
Take your steak next level with this Blue Cheese and Pecan Butter
It can well be argued great steak needs no additions – but you won’t regret adding this amazing savory butter. This compound butter...
Traditional barbacoa is made by taking an entire cow head, wrapping it in maguey leaves, burying in the ground to cook and then picking all the meat from the skull. Epic? Yes. Laborious? Even more so. Luckily, this version is not only a little more approachable in terms of time, ingredients and equipment, but also harnesses the goodness of beef cheeks. Beef cheek meat is very similar in texture and makeup to brisket – it’s rippled with collagen which converts to delicious gelatin once slow cooked. And though “cheek” might sound a bit weird to some, they are not an organ, but actually a muscle just like any other steak.
Beef cheeks can be difficult to track down – not everywhere sells them, and some processors or larger branded beef programs don’t offer them. There are some online options, but I’ve always had luck at my local Mexican grocery/butcher store. You can also find them at some groceries or large wholesale retailers like Sam’s Club where they are sold in vacuum seal packages. A warning with cheeks – they are often sold with lots of sinew and other less desirable bits and pieces, and you may have to trim them back to get to the actual cheek meat. Even then, you’ll have to trim some of the silverskin off the actual cheeks themselves. What you are looking for is a small beef “pillow” which is the actual cheek. This is what they look like when properly trimmed:
This particular recipes calls for the cheeks to be immersed in a braising liquid, which helps get them nice and tender for pulling. You could also try this recipe for more traditional smoked beef cheeks that end up being like baby briskets! The key to the bark on such a short cook time is using my Hardcore Carnivore Black seasoning, which has activated charcoal and coarse black pepper. It sort of acts like a meat cosmetic to give you incredible color before they have even started cooking. This way you end up having lovely flecks of that bark in the final shred mix.
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It can well be argued great steak needs no additions – but you won’t regret adding this amazing savory butter. This compound butter...
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