Shred Beef for Ropa Vieja Cuban Stew

Video Transcript

"Hi this is Brandon Sarkis on behalf of Expert Village. Today I am going to show you how to make Ropa Vieja which is a traditional cuban beef stew. O'kay here we are to shred our beef. Here we have our beef, the most important thing here. Make sure your hands are clean and remove any jewelry just in case. You don't want to lose a ring or something or you don't want to get food all over it. So we are just going to take our beef which is nice and cool and you can see how our grain runs across this way and if you just smash it down with the grain it just falls right apart and then we are going to break it apart because when you stir it in it will break out more. You can just start at one end of the grain and just starts to disintegrate basically right in your hands and if it falls apart the way this is falling apart like this you will know that you have cooked it the right way so far. We are just going to grab each piece and break it apart with your fingers and if you want to you could put it in a bowl and do this with a spoon but you know what I like cooking because I like playing with my food. Also you can watch out because some of these pieces in the middle will still be a little hot. Be aware of that before you grab a big hot piece and burn yourself and write me a big nasty e-mail saying hey I burned myself on your recipe. Obviously the longer you let it cool the less chance of this happening. Now you don't have to get it all perfectly shredded right now because as I said the pot will shred it too but we do just want to get it broke up as best we can just to give it a nice head start. This stuff is beyond fork tender, you could just eat it with a spoon. It's amazing. Another thing you can do is you can actually take this recipe just to this point right here, shred this, and make shredded beef sandwiches. But we are going to do this the right way and just make Ropa Vieja which actually means old rags which is kind of what this looks like when it is done. You will understand more when you see the end result. Just keep shredding away. This piece is a thick piece so it is still hot in the middle. Now you might find this is actually a vein in the middle and if you don't want to eat it I understand, put it off to the side. My wife would probably freak out if she found that in her food so we'll just keep it out of the way and that concludes our beef shredding process. So we're just waiting on our vegetables. We'll come back in a few minutes and finish those off."