OK, the recipe I will share with you is NOT the original, real deal machaca. In common parlance, machaca has come to be a reference to shredded beef cooked in the Mexican style. It is similar to the Cuban dish, ropa vieja (old rags, a reference to the appearance of shredded beef.) The original machaca was more of a reconstituted beef jerky. In rural Mexico, there weren't any refrigerators back in the day. So beef would often be preserved by drying. Slabs of the stuff would be sprinkled with lime juice, salted, and hung out to dry in the hot sun and wind. When completely dried, the beef would, texturally, have more in common with a wood plank than with something you would eat. So the cook would grab a machaca, a fist size rock, and the dried beef would then be machacado, that is, literally, beaten, pummeled, smashed, until the fibers of meat would seperate and the resulting fluff would be cooked with tomatoes, onions, chiles, etc, and sometimes scrambled up with eggs. If y...
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