Today we're going to do a quesabirria. This is a really fun dish, a street food from Mexico that's
really catching on in the u.s today we're using a turkey thigh roast it's a great alternative
to other proteins what's really cool about this dish is that it uses two Mexican street foods
a quesadilla and a birria and when those two are combined we take that with a little garnish and we
actually dip it into a tasty consummate that we've used to cook the turkey thigh roast in. The first
thing I'm going to do is make the Colorado paste that's the base of our quesabirria. In order to do
that we have three different chilies. So we have pasilla, arbol, and guajillo. Pasilla is going
to give us that rich deep earthy smoky flavor, arbol is where our heat's going to come from,
there's a little bang of heat with those, and then on the guajillo, we get a nice smooth robust flavor.
In the chilies go into some boiling water, all at once, and you can leave the stems and the seeds,
and we're going to take a plate, just to weigh them down, and place that on top. Once you get them
submerged, you can turn your heat off and set them aside. So these chilies have soaked for 30 minutes.
I've drained them and then I've removed the seeds and the stems. So to make the paste,
we're going to add some turkey stock or water, the chilies, onion, just cut into slices, garlic,
and a teaspoon of salt. The key to this salsa is making a nice smooth paste.
And now we're going to begin to make the birria, the stew part of this dish.
So I'm heating a pan until it's nice and hot and then I'm going to add some vegetable
oil and we're going to add our onion and split garlic cloves. One of the key components to the birria
is making sure that we char the onion and garlic. The reason that we char the onion is it gives us
a nice deep earthy flavor in the birria. When we get to that step, we want to add our Colorado paste.
When you add this you're going to notice that it starts to sizzle and pop a little bit
and that's good. We want to actually fry the paste now. Now that I've broken this thigh roast apart,
I'm going to add it and the juice to my Colorado paste. Now we're going to go in
with the spices. I have Mexican oregano, cumin, cinnamon sticks, whole bay leaf, and cloves. Now
I'm going to add the turkey stock, or you can use water, and I'm going to stir that to combine.
Now although the turkey pieces are fully cooked, we want to simmer this for about 45 minutes to an
hour to absorb those delicious flavors into the meat. So here I have the turkey thigh roast that has
been simmered in this beautiful birria and then we simply strained it and shredded it. Super easy to
do. I'm also ready with my turkey birria consummate. So it's got this great turkey flavor, the taste of
the chilies and the cinnamon and the spices and that's going to be served on the side of our
quesabirria. So we're going to heat our tortillas on a flat griddle. We're using Oaxacan cheese.
It's a delicious variety of a string type cheese. Once the cheese has begun to melt around the edges,
we'll top each one with another tortilla, pressing down slightly. We're going to flip them over.
Oh look at that. And when you flip those to the other side, you're going to bring in your turkey
and just re-warm it a little. Great, so now we're going to be putting this delicious turkey birria
and we'll top it with a little bit of garnish, but don't cover everything up you want to see some of that.
This fun mashup of two Mexican street foods is craveably delicious and simple to make.