Res en Chileajo de la Costa Chica

Ingredients

Equipment Needed

• •Cast iron comal or heavy skillet for charring garlic and toasting chiles
• •Heavy clay cazuela or 6-quart Dutch oven for braising
• •High-powered blender
• •Fine-mesh strainer

Instructions

1. 1

   Build the broth

   Put the beef in a large pot with the onion, the 4 garlic cloves, the bay leaves, and the salt. Cover with cold water by two inches. Bring to a gentle simmer and skim the gray foam that rises in the first fifteen minutes. Cook at a lazy bubble, partly covered, for about two hours, until the meat is tender enough to pull but still holds its shape. Lift the beef out and keep it. Save every drop of the broth. You will build the chileajo on it.

2. 2

   Char the garlic, toast the chiles

   Heat a dry comal or heavy skillet over medium. Lay the two whole heads of garlic on it and char them, turning, until the skins blacken in spots and the cloves go soft, about ten minutes. Set aside to cool. On the same comal, toast the costeño, guajillo, and pasilla oaxaqueño separately, a few seconds per side, pressing each flat with a spatula. They should puff and smell sharp and sweet, never blacken. The costeño is small and thin. It burns in a blink. Watch it.

   Burned chile is bitter chile and there is no fixing it later. If one goes black, throw it out and toast another. The pasilla oaxaqueño is already smoke-dried, so toast it the lightest of the three.
3. 3

   Toast the spices

   In the same dry pan, toast the cumin, allspice, cloves, and peppercorns over medium heat until fragrant, under a minute. Shake the pan so they do not scorch. Toasting wakes up the oils in the spice the same way it does in the chile. You can crush them or leave them whole for the blender to handle.

4. 4

   Soak and blend

   Put the toasted chiles in a bowl and cover with hot water, not boiling. Boiling water cooks the skins and turns the paste bitter. Soak for twenty minutes, until pliable, then drain. Peel the charred garlic. Into the blender go the chiles, all that garlic, the toasted spices, the oregano, the vinegar, and one cup of the reserved beef broth. Blend until completely smooth, adding broth a splash at a time only if the blades stall. You want a thick, clinging paste, not a soup.

5. 5

   Strain the paste

   Pass the paste through a fine-mesh strainer set over a bowl, pressing hard on the solids with the back of a ladle. The costeño and guajillo skins will not break down all the way, and you do not want them in the final dish. What comes through is deep brick red and glossy. Discard what stays behind in the strainer.

6. 6

   Fry the paste

   Melt the manteca in a clay cazuela or heavy pot over medium heat. When it shimmers, pour in the strained paste. Stand back, it will sputter. Fry it, stirring almost constantly, for eight to ten minutes, until it darkens, thickens, and the fat begins to break out around the edges. This is the step that makes chileajo chileajo. Raw paste tastes flat and harsh. Fried paste tastes deep and round. La manteca es el sabor. No me vengas con atajos.

   You will know it is ready when a spoon dragged across the bottom leaves a track that fills in slowly and the manteca pools red and separate at the edge of the pot.
7. 7

   Braise and finish

   Add the beef to the cazuela and turn it until every piece is coated. Pour in two to three cups of the reserved broth, enough to come halfway up the meat. Simmer uncovered for thirty to forty minutes, until the sauce thickens into a coat that clings to the beef and a sheen of red-stained fat rises to the top. Taste for salt. It should be assertive, garlicky, and hot, the way the coast makes it. Serve it in the cazuela with white rice, fried plátano macho, hot corn tortillas, and lime. Así se hace y punto.

Chef Tips

• •Chile costeño is the heart of this dish and it is hard to find outside the Costa Chica. Look in Mexican markets for the small, thin, deep-red coastal chile, sometimes sold as costeño rojo. If you truly cannot get it, chile de árbol with an extra guajillo will give you the heat and the color, but you will lose the specific coastal fruit of the costeño. That is a compromise, not an upgrade.
• •Do not skimp on the garlic. Two whole heads sounds like too much until you taste it. Chileajo is named for the garlic as much as the chile, and charring it on the comal turns it sweet and deep instead of raw and sharp.
• •Pasilla oaxaqueño is smoke-dried and sits quietly behind the heat. If you cannot find it, use one regular pasilla and half a chile chipotle meco for the smoke. Again, a compromise, and again, I am telling you what you are missing.
• •Serve it the way the coast serves it: white rice to carry the sauce, fried ripe plátano macho for the sweetness against all that chile, and hot corn tortillas to finish what the fork leaves behind. This is the Afro-Mexican table, not a side note to it.

Advance Preparation

• •This is a make-ahead dish that only improves overnight. Cook it a day before, let the beef rest in the chileajo in the refrigerator, and reheat it slow. The sauce tightens and the garlic settles into the meat.
• •The chile paste can be made and fried up to three days ahead, or frozen for a month. Braise the beef in it the day you serve.
• •Render your own manteca if you can, or buy good fresh lard from a carnicería. The shrink-wrapped lard off a supermarket shelf is a last resort, not the same thing.

Frequently Asked Questions

Nutrition Information

1 serving (about 430g)