Tender, Slow-Cooked Barbacoa Is the Ultimate Party Food

This is the magic of barbacoa, Mexico’s centuries-old method of slow-cooking meat. The dish is a long-standing staple of Sunday afternoon special occasions—birthdays, religious celebrations, or any other large gathering that demands a full-on feast. The tender shreds of meat are served with warm tortillas and a rainbow of garnishes such as salsas, chopped onion, radish, and cilantro. Rice and beans, corn, rajas, or other traditional side dishes made with the animal’s organs might round out the buffet. And for sipping, there’s a pot of pungent, piping hot consomé de barbacoa, a savory broth studded with garbanzo beans, rice, potatoes, and/or green beans that is flavored with the drippings of the roasted meat. “It’s a full meal that has a lot of tradition surrounding it in Mexico,” Iliana de la Vega, chef of Austin’s El Naranjo and the culinary expert behind the food tour company Mexican Culinary Traditions, explained. “It’s a party dish.”

Traditionally, barbacoa is roasted over a low fire in a pib (a shallow pit oven), an ancient technique that dates back at least as early as the Mayans, who used earthen ovens lined with hot stones to cook maize, beans, and squash. Thousands of years later, barbacoa cooks employ a similar setup to make recipes that have been handed down and refined for generations: Lower a large, wide pan of water; vegetables; and aromatics into a pit oven to make the consomé. Then, add the leaf-wrapped meat on a rack on top of it so that the meat’s juices trickle down into the pan. Cover the whole assembly with a woven mat and a layer of dirt and wait 6 to 12 hours for the subterranean cooking to complete.

“The work makes the meat delicious,” explained Cristina Martinez, chef of South Philly Barbacoa, through her translator Elise O’Neill. “But at the same time, it’s the love that you put in.”

Cooking barbacoa successfully this way requires years of practice and a deep understanding of how pib cookery works, so the traditional method is best left to professionals. (Not to mention that preparing a whole animal and creating a pib in one’s backyard isn’t feasible for most home cooks.) But I wanted to capture some of the magic of barbacoa at home, so I set out to create an indoor version of this recipe that could be cooked in a pot.

Across Mexico, but particularly in the states of Oaxaca and Hidalgo, there are countless versions of barbacoa, each varying slightly in seasoning, meat, and accompaniments. I was drawn to one of the Oaxacan variations, which involves coating the meat (typically goat or lamb) with a spicy, punchy adobo. I created my adobo by blending toasted and soaked guajillo chiles, their soaking liquid, garlic, oregano, pepper, cloves, cumin, and cider vinegar and then applied it to a boneless leg of lamb, cut into slabs (though beef can also be used). I found there was no need to marinate the meat overnight to encourage deep salt penetration, as its seasonings could be adjusted after cooking and shredding, and the long steaming time allowed the meat’s connective tissue to turn into gelatin, making the barbacoa plenty tender. 

For the consomé, I chose to include red-skinned potatoes, cut into chunks, and canned chickpeas. The precooked beans didn’t require an overnight soak, and the inclusion of their liquid gave the consomé a silkier consistency. I added half a small onion, two carrots, two bay leaves, and some salt to flavor the broth, leaving the vegetables in larger pieces so that they’d be easy to remove before serving. 

The ingredients settled, it was on to the biggest challenge of the recipe: replicating the effects of the barbacoa pit indoors. Inside the pit, the meat essentially steams in its leaf wrapper, the moist heat slowly rendering it ultratender. I tested a few different setups that would allow for similarly slow steaming indoors. A V-rack set in a roasting pan and covered with a large sheet of foil did a great job of mimicking pit cookery, but covering the large pan tightly proved tricky, and the setup overall seemed too large for the 3 pounds of leg of lamb I was cooking.

A similar, but more manageable, setup? I set the meat atop a plate and rested the plate atop a ramekin in a 7-quart Dutch oven. This way, the meat was still suspended, allowing it to steam from all sides, and the Dutch oven’s lid trapped the heat and moisture. This setup was not only simpler but also faster than the rack version: After I brought the liquid at the bottom of the pot to a simmer, covered it, and placed the pot in a 350 degree oven, the meat was tender and cooked through in about 3 hours.

A vibrant spread of accompaniments is a must for barbacoa, so I prepared some cilantro, lime wedges, diced white onion, and sliced radish to top the tacos. I also whipped up a bright, hot salsa roja: First, I lightly charred tomatillos, onion, tomato, and garlic in a skillet until their interiors were tender and then blended them with arbol chiles and toasted ancho chiles. After blending, I seasoned the mixture with salt, sugar, and vinegar, a critical step to account for tomatillos’ variable acidity and sweetness.

When the lamb was fork-tender, I pulled it from the oven to rest for 30 minutes, broke it into pieces, reheated the consomé, and warmed some corn tortillas. I enfolded a hearty portion of meat in a tortilla and then added the colorful garnishes to both the taco and my cup of consomé. Following de la Vega and Martinez’s advice, I alternated bites of the meaty taco—augmented by pungent onion, tart lime, fresh cilantro, and spicy salsa—with sips of the cozy, savory broth. Those flavorful first bites confirmed it: It was time to gather some hungry guests and start the party.