Crockpot Chicken Tinga – An Essential Mexican Recipe

🇲🇽 3-Step Chicken Tinga Recipe 🇲🇽

1️⃣ Plop the following ingredients into a Crock-Pot / slow-cooker:
• ~2lbs skinless chicken thigh (consider bone-in!)
• 2-5 canned chipotle peppers
• 1-14.5-ounce can of fire-roasted tomatoes
• 3 garlic cloves
• 1 chopped onion
• 3 tsp kosher salt
• black pepper
• 1 tsp cumin
• 1 tsp Mexican oregano
• extra optional spices
○ chili powder
○ a whole bay leaf
○ smoked paprika
2️ Let it braise on low for ~6 hours or high for ~3 hours
(If using an instant pot, you can cook this under pressure for as little as 15 minutes! And if you’ve got one of the really fancy ones, you can even sear the chicken and onions in the pot before braising)
3️ Remove the chicken to cool. Set the Crock Pot to high. Use an immersion blender to turn the braising liquid into a smooth sauce. Shred the chicken with your hands and return it to the bubbling sauce. Serve chicken as part of nachos, tacos, tostadas, quesadillas, or enchiladas.

Good luck, chef. Lemme know how it comes out.

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I’ve got a lot to say about why I think
you need this recipe in your arsenal, but
it’s probably best to get straight into
the recipe so you first see how easy it is.
Here are all the ingredients you’ll need
to gather, and you can screenshot the list
now or refer to the description for a text-based
recipe.
It’s all gonna go into a slow cooker so
it works as a base for weekday meals.
Weekday cooking has to be easy and produce
food that maintains a pleasurable texture
three days later, and braising meat in an
electric crock pot achieves both.
Start with a whole white onion that’s been
broken down, be it roughly diced by hand,
in a chopper or with a mandolin.
Put those onions in the pot, plus three garlic
cloves.
You could properly mince these, but for a
low-effort everyday meal like this, one just
smash it to irregular bits with the side of a knife.
Add one can of fire-roasted tomatoes.
14 and a half ounces is a standard size, but
you can give or take an ounce or two.
It doesn’t have to be exact.
Same goes for the chicken
thighs. 2 pounds is a good amount to make
sure it’s a big enough batch to last several
meals over, but you don’t get to choose
exactly how much chicken comes in a pack,
so anywhere between 2 to 3 pounds will be
alright.
Once you get closer to 4 pounds of chicken,
you’ll have to up the salt accordingly.
To my 2 pound pack, I’ll sprinkle 3 teaspoons
of salt.
Viewers who have been taking notes will point
out that one teaspoon of salt per pound of
meat is my typical ratio, but there also has
to be enough salt to season the onions– hence
the 50% increase.
This is the major flavor contributor of the
dish: chipotle peppers canned in adobo sauce.
plop 2 peppers in if you’re not too keen
on spice, or 5 if “pica pica” is a phrase
in your household that’s strictly reserved
for pokemon.
A spoonful of the adobo sauce can come along
too.
For the finishing spices, churn out several
big cranks of black pepper, and add 1 teaspoon
of ground cumin and 1 teaspoon of oregano.
I’ve seen recipes that also add chili powder,
a bay leaf, or even sugar, but as long as
you have that backbone of cumin and oregano,
the base flavor profile will be in the right
zone.
After that, you can freestyle or abstain as
desired.
I do tend to get fussy about oregano, since
Mexican oregano is totally different
from the kind you’d find in an Italian spice
blend.
If your grocery store carries Mexican oregano,
please buy some for this dish.
As soon as you grind it between your hands
and get a whiff of the aroma, you’ll notice
it’s a different ingredient unto itself.
If you can only get the other kind oregano,
it’ll be fine.
I guess…
Cook this all on the low setting of a crock
pot for 6 hours if you’re gonna go to bed
overnight or work overday, or on the high
setting for 3 hours if you don’t wanna wait
that long.
You could also do all this in a dutch oven
over the stove in like, 1 hour depending on
how high the heat is, but remember this is
deliberately presented as a recipe for electric
slow cookers.
I feel like crock-pot recipes get popular
in the winter, then unfairly forgotten in
the summer, whereas my preference is the opposite.
I like being able to cook half a week’s
worth of lunches without making my house hot
and smokey.
Is it the traditional means of chicken tinga
cookery?
Of course not!
Tinga recipes date back to the 1800s and the
crock pot didn’t exist until 1940.
But modern problems require modern solutions,
so let the robot do the cooking, and after
the requisite number of hours have passed,
observe the texture.
When the chicken fails to support its own
weight, it’s fully cooked and ready to pull.
Set it all aside on a plate so it cools enough
to handle with bare hands, and shred it apart.
You can shred meat with two forks or plastic
claws, but if you just let it cool, you won’t
need a tool.
And why should we put so much importance on
resting seared meats, but not slow-cooked
ones?
Anyway…
At this point, you’ve done it.
Chicken tinga.
Good job.
You could spoon some of the braising liquid
on top, call it a day, and you’ll have made
a simple, hands-off, totally respectable chicken
dish that freezes well, reheats well, and
lends itself to dozens of meal preparations.
If you’re looking for the lowest-effort
meal possible, stop watching now and go enjoy
your dinner.
To everyone else, this one extra step adds
so much flavor for such little effort.
Leave the chicken out on the cooling dish,
pick out your bay leaf if you added one, and
blend this braising liquid into a smooth sauce.
It’s gonna get thicker from all that rendered
chicken fat and spicier from the chipotle
peppers getting fully integrated.
Set the crock pot to high and add the shredded
chicken back in.
You want this to cook for 10 more minutes
so the sauce gets a little reduced, and so
it can fully adhere to the meat.
Now that this meat can be served warm, luxuriating
in its own thick sauce, you don’t need to
add a salsa when assembling it into a taco.
I’ve noticed that a lot of contemporary
braised meat recipes instruct you to throw
out the cooking liquid out, but this final
action creates an asymmetrical return in value.
It’s free real estate.
I have tried to increase the flavor even more
by searing the chicken first, then browning
the onions, then deglazing any remaining pan
fond with the acidic tomatoes, then braising
everything together, but the improvement of
flavor just wasn’t enough to justify all
the cleanup.
It would totally make sense if you made the
whole recipe in one dutch oven on the stove,
but if you’ve got a crock pot, I must insist
that the hands-off approach is the easiest,
most reliable way to make flavorful, shredded
chicken.
And once you do, you’ve got two pounds of
meat that can be added to nachos, quesadillas,
burritos, burrito bowls, enchiladas, and of
course, tacos.
If you followed my instructions on how to
make perfect corn tortillas, chicken tinga
and a slice of avocado with a lime wedge on
the side is a wonderful way to showcase your
work.
I don’t actually think you need me to pitch
you on the hundreds of uses for flavorful
shredded chicken— it’s one of the most
popular proteins for a reason.
Plus I bet you’ve got half the requisite
ingredients in your pantry already, so the
only ones who still have an excuse are the
vegans, and they can swap the poultry for
jackfruit.
From this point forward, do not talk to me
until you’ve tried making chicken tinga
at least once… bye bye!
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