Crispy, saucy birria tacos with a smoky, spicy and slightly sweet dipping sauce. This is such a special meal and great fun to make! It’s well worth the effort! This recipe relies on a couple of special Mexican chilli varieties, and I would highly recommend getting them! They can be stored and used for many other gret recipes, such as a chilli!

Birria Tacos

Birria tacos, or quesabirria, are a delicious dish from a town called Jalisco, near Guadalajara. They consist of a delicious, meaty stew (called birria) and cheese in tortilas that have been soaked in the stew juices. These are then fried and served alongside a bowl of the sauce from the stew to dip into. These have really gripped the online food scene in recent years and for good reason. They are delicious and a lot of fun!

Birria tacos trace their history back to the 16th century. This is when the Spanish Conquistadores were exploring and colonising Mexico. They brought with them plenty of new goods and trade. This included a wealth of new spices and animals, including goats. Goats propagated rapidly and became an invasive species. The Spanish didn’t like goat meat as it is tough and has a strong smell and flavour, but local Mexicans adopted this meat into their diets. It needed to be cooked for a long time to become tender, and this was done barbacoa style in earthen ovens with plenty of local herbs and spices. There is a great article here for more info!

Modern Birria

The dish has grown since then to become massively popular in Mexico, where it is commonly eated as a celebration dish. It has also grown into a street food option, often sold from c arts and restaurants called birrierias. Outside of Mexico, birria has become a very popular Mexican dish. It is found often on menus at Mexican restaurants and in street food markets around the world.

Nowadays, it is quite common to find the dish made with beef or lamb instead of goat. These meats have a better natural flavour and can be slow cooked to the same effect. Otherwise, the recipe and concept remains very similar!

Slow Cooking Meat

An essential part to making good birria is slow cooking. This takes traditionall tough cuts of meat and makes then soft, juicy and tender. When done right, your meat should fall apart and shred easily. This delivers a fantastic texture and lets flavour build over time as it cooks!

The principle behind slow cooking comes from the type of meat and where it comes from on the body. Most meat we eat is muscle, and muscle is made of fibres of collagen and other proteins. Muscles that are used more tend to have less fat and more extensive protein fibres. When cooked and exposed to heat these fibres contract and seize up, making the meat very tough as a result. Typically speaking meat from areas like legs, shoulders, ribs etc will benefit from slow cooking as they are almost constantly in use by the animal.

Exposing these muscle fibres to both heat and water causes the collagen to breakdown and form gellatin instead. This of course leads to a much softer and tender end result! This process takes place optimally betweeen 50°C and 180°C, and the results will be better at lower temperatures. Of course, with lower temperatures it also takes more time to cook! I make use of slow cooking in my beef shin chilli, or tender beef shin with mustard mash recipes!

My Birria Tacos Recipe

Despite the most traditional recipe using goat, I am using beef. Specifically I am using beef short rib. This cut has a great natural fattiness and gets suer tender, and it benefits from being on the bone for extra flavour. After slow cooking, this will literally fall off the bone and it should come away quickly.

To make up my sauce, I use 3 different Mexican chilli varieties. I use dried ancho and guajillo chillies for sweet, fruity and earthy flavour, and chipotle chillis in adobo sauce for smokiness and spiciness. These for the core lavour profile of the whole dish. This is then accentuate with spices. These include cumin seeds, coriander seeds, smoked paprika, oregano, cinnamon and cloves. These all accentuate the core flavours of the chillis really nicely, and build a massive depth of flavour.

The bulk of the sauce comes from veg, including onions, garlic, coriander stems, tomatoes and tomato puree. These are cooked off the brown nicely and build natural char and sweetness through caramelisation. The sauce is finished off with fresh lime juice and beef stock for depth of savoury and fresh, tangy flavours.

There are two elements I use that are different than what you would find in Mexico, and these are the cheese and tortillas. Typical recipes would use corn tortillas for this, but I actually prefer flour ones. I just like the flavour and texture more! The cheese you would find traditionally would be oaxaca cheese, but this is extremely hard to find in the UK. The best match for a substitute is probably mozzerella, but I like to use cheddar for the flavour (don’t come after me!).

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