My buddy James posted on Facebook bout stopping for some barbacoa a while back. Since seeing it I have wanted some. I haven't been to Texas much in the last several years and the times that I have been there, I haven't been able to find a good barbacoa place. I searched the net for a recipe and this is the one I decided sounded best. http://bit.ly/uNzWBy I made it almost the same as in the link. My variation is as follows.
One of my smokers is broken, the other is a pain in the arse to use and burns up charcoal almost as fast as I can feed it so I used the indirect heat method my gas grill. One burner on low with a foil pack of hickory wood chips over it and the meat on the other end. The temperature stayed about 270 degrees on the cooking end of my grill. I let it go for about 2 hours so that it would get the smoke flavor. I took it in the house, cut it up into 4 big pieces and threw it in the crock pot with a can of Rotel tomatoes, set it to high and left it for about 6 hours. When the meat was done (I went to 200 degrees with it) I used a slotted spoon so remove it from the liquid and tomatoes. I then put the liquid and tomatoes in a sauce pot with the juice from one lime and about 2 tablespoons of chopped cilantro. I pureed this with my immersion blender and reduced it down to about half quantity and poured on the shredded meat just before serving.
