Puerto Rican-Style Ropa Vieja

Beef and peppers are great together, stir-fried or braised like this wonderful ropa vieja. Preparing a braise is typically easy but this one was particularly fast since the meat didn’t have to be browned. Skipping this step made me wonder if the sauce would be somewhat bland, but it turned out to be an unnecessary concern.

The mustard, tomatoes, and garlic were great additions to make the sauce flavorful, and I loved the sharpness of the olive brine. Another thing that makes this recipe simple is that the liquid doesn’t have to be reduced afterwards. The beef is shredded right in the Dutch oven and it is ready to be served. Jasmine rice made the dinner table—a great accompaniment for ropa vieja.

This is the dish that you start on a Sunday afternoon and put in the oven while you go out for a walk or go about your day. Enjoy it for dinner that night and then graze on it all week long. There is so much flavor from such little effort and truly humble ingredients.

I can’t stop eating this in tacos, with beans and avocado, but there are so many possibilities. Would be lovely tucked into a breakfast scramble or even stuffed into a baked potato.

Yum! A delicious, mostly hands-off recipe. I was a bit skeptical that the recipe didn’t call for any browning of the meat at the beginning, but I was very happy with the end result. It was great to toss everything in the Dutch oven, pop it in the oven for a few hours and unveil the simmering medley of the flavors to enjoy.

I definitely plan to make this again in the future. With the right timing, it’d make a great work-from-home, weekday dinner. The leftovers hold up great, too. This recipe was very close to being a 10 for me. The next time I make it I plan to use 1 green bell pepper instead of 2, slice the olives in half, and cook it for 4 hours total.

I love a slow-cooked recipe that uses the oven instead of a slow cooker. I’ve made ropa vieja before but it has been years. This one was a breeze to prepare—a few minutes chopping and assembling, then pile everything in the Dutch oven and slowly cook over three hours. Mine did have the full 3 hours in the oven.

It shredded easily with a fork and a pair of tongs. It’s delicious and tastes just as great when reheated. Nice to have plenty of leftovers for the week ahead.

There’s something so comforting about tucking into a bowl of this. It isn’t showy or pretentious and doesn’t call attention to itself. It’s effectively a “dump dinner”, where you put a bunch of things into a pot (no searing required), mix them together, and then braise for 3 hours.

The ingredients, in their raw form, would certainly get people to question your sanity seeing fluorescent yellow mustard coating bell peppers and raisins, a combination almost never seen in the wild, but some magic really happens in that oven, and everyone at my table had full second helpings so we could keep exploring the varied tastes and textures.

The raisins soak up the beef juices and, while providing a nice background flavor, don’t endanger the meal’s savory status. The headnotes make sure to proclaim this recipe’s inauthentic origins, I can’t wait to seek out more ropa vieja variants and explore Cuban cuisine beyond what I can get as takeout from Porto’s. Everyone who ate it wants the recipe.

I instantly felt a connection to this recipe because I used to go to La Taza del Oro during my earlier days living in NYC when I was craving a taste of home. (I don’t have a Cuban background, but one of my parents’ favorite hole-in-the-walls growing up was a small Cuban diner in the heart of Long Island that served tremendous ropa vieja.) It’s been a long while since I’ve both had good Cuban food and seen my folks, so I figured savoring a taste of my past would satisfy both desires.

This is the sort of low, slow dinner that’s perfect to make on a lazy Sunday. There’s not much work involved in preparing it—the most you have to do is slice the onions and peppers, crack enough black pepper to coat the chuck roast, and be patient as the aromas overtake your kitchen.

While some of the flavor elements got lost in the mix (particularly the cumin), all was forgiven the moment you bit into the roast which is, no joke, some of the most flavorful meat I’ve made in a while. The pops of sweetness from the raisins cut through the brininess and acidic stronghold, but it could’ve become overwhelming if I didn’t cook rice to accompany it. That said, it tasted exactly like home to me.

UPDATE: The recipe was completely right; the flavors become even better over time. I ate my leftovers atop a whole roasted sweet potato, and the natural sweetness pairs perfectly with the briny, acidic, rich meat.