dried stuff - parsley, oregano, powdered tomato, thyme, chives, black peppercorns
chiles - ancho, guajilo, some frozen jalapenos from last years crop, and a few thai chillies for heat, plus a cinnamon stick, apple cider vinegar, and some anchovies (and a glug of the oil) because beef always tastes better with some anchovy hidden inside....
beef stock, tomato paste and mix...
it went in the pressure cooker for an hour.
threw it in batches into the blender and produced nearly 2 litres of sauce.
(its a little on the spicy side, so im gonna try and calm it down with some sugar, lemon and dairy)
beef shin salted and ready to go shortly....
shin browned off in saute mode
as the birria sauce is pretty much a mole, to tamp down the heat, i figured i'd add some chocolate (that a friend gave to me, as it had melted and bloomed slightly in his shop, so couldnt sell it), and some feta (closest i have to Oaxaca here in the fridge, it needed using anyway) and a dollop of cream cheese
once the meat was browned (i did it in two batches) i put it back in the pot....
then added the sauce back in - the sheet pan i was storing it on was used to cook some bacon and sausages on earlier, so i scraped up the fat and juices and added it in too, along with a couple of bone marrow cubes out the freezer then back in the pressure cooker for 90 mins....
fished the meat out with a slotted spoon and decanted to a bowl to shred
the meat just needed stirring with a spatula and it just fell apart
from 2kg of meat, i got 3*550g tubs of shredded birria meat and 4.5 tubs of sauce. ill use one of the tubs for the next batch i make