THE BEST INSTANT POT BARBACOA and how to make it!

Hi guys welcome to the chef's backyard. Today I'm going to show you how to make barbacoa tacos. We're going to use some beef cheeks. It's the cheek muscle of the cow. It's kind of fatty. Whenever it shreds it takes on a nice luxurious texture and it's great for tacos, great for burritos, great for putting on top of your favorite kind of bowls. Let me show you how to make it. All right guys so we've got our beef cheek meat. We've got some salt, pepper, some oregano, a couple of bay leaves, a couple of cloves of garlic. I've got some cumin, some chili powder, some paprika, onion, and some beef broth. We've also got a little grapeseed oil. Start the instant pot. We're going to saute and we'll let that get hot. Now our next step is we're going to start processing this meat. We'll just cut open the package. All right you got a couple of pieces in there and what you want to do is cut it into smaller chunks. Okay some of this this is all fat. You can leave it in there for your cook and just remove it because like I said that fat is going to equal flavor. Our instant pot is hot. I'm going to start with some of this grapeseed oil, a couple tablespoons, and then we'll start with that fat and start helping it on all sides. These were the first few pieces that were mostly fat. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to start seasoning the meat. Okay we're going to season the meat as we add it into the pot there. I've got salt, paprika, chili powder, a little pinch of cumin, black pepper, in the process is to deglaze the pot. I'm going to use some onions and beef broth. Add in the bay leaves, the garlic, and a little more of that oregano. We'll let that come up to a boil. Once it boils we'll add the meat and put the lid on and let it cook for about 40 minutes. All right and we'll set the timer to 40 minutes. All right guys so we let our pressure cooker cook and come down naturally, release the pressure naturally. Let's take off the lid and see what we've got going on. All right and then I've got a couple of tools here. We've got a bowl, I've got a strainer, you can use any kind of colander, and then I've got a spoon and this spoon is slotted. We're going to leave that liquid in the in the cooker there. You want to remove that bay leaf. Remember we had a couple of pieces of fat. We'll kind of fish those out and leave them back in that liquid. Oh there's one of them. All right so now that we've got that done let's see what we've got in this bowl. We've got a little bit of liquid. I'll go ahead and dump that back in for now and then we've got our meat. Now give me a second I'm going to clean up the workspace and I'll show you how we'll shred it. Okay guys so we've got our meat in the bowl. I kind of mash it because at this point it's so tender that it's just shredding apart. If there's any big chunks of fat you can remove those. There's our other bay leaf. Alrighty guys there's that shredded beef that we're looking for. You got some little streaks of fat in there that's okay that's flavor. All right we're going to use our pan here and heat up our tortillas. I'm going to add some of that pepper in there black pepper. All right and we'll heat our tortillas. All right so we'll get some of that barbacoa shredded beef cheeks. Now you can dress it up however you like. Some people like it with diced white onion. Some people like it with the pico de gallo. That's going to be onion, tomato, jalapenos or serrano peppers, something spicy, lime juice, salt, pepper and cilantro. What I had available to me is some pickled jalapenos and I like mine with a little more salt. All right guys so we've got our beautiful taco here. Let's see how it tastes. That's really nice. The meat is rich but soft and tender. Super flavorful. The spicy jalapeno accentuates it. Corn tortilla got a little bit toasted. Oh man fantastic. I hope you guys get a chance to try this recipe at home and we'll see you soon here at the Chef's Backyard. Bye-bye.