Vaca Frita (Boiled Beef Shredded Fine and Pan-Crisped with Lime)

Variations

• The restaurant's thicker cut: the photograph is a restaurant plate from New York, shredded coarser than this and with the onions laid over. The thicker the strand, the more interior it keeps — moister, less crisp.
• Chicken: thighs boiled, shredded and fried the same way with lime and garlic. Chicken shreds after about an hour.
• Before the ropa vieja: boil extra beef when making ropa vieja and take half out before it goes into the sauce; the next day it becomes this. Beef that has already simmered in the sauce is a different thing — the sofrito and tomato are in it now.
• Sour orange: some households use Seville orange juice instead of lime. The acid is doing the same job either way.

Tips

• One pot, surface spent the other way. Ropa vieja says "The shredding is the seasoning step, not a finish." Shredding multiplies the surface, which is why "rags can be in twenty minutes". Vaca frita leaves the same pot the same way and spends that surface on a crust instead of a sauce. The plain water is the same decision in both: the boil makes the beef tender, and the flavour goes in after the shredding.
• Which is why it is shredded finer. Carnitas says the opposite: "Shredded fine, the crisp edges get lost in the moist interior and go soft." That is right for carnitas, which fries chunks with a moist inside. Fine strands pressed into a thin mat have almost no inside at all; the whole thing is edge.
• The lime is not there to tenderise. The beef is already tender. What marinades do says "A marinade penetrates one to three millimetres." A fine strand is thinner than that from both sides together, so the seasoning meets in the middle — in thirty minutes, which an overnight soak cannot do for a thick piece.
• Then squeeze it out. As carnitas puts it, "wet meat will not start to colour until the water has gone". Lime juice is mostly water, the flavour is already inside the strands, and what stays on the surface only gets in the way.
• Press, and wait. A surface can only dry and brown while it stays against the pan. Stir it and a wet side comes down each time and the temperature drops (browning).
• Why not start from raw beef. Griot puts it plainly: "Braise first and fry second is the whole technique" Flank cut into strands along the grain and fried raw would be all chew — the long fibres are exactly what a raw steak has to be cut across (cooking meat). Because the collagen was boiled out first, the inside of the crisp is tender.
• Eat it at once. Next to steaming rice the crispness goes within minutes. Leftovers go back into a dry hot pan.