Mexican · Main
Barbacoa de Borrego
- Advanced
- 50 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with fresh herbs arguing happily on top, aromatics blooming from the first bite, fading in warm spice.
Ingredients
- 2.5 kg lamb shoulder and leg on the bone, in 4 pieces
- 25 g fine salt
- 2 maguey leaves (pencas), spines trimmed, or 4 banana leaves
- 6 avocado leaves
- 200 g dried chickpeas, soaked overnight
- 80 g long-grain rice, for body in the consommé; it dissolves over the cook and does not stay as grains
- 1 white onion, sliced
- 3 guajillo chillies, stemmed and seeded
- 4 garlic cloves
- 2 g dried mint
- 8 g fine salt, for the broth
- 1.2 litres water
The skills inside
Tortillas on the comalSoaking dried goods back to life
Allergen screen
None found among the 14 screened.
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Hold the maguey leaves over a flame or lay them on a hot comal until they darken, weep and go bendy; a raw penca cracks along its fibres and will not wrap.
- Rub the lamb with the 25 g of salt and leave it uncovered in the fridge overnight, so the surface dries and the salt goes in.
- Put the chickpeas, rice, onion, guajillos, garlic, mint, broth salt and water in a deep roasting tin and set a rack over it, high enough that nothing touches the liquid; over five hours the rice will blow apart completely and thicken the broth, which is the job it is there to do.
- Line the rack with the maguey, lay the lamb and avocado leaves on it, fold the leaves over the meat and seal the whole tin tightly with foil.
- Cook at 150C (300F) for 5 hours, until the meat slides off the bone; lift out the lamb, then skim and season the consommé that has caught every drop below. 300 min
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Tortillas on the comal 27 recipes
- It puffs. On the second turn the tortilla lifts into a dome as the trapped water flashes to steam and splits the two faces apart; a tortilla that never puffs was pressed too thick, cooked too cool, or turned too often.
- Freckled, not blackened: small brown spots across a pale field. An evenly browned tortilla has been on too long and will be a cracker by the time it reaches the table.
- It folds without cracking while warm, and still folds after five minutes under a cloth. A tortilla that splits along the fold has lost too much water on the comal.
- The edges are unbroken and roughly round, with no ragged fringe: a fringed edge means the masa was too dry when it was pressed, and no amount of heat will fix it afterwards.
- It smells of toasted corn rather than of scorch or of raw lime. Raw lime means the nixtamal was under-rinsed; scorch means the comal was above the working heat.
Where it goes wrong The masa was too dry or the comal too cool. A dry masa cracks at the edge on pressing and cannot generate the steam that puffs it; a cool comal dries the tortilla through before the water can flash, so it leaves the heat stiff, pale and already stale.
Soaking dried goods back to life 69 recipes
- Fully submerged with room to swell: the level is well above everything at the start and still above it at the end.
- Given the full time, and judged by what is in the bowl rather than by the hours on the clock.
- Tested at the CENTRE of the largest piece, cut or pressed. Anything with a hard dry core will still have one after cooking, because the outside softens first and stops the water getting further in.
- The soaking water was dealt with on purpose: kept because it holds flavour, or thrown away because it holds what should not be eaten, but never simply left undecided.
- Drained before it is used, so the dish does not silently gain all the water that came with it.
Where it goes wrong Too little water, or too little time. The pieces swell until they are packed tight against each other and the ones in the middle never fully take up water; they will not soften later in the dish either, so the finished plate has hard pieces scattered through it.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Off-dry Riesling (Mosel Kabinett)
- Also Right
- Gewürztraminer or off-dry Chenin
- From the Taps
- Mexican lager with lime
- Zero-Proof
- Agua fresca or iced jasmine tea
Sugar, cold, and low alcohol are the fire code: sweetness tames capsaicin while acid resets the palate; tannin would fan the flames.
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