Puchero tabasqueño

As tradition built it

Puchero tabasqueño

Tabasco, criollo

Ingredients

The stew

• 500g beef, bone-in pieces (retazo con hueso)
• 500g beef shank, in small pieces
• ½ onion, in chunks
• 3 cloves garlic, peeled
• to cover water
• 2 tender corn cobs, in chunks
• 1 purple sweet potato, peeled and cut
• 1 macal (taro)
• 1 yuca, in pieces
• 2 green plantains, cooked separately, in rounds
• 500g calabacitas (courgettes), cut
• 2 small chayotes, peeled and cut

The sauce

• a little oil
• ½ onion, chopped
• 1 green pepper, chopped
• 2 tomatoes, roasted, peeled and seeded
• to taste salt and pepper

To finish

• 2 sprigs cilantro, chopped
• 2 sprigs parsley, chopped

Method

1. Cook the beef with the onion chunks, the corn and the garlic in water to cover, until the corn is soft.
2. Add the sweet potato, macal, yuca, plantain, calabacitas and chayote, and cook over a medium heat. Do not let the vegetables overcook.
3. Meanwhile soften the chopped onion in a little oil over a low heat. Add the pepper and the tomatoes, season with salt and pepper, and let the sauce reduce.
4. Before the stew is done, stir in the sauce, lower the heat and cook a few minutes more.
5. Serve at once in deep bowls, with cilantro and parsley over each.

Notes

The recipe is El Heraldo de Tabasco's, from Mamá Lupe, a Tabascan cook on YouTube; SADER Tabasco gives the same method. Both are beef only. Both list 250g of green beans that their methods never use. Héctor Palacio's family puchero, in SDP Noticias, cooks the beef in salted water, adds the roots in order of how long they take, then turns off the heat and covers raw onion, garlic, cilantro, parsley, sweet chile and oreganón in the broth to perfume it, with chile amashito, totoposte and tortillas on the side.

What a modern chef changes

Three meats, three doneness points

Method

1. Cook each of the three meats sous vide separately, to its own correct doneness, rather than simmering all three together until the toughest cut is done and the others have overcooked.
2. Build the broth from the reserved bones and trim, reduced properly and passed through a chinois for something closer to a genuine consommé than the cloudier traditional pot liquor, poured over the meats and vegetables at the point of serving.
3. Roast the plantain briefly on the Big Green Egg's direct heat before it goes into the pot, for real caramelisation the simmering pot alone cannot give it.