Crockpot Chicken Tinga - An Essential Mexican Recipe

I've got a lot to say about why I think you need this recipe in your arsenal, but it's probably best to just get straight to the recipe so you first see how easy it is. Here are all the ingredients you'll need to gather, and you can screenshot the list now or refer to the description for a text-based recipe. It's all gonna go into a slow cooker so that this works as the base for weekday meals. Weekday cooking has to be easy and produce food that maintains a pleasurable texture three days later, and braising meat in an electric crockpot achieves both. Start with a whole white onion that's been broken down, be it roughly diced by hand, in a chopper, or with a mandolin. Put those onions in the pot, plus three garlic cloves. You could properly mince these, but for a low-effort everyday meal like this, just smash it to irregular bits with the side of a knife. Add one can of fire-roasted tomatoes. Fourteen-and-a-half ounces is a standard size, but you can give or take an ounce or two. It does not have to be exact. Same goes for the chicken thighs. Two pounds is a good amount to make sure it's a big enough batch to last several meals over, but you don't get to choose exactly how much chicken comes in a pack, so anywhere between two to three pounds will be alright. Once you get closer to four pounds of chicken, you'll have to up the salt accordingly. To my two-pound pack, I will sprinkle three teaspoons of salt. Viewers who have been taking notes will point out that one teaspoon of salt per pound of meat is my typical ratio, but there has to be enough salt to season the onions, hence the 50% increase. This is the major flavor contributor of the dish, chipotle peppers canned in adobo sauce. Plop two peppers in if you're not too keen on spice, or up to five if pika pika is a phrase in your household that's strictly reserved for Pokemon. A spoonful of the adobo sauce can come along, too. For the finishing spices, churn out several big cranks of black pepper, and add one teaspoon of ground cumin and one teaspoon of oregano. I've seen recipes that also add chili powder, a bay leaf, or even sugar, but as long as you have that backbone of cumin and oregano, the base flavor profile will be in the right zone. After that, you can freestyle or abstain as desired. I do tend to get fussy about oregano, since Mexican oregano is totally different from the kind that you would find in an Italian spice blend. If your grocery store carries Mexican oregano, please buy some for this dish. As soon as you grind it between your hands and get a whiff of that aroma, you'll notice it's a different ingredient unto itself. If you can only get the other kind of oregano, it'll be fine. I guess. Cook all this on the low setting of a crockpot for six hours if you're going to go to bed overnight or work over a day, or on the high setting for three hours if you don't want to wait that long. You could also do all of this in a Dutch oven over the stove in, like, one hour, depending on how high the heat is, but remember, this is deliberately presented as a recipe for electric slow cookers. I feel like crockpot recipes get popular in the winter, and then unfairly forgotten about in the summer, whereas my preference is the opposite. I like being able to cook half a week's worth of lunches without making my house hot and smoky. Is it the traditional means of chicken tinga cookery? Of course not. Tinga recipes date back to the 1800s, and the crockpot didn't exist until 1940. But modern problems require modern solutions, so let the robot do the cooking, and after the requisite number of hours have passed, observe the texture. When the chicken fails to support its own weight, it is fully cooked and ready to pull. Set it aside on a plate so that it cools enough to handle with bare hands, and shred it apart. You can shred meat with two forks or plastic claws, but if you just let it cool, you won't need a tool, and why should we put so much importance on resting seared meats but not slow cooked ones? Anyway, at this point, you've done it. Chicken tinga. Good job. You could spoon some of the braising liquid on top, call it a day, and you will have made a simple, hands-off, totally respectable chicken dish that freezes well, reheats well, and lends itself to dozens of meal preparations. If you're looking for the lowest effort meal possible, stop watching now and go enjoy your dinner. To everyone else, this one extra step adds so much flavor for such little effort. Leave the chicken out on the cooling dish, pick out your bay leaf if you added one, and blend this braising liquid into a smooth sauce. It's gonna get thicker from all that rendered chicken fat, and spicier from the chipotle peppers getting fully integrated. Set the crockpot to high, and add the shredded chicken back in. You want this to cook for like 10 more minutes, so the sauce can get a little reduced and so that it can fully adhere to the meat. Now that this meat can be served warm, luxuriating in its own thick sauce, you don't need to add salsa when assembling it into a taco. I've noticed that a lot of contemporary braised meat recipes instruct you to throw out the cooking liquid, but this final action creates an asymmetrical return in value. It's free real estate. I have tried to increase the flavor even more by searing the chicken first, then browning the onions, then deglazing any remaining pan fond with acidic tomatoes, then braising everything together, but the improvement of flavor just wasn't enough to justify all the cleanup. It would totally make sense if you made the whole recipe in a dutch oven on the stove, but if you've got a crockpot, I must insist that this hands-off approach is the easiest, most reliable way to make flavorful shredded chicken. And once you do, you've got 2 pounds of meat that can be added to nachos, quesadillas, burritos, burrito bowls, enchiladas, and of course tacos. If you followed my instruction on how to make perfect corn tortillas, chicken tinga in a slice of avocado with a lime wedge on the side is a wonderful way to showcase your work. I don't actually think that you need me to pitch you on the hundreds of different uses for flavorful shredded chicken. It's one of the most popular proteins for a reason. Plus, I bet that you've already got half of the requisite ingredients in your pantry right now, so really the only ones who still have an excuse are the vegans. And they can swap the poultry for jackfruit. From this point forward, do not talk to me until you've tried making chicken tinga at least once. Bye bye! This is an ad for Barkley. Barkley is a brand that I started so I could sell handmade ceramic dinnerware made in Tempe, Arizona. There's other stuff in the shop, like baseball caps and fancy aprons, but something about handmade work really represents the sense of humanity I'm trying to bring to the table. Each piece has these little pops of character from the subtle undulations in the rim to the shallow ridges from the sponge finishing off the undersides. If you want to learn more, or just poke around the shop, visit dinnerwithbarkley.com. My margins aren't exactly as wide as the direct-to-consumer goods you would normally see in a YouTube ad, so I don't have a discount code to offer you. Best I can do is pasting a link in the comments so you don't have to type it all out. That's my final offer. Deal? Pleasure doing business with you.