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Barbacoa de Borrego en Penca de Maguey

Advanced
55 min
roughly 3 of 4 for cost

warm-spiced · bright · herb-fresh · earthy Leads with warm spice humming through the middle, acid holding everything up to the light, settling low and earthy.

Ingredients

2.5 kg lamb shoulder and leg on the bone, in large pieces
60 g guajillo chillies, stemmed and seeded
20 g ancho chillies, stemmed and seeded
6 garlic cloves
5 g cumin seed, toasted
3 g black peppercorns
2 cloves
30 ml cider vinegar
25 g fine salt
3 maguey leaves, spines trimmed and the leaves held over a flame until they soften and darken
8 avocado leaves, toasted
2 L water
200 g chickpeas, soaked overnight
150 g carrot, in chunks
1 onion, 150 g, halved
80 g long grain rice
20 g mint leaves

The skills inside

Skimming: foam, fat and a clear broth Soaking dried goods back to life The overnight rest: letting a dish marry

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

Toast the chillies on a dry pan until they smell of raisins and no longer, soak them 20 minutes in hot water, then blend with the garlic, cumin, peppercorns, cloves, vinegar and 15 g of the salt to a thick adobo. 20 min
Rub the lamb all over with it and leave it overnight in the fridge.
Put the water, chickpeas, carrot, onion, mint and remaining salt in the base of a deep pot and set a rack above the liquid, high enough that the meat can never touch it. The rice waits until the end.
Line the rack with the softened maguey leaves, lay in the lamb and the avocado leaves, fold the leaves over, cover with foil and the lid and cook at 150C (300F) for 5 hours, until the meat leaves the bone with no resistance. At the four hour mark, open it just far enough to stir the rice into the broth below, then seal it again. 300 min
Shred the lamb, skim the fat from the broth beneath and serve that broth alongside as the consomé.

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.

The overnight rest: letting a dish marry 29 recipes

Cooled quickly before it went in (spread out, decanted, or stood in cold water) rather than carried to the fridge hot in the pot it was cooked in.
Protected from the rest of the fridge once cold: covered, or given space where nothing strong is sitting beside it. A rest this long is long enough to take on whatever it shares the shelf with, and some dishes want the open air.
Given the whole time. This is the one technique whose entire content is waiting, and cutting it short leaves the dish exactly as it was when it went in.
Brought back deliberately: reheated gently, or brought up to the temperature it is meant to be eaten at, rather than served straight out of the cold because it is late.
Tasted and corrected AFTER the rest. Seasoning and brightness both flatten in the cold, so the dish is finished at the end of the wait rather than at the start of it.

Where it goes wrong It went into the fridge hot and covered. It held its own heat for hours in the range where food spoils, and the lid sweated and dripped back into it all night: what comes out is duller and wetter than what went in, which is the exact opposite of the point.

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: Syrah or Grenache/GSM
Also Right: Malbec
From the Taps: Porter
Zero-Proof: Pomegranate spritz

Lamb’s sweet grass-fat wants structure: tannin from Cabernet, smoke-echo from Rioja’s oak, or Syrah’s pepper for the spiced routes.

Family notes

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Film school

This dish, cooked on camera Search films of Barbacoa de Borrego en Penca de Maguey Search YouTube: Rick Bayless on Barbacoa de Borrego en Penca de Maguey A YouTube search for Rick Bayless and this dish. No affiliation.