Fire in the Hole! Or, How *Not* to Cook Your Venison Barbacoa

Nothing makes a new recipe more exciting than setting your kitchen on fire while cooking it.

Thanks to a friend, we have a fair amount of venison in our freezer, and I’m generally on the lookout for new ways to cook it. For years I thought that the only thing you could do with venison was make a substandard and overly-spiced chili with it (yeah, throwing a little shade there) so the last several years’ worth of dinners at our friends’ house have been an absolute revelation. Having been on a bit of a taco kick since receiving Death By Burrito as a gift a few years ago, the venison barbacoa seemed like a shoo-in for my latest favorite taco filling.

The recipe itself is dead easy as long as you think ahead and pull out your slow cooker earlier in the day. As is slow cooker standard, you put everything in and turn it on and magically your dinner is done when you wake up from an extended nap on the couch. That's the beauty of the slow cooker: the part where you really don't have to pay any attention to it or worry about it. (This becomes important later.)

My slow cookers have seen a fair bit of hard labor; from September to April there’s pretty much always one on the kitchen counter, and it's started to make more year-round appearances as I hate heating up our non-air-conditioned house in the summer. Stephanie O’Dea’s excellent slow cooker website has definitely given me a much larger repertoire (though I will never get over the eww factor of her frequent use of the word ‘plop’ in the instructions) as well as explaining that different size slow cookers exist for a reason and that reason has an awful lot to do with not drying out your food while it’s cooking. Hence my justification for owning three different slow cookers of various sizes.

As this was a smallish piece of meat, my smallest, oldest, least complicated cooker was called for. Ingredients in: check. Turn dial from Off to High: check. Fall asleep on couch while food cooks itself with no help from me: check.

Kids! Dinner's ready!

My daughter moved the slow cooker ever-so-slightly and – loud popping noise while the fuses blow: check. Smoke and flame shooting out from underneath: check. Big charred spot on the kitchen counter: check. I slept through all of this even though it took place about 15 feet away. At some point I was lucid enough to tell her to just get another slow cooker and transfer everything, but I don’t remember it. And then when I woke up, dinner was magically ready and there was a nice big char spot on the counter and now I only own two slow cookers.

Tucked into a warm corn tortilla with some pickled onions and crumbled cheese, this was well worth sacrificing one of the slow cookers for, although I’m not going to recommend that as a cooking method. I imagine this would also be outstanding with beef, in which case I’d skip the additional fat.

From Buck, Buck, Moose by Hank Shaw. 

Venison Barbacoa

2-3 lbs venison (shoulder or legs)(or shanks or roast or neck; I used a roast)
2-4 canned chiles in adobo
1 red onion, chopped
5 garlic cloves, chopped
2 bay leaves
1 tsp smoked paprika
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp ground cloves
1 Tbsp kosher salt
½ cup lime juice
½ cup cider vinegar
1 quart venison or beef stock
¼ cup lard or vegetable oil

Put everything except the lard in the slow cooker and cook on High until the meat falls off the bone and/or falls into shreds, somewhere between 2 and 6 hours depending on the age of the venison. If you’re making this in the oven, set the temperature to 300.

Pull all the meat from the bones (if applicable) and shred with forks. Stir in the lard and salt to taste. The fat should coat the meat; venison is super lean and really does need this extra additional fat. Also deer fat is pretty nasty. Pour some of the juices from the pot over the meat.

Serve over rice, with potatoes, or as tacos (with lots of crumbled dry cheese, cilantro, and pickled onions).