Slow-roasted comfort
A childhood favorite: lamb stew marinated with red chiles
The dinner party circuit is rife with roasted chickens. But lamb birria — red chile-slathered, slow-roasted lamb shoulder — is what you should cook for a crowd as the days shorten and the rains (hopefully) come.
The recipe comes from Dominica Rice-Cisneros of Oakland’s Cosecha. She riffs on a classic central Mexican dish: a whole lamb or goat marinated in a chile-dense paste, then cooked in a pit in the ground for upward of 24 hours.
Recognizing that whole animals and earthen pits might be hard for the average home cook to come by, Rice-Cisneros created a version that’s slow-cooked in the oven for four-plus hours, until the boneless lamb shoulder collapses into supple ribbons, moistened and flavored by the cooking juices, the red chile marinade and a blanket of masa.
Birria is a dish that Rice-Cisneros grew up eating. Raised in Los Angeles’ Chinatown, she has fond memories of the red chile stews prepared by her grandmother, a native of Chihuahua, and the menudo that her father, a butcher, would procure for the family.
Encouraged by her family, Rice-Cisneros left L.A. to attend the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco. She worked in New York for a bit, then returned here in the late ’90s, determined to work at Chez Panisse. “I showed up at the back door every day for a couple weeks and asked for a job,” she says. “I told them I wasn’t leaving.” Her persistence paid off; she was hired as a buser, then worked her way into the kitchen.
Preparing the lamb in this dish takes only about 30 minutes of active time. But the resulting dish — fragrant, rich, fork-tender meat, with the earthy, sweet fruitiness of red chile — is a welcome way to break out of a chicken rut.