Slow Cooked Beef Chilaquiles

Chilaquiles are a great example of Mexican creativity. Carlos’s recipe for slow cooked beef chilaquiles shows you how to turn old tortillas into something really special, using just a few extra ingredients. 

This recipe takes the popular Mexican chilaquiles (authentic nachos) dish and turns it up a notch.  Chilaquiles are served any time of day all over Mexico, from homes to mercados. 

One of the key ingredients of the chilaquiles is our tortilla chips. We make authentic tortillas and tortilla chips using an ancient method to produce a product that tastes as authentic as possible. 

Corn tortilla chips are topped with a beautiful slow cooked beef chuck with warming spices and a killer blend of dried chillies, to make a rich and comforting sauce. It’s then finished off with some fresh cheese, sour cream and herbs of your choice. 

This, in our humble opinion, is the perfect autumnal comfort food. 

Ingredients

This recipe yields about five portions

For the short rib sauce:

• • Chillies: 1 ancho, 4 cascabel chilli (guajillo chilli works too), 1 small chipotle chilli (morita chilli can be used instead)
• • 400g beef chuck. Beef brisket or lean shin meat will work well. Cut into Chunks of around 100g each
• • 1/2 medium brown onion, peeled and sliced
• • 2 garlic cloves 
• • 25g tomato puree
• • 3 fresh tomatoes
• • ¼ each of tsp of ground clove, allspice, cinnamon, cumin, whole caraway seed
• • 2 tsp of sea salt
• • Rapeseed oil

For the rest of the chilaquiles:

• • 2 bags of Blanco Niño Lightly Salted tortilla chips
• • 150g of yogurt 
• • 75g of fresh cheese, like feta or smoked gubbeen 
• • 50g of red onion
• • 10g each of fresh coriander, jalapeño chilli, mild red chilli 

Method

For the pulled meat sauce:

• • Heat your oven to 150ºC
• • In a pot, bring 2 cups of water to the boil and set aside
• • De-seed and de-stem the chillies
• • Heat up another pot at medium heat and roast the dried chillies until they become fragrant and the inside skin turns colour. 
• • Place the chillies into the pot with the hot water and let them rehydrate for 15 minutes 
• • In the same pot used to roast the chillies, turn the heat up to high and add some rapeseed oil and brown the meat on all sides. Be sure to do it in stages so the meat has enough space to brown properly. Set the meat aside
• • Add some more oil to the pot, turn the heat to medium and add all the spices. Stir to fry them well for a few seconds and then add the onion and a pinch of salt. Cook for 5 minutes
• • While that’s happening, in a blender cup add the rehydrated chillies with their water, garlic, tomatoes and tomato paste and blend until smooth
• • Pour the blended mix over the onion and let it sizzle. Add the meat back in the pot, one cup of water and bring the whole mix to a boil. Cover with a lid and set the pot in the oven and cook for 3.5hrs or until the meat is soft (you can also cook the meat in a pressure cooker for about 1.5hrs)

• • Once the meat is cooked and soft, let it sit in the sauce for 30min, this way it will be able to relax and absorb more water in, and become juicier!
• • Take the meat out of the sauce and pull it with your hands or a couple of forks. Put it back in the sauce and mix in
• • Season with salt

To serve

• • Place the Blanco Niño Lightly Salted tortilla chips on the plate and pour over the pulled meat sauce 
• • Add dollops of yogurt on top and crumble the cheese all over
• • Finely dice, chop and slice your onion, coriander and chillies 
• • Top the chilaquiles with the red onion, chilli slices and coriander

If your supply of Blanco Niño tortilla chips is running low, if you’re in Ireland you can visit our shop or in the UK you can find us on Ocado. 

Check out our other recipes here.