Quesabirria (Instant Pot)
These quesabirria are several levels above your average taco night. Fresh corn tortillas are fried up crisp in a skillet, stuffed with richly seasoned beef and melty cheese, and served hot with a flavorful red consommé.
Beef
I used a nice chuck roast and some beef short ribs. Both cuts do well with long cooking times and end up super tender. To prep the meat, trim off any excess fat to about 1/8th inch, and remove the bone from the chuck roast, if there is one.
You can leave the bone in the short ribs. After the cooking time is up, it should just fall out of the meat. Before shredding the short ribs, cut away any connective tissue that was holding the bone inside.
You don’t need to season the beef with anything other than salt and pepper before searing. With a total of about 3 pounds of meat, you’ll need to sear in batches. The beauty of using the IP is that it holds temperature really well, so you get a nice crust on the beef.
I only seared the top and bottom of the beef chunks for 2 minutes per side, rather than all the sides. The finished beef tore apart almost effortlessly.
Consommé
This sauce is unbelievably flavorful. Start by de-seeding the guajillo peppers. These peppers have a rich flavor and aren’t as spicy as most other peppers. They rank at 2,500-5,000 SHU on the Scoville scale, along with jalapenos.
I always wear gloves when working with peppers, just because I don’t like having the spice on my fingers. The stems will pull off easily, and most of the seeds should just dump out of the end. To get all the seeds out, just tear the skin apart in a line and split it open. Use your fingers to scrape out the rest of the seeds.
Boil the pepper skins in beef broth with some tomato paste for a few minutes, and let everything cool for about 10 minutes before adding it to the blender. I’ll usually take the peppers and broth off of the heat and let it cool down while I gather up all the rest of the spices that go into the sauce.
Blend the spices, peppers and broth together until you have a thick, bright red sauce.
Finishing the quesabirria
Well, frying them, anyways! After the cook time is up and you get the beef out of the Instant Pot, you’ll see a slick of bright red grease on top of the sauce. It’s all the delicious beef fat that was rendered out and steeped with the flavors in the sauce. Hello.
Skim the grease from the sauce and reserve it in a shallow dish that you can dip the tortillas in. Just like you’d make French toast, quickly coat each side of the tortillas in the red grease and fry them in a piping hot skillet. When you flip to cook the other side, load one half of the tortilla with plenty of cheese, beef, onion and cilantro.
Carefully fold over the taco and keep it pressed onto the skillet so that it holds its half circle shape. Repeat until you run out of either tortillas or red grease.
Serve with more of the consommé for dipping! You can refrigerate leftover quesabirria for a few days, but the shells won’t be as crisp.
Print
Quesabirria (Instant Pot)
- Prep Time: 30 minutes
- Cook Time: 2 hours (includes frying time)
- Total Time: 2 hours + 30 minutes
- Yield: 10–12 tacos with cheese 1x
- Category: Dinner, Beef
- Method: Stovetop
- Cuisine: Mexican
Description
These tacos are stuffed with rich, seasoned beef and melty cheese before being fried in a flavorful consommé.
Ingredients
To make the sauce and beef:
- 3 cups beef bone broth or stock
- 2 TB tomato paste
- 5 guajillo peppers, stems and seeds removed
- 7 oz can chipotle peppers in adobo sauce
- 1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
- 4 bay leaves
- 4 cloves garlic, peeled
- 1 inch of a whole cinnamon stick (or 1/8th tsp ground cinnamon)
- 4 whole cloves
- 3–4 stems fresh thyme
- 2 tsp lime zest
- 1 tsp Mexican oregano
- 1 tsp cumin
- 1 tsp whole black peppercorns
- 1/2 tsp ground ginger
- 2 TB olive oil
- 2 TB salt
- 1 TB ground black pepper
- 2 lbs chuck roast, excess fat trimmed, bone removed and cut into large chunks
- 1 lb beef short ribs, excess fat trimmed, bone left in
To serve the tacos:
- juice from one lime (you can use the lime you zested earlier)
- small white onion, minced
- small bunch cilantro, minced
- 10–12 corn tortillas
- queso Quesadilla or queso Oaxaca, shredded
Instructions
Make the sauce:
- Add the beef broth and tomato paste to a medium saucepan (I used a 3 quart size) and set aside.
- Wear gloves if your hands are sensitive to spice/heat and remove the stems and seeds from the guajillo peppers. They should remove easily without needing a knife. Discard the stems and seeds, and add the deep red skins to the pot with the beef broth and tomato paste.
- Set the saucepan over medium high heat and allow the broth to come to a boil. Boil the peppers for a minute, and then remove from the heat. Set aside to cool slightly while you prep the rest of the spices for the sauce.
- In a blender canister, combine the chipotle peppers in adobo sauce, apple cider vinegar, bay leaves, garlic, cinnamon, cloves, thyme stems, lime zest, Mexican oregano, cumin, whole peppercorns and ground ginger. Carefully add the hot broth and guajillo peppers to the blender and secure the lid.
- Blend until smooth according to the manufacturer’s instructions for your blender. Set the sauce aside while you prepare the beef.
Make the beef:
- Following the instructions for your Instant Pot, set your cooker to sauté on the highest setting and add the 2 TB of olive oil. While the cooker heats up, season all of the beef with the salt and pepper on all sides.
- Once the cooker has reached the sauté temperature (it should tell you that it’s hot) add enough beef to cover the bottom of the cooker. You’ll probably need to work in batches to avoid overcrowding the cooker.
- Sear the beef for 2 minutes per side, and remove the finished chunks to a clean plate while you continue searing the remaining beef. After all the meat has been seared, cancel the sauté setting and add the beef back to the cooker.
- Pour the red sauce from the blender canister into the Instant Pot, making sure to coat all of the beef. The sauce won’t completely submerge the meat, that’s okay.
- Secure the lid on the cooker, and make sure that the valve on the top is set all the way to the “sealing” position. Select high pressure cook according to your cooker’s instructions and set the timer for 1 hour. The Instant Pot will take about 15-20 minute to build pressure before beginning the cook time.
- After the cook time has completed, carefully release the pressure manually by pushing the top valve to the “venting” position. The steam will escape very quickly and will burn if you touch it. Be very careful. Wait until all the pressure has released, the small silver meter next to the valve should be completely sunken in.
- Remove the beef from the cooker to a separate bowl and use 2 forks to shred it. Discard the bones from the short ribs.
Assemble and fry the tacos:
- After you remove the meat, you’ll notice a slick of bright red grease on the surface of the sauce. Use a ladle to carefully skim off that grease and add it to a shallow bowl. This will be used to dip the tortillas before frying.
- After you separate the grease from the consommé (sauce), remove about a cup of the consommé from the Instant Pot and add it to a smaller bowl for serving. Squeeze the juice from one lime into the consommé in the small bowl along with a sprinkle of some white onion and cilantro. Set aside for serving.
- Pour the remaining consommé into the shredded meat and use tongs to coat the beef in the sauce. Set a large skillet over medium heat and allow it to come up to temperature. Keep small bowls of the white onion, cilantro and shredded cheese nearby for easy grabbing and smoother workflow when the tacos are in the pan.
- Once the skillet is hot, dip one corn tortilla in the red grease on both sides. Carefully add the tortilla to the skillet and allow it to fry on the first side until it “blisters.” You’ll be able to clearly see little pockets of air expand up and “blister” over the tortilla.
- Flip the tortilla onto the second side and add a layer of cheese, a portion of beef, onion and cilantro to one side of the tortilla, leaving the other side empty.
- Fold the empty side over the fillings, carefully pressing down on the taco to finish frying and hold its folded shape. Remove the finished taco to a clean serving plate and repeat this process for the remaining tortillas, or until the red grease has been used up.
- Serve the tacos with the small bowl of consommé that you seasoned with the lime juice from earlier. Any leftover tacos should be individually wrapped and refrigerated. Use within 2-3 days. Extra consommé can be refrigerated for up to a week.
Nutrition
- Serving Size: 1 taco with 2 TB of cheese
- Calories: 360
- Sugar: 5.6 g
- Sodium: 678.6 mg
- Fat: 24 g
- Saturated Fat: 9.6 g
- Trans Fat: 0.1 g
- Carbohydrates: 11 g
- Fiber: 2.7 g
- Protein: 25.7 g
- Cholesterol: 84.4 mg
