Mexican Beef Stew

This post is in response to someone that really wanted the recipe for my Mexican Beef Stew, which is actually a recreation of a stew that I had in Gallup, New Mexico, at a Mexican restaurant that was a family-owned little place that made its own nearly everything, including fluffy flour tortillas and a fairly standard Mexican restaurant menu but for a single item. It was lovingly placed in the MIDDLE of the second page, and had the mother's name attached to the stew. I'd never had Mexican beef stew before and ordered it, anticipating chilies or other things, but instead got this delightful brothy beef stew. There was obviously tomato in the broth, but no chilies that I could detect, no corn, no beans, just huge chunks of super tender beef, carrots, celery, potatoes, and the long, long, long simmered ghosts of onion chunks.

Mexican Beef Stew from Vergie's
Restaurant and Lounge

Here's a picture of the original, just so you have a good idea of what I was talking about. It was a revelation for me about what a beef stew could be about. 

I looked all over the Internets for a recipe that actually fit the original, and found a few things that were close, but they all veered into the territory of Americans going, "This is what a Mexican stew SHOULD have."  They included corn and beans and chilies and... etc.

So I took one of those and modified it so that I could get what I really wanted, which was something to approximate my memory of this particular beef stew. 

And it starts with the broth. 

I started with Sky Pilot Farm's beef bones for broth. They don't always have them, so I buy them when I see them available, and I usually buy two packages of them at a time. Five pounds of bones. I defrosted them, put them on a half-sheet baking tray along with an onion cut in half, with the skin still on and roasted the whole tray at 400 degrees for about an hour or until the whole house smelled wonderful with the scent of roasting meat and bones. I took the whole tray out, used a spoon to scoop out the loose marrow (as I don't really like it in my stock), and left the marrow that stayed stuck in the bones.  I put all the bones and the drippings from the pan into a 3 gallon stock pot. I then put water on the roasting tray, put that over the stove lit a fire under it and scraped up every last bit of Stuff on the tray and put that into the stock pot and then added water (including a kettle's worth of boiling water) until it was two inches from the top of the pot.

I then put it on a high flame until it started to bubble, skimming all the scum that rose to the top, and throwing that stuff away. I put a lid on it, and dropped by every ten or twenty minutes to skim anything else that came and to adjust the fire until there would just be a bubble breaking the surface every few seconds and then I left it for eighteen hours.

Yes.

Eighteen hours. Overnight, into the morning, and at about noon, I took it off the flame. I put it outside into the winter air to cool for a few hours, and then filtered the stock into containers that I could freeze or refrigerate as I needed. It's amazing how much of the bone breaks down in the process. I ended up with about two and a half gallons of stock that gelatinized well under refrigeration.

You don't have to do all that. You can actually just use water. Or chicken stock. Either will work, but I wanted what I had tasted in that stew, and that included just doing a simple beef stock that takes time.

So my recipe is loosely based on Lil Luna's Mexican Beef Stew Recipe, if you want to see the original.  She does not mention a source for hers, but all her modifications were the ones that I removed. This recipe takes about four and a half hours of cooking time, and possibly a good hour of prep. 

Ingredients

• 2 pounds chuck roast
• Vegetable oil, salt and pepper for searing
• 1 small onion, large dice
• 4 cloves garlic smashed and peeled
• 4 stalks celery cut into big chunks
• 2 (10oz) cans diced tomatoes
• 1 quart good broth (beef if you make it, chicken if you buy it, water if you don't have it)
• 1 package taco seasoning
• 2 tsp ground cumin
• 1 tsp dried Mexican oregano, crushed
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 pound potatoes, washed and cut into large chunks
• 4 large carrots, peeled and cut into large chunks

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 275 degrees Fahrenheit.
2. Slice the chuck into 2" wide strips. Salt and pepper the strips and rub them down with a little vegetable oil. Heat a Dutch oven until it's nearly smoking, and then lay the strips down into it and let the meat sear until it's good and brown on one side (about three or four minutes), flip and do the other side. You may have to do this in two batches to not crowd the meat. If it's too crowded a lot of juice will come out and it'll steam instead of sear. You want each side to be very very brown. Remove the meat onto a plate and while the other things are cooking, cut it into bite-sized pieces. 
3. Toss in the onions and garlic into the pan, turn the heat down to medium high and stir the vegetables and with the liquid given off by the onions, scrape the fond from the sides and bottom of the pan. If there's too much browning going on and it heads toward burning, go ahead and add a splash of water, cover it for a few minutes and then go back in with a wooden spoon to scrape off the fond. Cook until the onions are translucent and tender, and have picked up a lot of color from the pan and might be starting to caramelize. About ten minutes.
4. Add the cumin, taco seasoning, and oregano. Toast the seasonings for a minute or two, or until you can smell them.
5. Pour the tomatoes and broth into the pot, scrape up any last bits of fond or anything that the onions added. Add the celery and bay leaf. Return the bite-sized pieces of meat to the pot. Bring to a simmer. Cover and put into the oven for three hours.
6. I then put the Dutch oven into a Wonder Bag until it was an hour before I wanted to eat.
7. I then prepped the carrots, put the Dutch oven on the stove to come back to a simmer, and added the carrots. And then prepped the potatoes and put them in. I tasted it at this point to see if there was enough salt and mine had plenty from the taco seasoning, but you should adjust to your taste. Simmer for 30 minutes or until the vegetables are spoon tender. 
8. Serve with flour tortillas, or if you prefer, bread. John loves adding spoonfuls of green chili to his bowl as well, which are a combination of lime juice, salt, and chili.

And here's a picture of the result with my homemade bread. We needed to add a little more beef broth, after, to make it quite as brothy as the original, but the flavor and textures were amazing.