Slow Cooker Beef Barbacoa with Chipotle and Lime
A chuck roast broken down low and slow in chipotle and lime until it shreds with a fork — built for taco night or a week of meal-prep bowls.
- Serves
- 6
- Prep
- 20 min
- Cook
- 8 hours
- Written
Method
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Season the chuck roast pieces heavily with salt and pepper.
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Heat the oil in a skillet over high heat and sear the beef on all sides until deeply browned, about 3 minutes per side.
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Transfer the beef to the slow cooker.
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Whisk together the garlic, chipotles and adobo sauce, beef broth, vinegar, lime juice, cumin, oregano, and cloves, then pour over the beef and tuck in the bay leaves.
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Cover and cook on low until the beef shreds apart with almost no resistance from a fork, 8 to 9 hours.
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Remove the beef and bay leaves, then shred the meat with two forks, discarding any large pieces of fat.
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Skim the fat from the surface of the cooking liquid, then simmer it in a wide skillet over medium-high heat until reduced by about half.
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Return the shredded beef to the skillet and toss until it’s coated in the reduced liquid and the edges start to crisp.
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Taste and adjust the salt, then finish with cilantro and a squeeze of lime.
Notes
The chipotles are what separate this from a pot roast — smoke and a slow-building heat instead of a straight beefy gravy, plus the vinegar and lime to cut through the fat. Searing the chuck before it goes into the slow cooker isn’t optional; skip it and the meat steams instead of browning, and you lose the base the whole sauce is built on.
Pile it into tortillas with onion and cilantro, spoon it over rice for a burrito bowl, or fold it into scrambled eggs the next morning — the reduced, crisped-up meat keeps in the fridge for the better part of a week and only gets better sitting in its own sauce overnight.