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Red Chile Sauce Braised Beef is tender braised beef swimming in a spicy red chile sauce that is the perfect combination of heat and delicious flavor.
Red Chile Sauce Braised Beef
Are you looking for a perfect comfort food recipe at its best? Look no further this Red Chile Sauce Braised Beef… is what your spicy little heart has been craving.
As a food blogger, there are some recipes that don’t always want to play nice with you. This recipe for Red Chile Sauce Braised Beef was one of them. Like most everyone, the older I get, the more I realize how difficult it is to lose weight. Like them or not, I am a daily Lean Cuisine lunchtime eater. Over the years, I have narrowed down my weekly selection to a handful of tried and true favorites and one of them is the Ranchero Braised Beef with whipped sweet potatoes. Tender meat, spicy sauce and yum yum yum!!! … I could probably eat that little package of perfection three times a day if I had to. If only it came in a bigger portion ….. hmmm…
So started the attempt to recreate that recipe from scratch so that my husband could enjoy the meal too without the pretense of a Lean Cuisine.
Big Scary Mike’s not going to have any part of that!
So, let’s go over all the things that went horribly wrong the first time I tried to write this recipe. The sauce, horrible! I completely missed the mark on how to make a comparable sauce. I was boiling dried chiles, mashing stuff together, boiling it again, desperately waving my bippity boppity boo wand over my dutch oven, hoping for the best. Then I put in my beautiful hunk of chuck roast in that swill and let it simmer for 9 hours only to be even more disappointed when it was time to taste test it. It was disgusting! It was a waste of a day, the heartbreak of anticipation for nothing and the loss of a really good chunk of meat. Let’s put it this way, it was so bad I never even served it to Mike. I think I heated him up pizza rolls or something from the freezer that night but I knew that I would figure out someday how to make a copycat of that amazing dish.
Fast forward a year and here we are.. since then I have learned a little bit more, experimented a little bit more, cooked a little bit more. This Red Chile Sauce Braised Beef is ridiculously amazing this go around and I couldn’t be more proud of it. Believe me, if my husband … who hates repetition when it comes to food… asks me to make a recipe almost weekly, I NAILED IT!!
I took notes from my Homemade Enchilada Sauce recipe, tweaked it a little bit and now you could slather this Red Chili Sauce on a flip-flop and you would be happy to eat it. I served this with some whipped sweet potatoes but Mike was very happy to have his over white rice so I am thinking this can be served with your family’s favorite side dish.
This just goes to show that if sometimes the most horrible cooking mistakes morph into the best plates of comfort food!!!
Enjoy!
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Red Chile Sauce Braised Beef
Red Chile Sauce Braised Beef
Red Chile Sauce Braised Beef
Red Chile Sauce Braised Beef
Ingredients
Preparing the Chuck Roast
- 3 lbs chuck roast
- 2 tbl vegetable oil
- 1 tsp salt
- 1 tsp pepper
Red Chile Sauce
- 2 tbl canola oil
- 3 tbl all purpose flour
- 2 1/2 cup chicken stock
- 4 tbl tomato paste
- 1 tbl apple cider vinegar
- 1 tsp cayenne
- 1/2 tsp cumin
- 1/2 tsp smoked paprika
- 2 tbl brown sugar
- 3 tbl chili powder
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1/4 tsp cinnamon
- 1 tsp garlic powder
- 1/2 tsp onion powder
- 1/4 tsp black pepper
Instructions
Braised Beef
- Start by heating up a dutch oven or large cooking pot over high heat and add in your vegetable oil
- Generously season your chuck roast on all sides with salt and pepper and carefully move meat to the heated pot
- Sear meat for 3 minutes on each / all sides until a nice dark crust forms on the outside.
Red Chile Sauce
- Add the oil to a small sauce pan over medium-high heat
- Once hot, add flour and whisk together let cook 1 minute while continuing to stir
- Pour in chicken stock, vinegar and tomato paste and whisk to combine
- Add in all spices and whisk until all ingredients are well incorporated
- Bring sauce to a low boil then reduce heat to low.. simmer for 15 minutes while stirring occasionally
- Remove from heat and pour on top of braised beef. Cover and simmer on low for 8-10 hours. When fork tender, serve with rice, potatoes or with whatever your favorite side dish is!
Not exactly the lean cuisine, but close enough!. Absolutely delicious!
I used to get the Lean Cuisine Ranchero Braised Beef for my lunches too. I was looking for a recipe to make for dinner because I loved it so much and wanted the men in my life to at least try it. It is a huge hit. This is not an exact copy, but it is so close and even better! Absolutely love this recipe!
Instead of simmering on the stove, I put it all in the crock-pot before work with some cut up sweet potatoes and come home to a delicious meal.