Churipo

As tradition built it

Churipo

Serves 4. About 1 hour.

Ingredients

The broth

• 1kg beef shank, on the bone
• 3 litres water
• ½ onion
• 2 cloves garlic

The chile

• 2 guajillo chiles, seeded
• 2 ancho chiles, seeded

The vegetables

• 1 young corn cob, in medium pieces
• 1 chayote, in medium cubes
• ¼ white cabbage, in chunks
• 1 potato, in medium cubes
• 1 carrot, in medium cubes
• 2 long courgettes
• 1 sprig mint
• 1 sprig epazote
• to taste salt

Method

1. Put the shank on to cook in the water over a medium heat with the onion and garlic.
2. When the meat is half cooked, add the corn, chayote and cabbage.
3. Toast the chiles on a comal and soak them in a little of the hot broth. When they are soft, blend them with the garlic, onion and broth to a fine sauce.
4. Stir the sauce into the pot and cook over a low heat.
5. Add the potato and carrot, then the courgettes last, with the mint and epazote.
6. Salt it and cook over a low heat until the meat is very tender. Serve in clay bowls with corundas.

Notes

Two contradictory origin stories circulate for churipo, one tying it to the revolutionary era and a meal served to José María Morelos y Pavón, the other to pre-Hispanic times; neither is documented to a primary source, so both are named and neither is chosen.

The recipe is chef Fernando Martínez Zavala's, for El Universal. Elena Hernández, for Cocina Delirante, and México Desconocido make it for 12 with a kilo of fresh beef, a kilo of cecina and porous bones, cook cilantro with the meat, strain the chile, add it once the meat is cooked, and put the vegetables in one at a time from hardest to softest. Corundas are the tamales served with it.

What a modern chef changes

Separately Sous Vide, Clarified Broth, Egg-Toasted Chile

Method

1. Cook each meat, beef, pork and mutton, separately sous vide to its own correct doneness, rather than together in one pot where the fastest-cooking meat overcooks waiting for the slowest, then combine all three only at final assembly.
2. Reduce and clarify the meats' combined cooking liquor through a chinois into the base for the chile broth, a cleaner result than building the broth directly in the same pot the meat cooked in.
3. Toast the ancho chiles briefly in a Big Green Egg run hot and direct before blending, a faster, more even toast than a dry pan gives, adding a genuine trace of smoke the traditional stovetop method does not.