Frijoles Especiales Recipe 🫘 basically charro beans…but made better by taquerias in South Texas

And that, my friends, is a bowl of frijoles especiales. Puro South Texas style, baby. I've got my two cups of beans in here, seven cups of water, and we're going to add a tablespoon of fine ground black pepper. We're going to add two teaspoons of salt. I'm also going to add two garlic cloves at this stage. I'm going to close this up. Now, I've got my Crock-Pot here set to high. Generally, going to take about 4 hours to get these beans done from start to finish. We're going to take two slices of bacon. I like to dice it up kind of fine. Salt pork has a very tough skin, so it's a little more challenging to cut. So, I like to cut it into quarters like this. We're going to go ahead and add some of this pork belly in here. While that's coming up to temp, we're going to go ahead and get the chorizo ready. You can chop up the chorizo like I'm doing here just to make the process a little bit quicker. Meantime, winner. You can cube it up or you cut it into slices. Next up, we've got a quarter of an onion that we're going to dice up. It's time for the tomato. Now, you don't have to be perfect on your dicing here. It's pretty much going to dissolve, and all that delicious flavor is going to be in the beans. Here we go. FYI, you can add all of this into the Crock-Pot without the sauteing part. But, trust me, the sauteing brings out some extra flavor in the onion, in the chorizo, and in the tomatoes. The recipe calls for a quarter cup of tomato sauce. This is a quarter cup, but remember we're making half of the recipe today, so we're not going to use it all. We're going to use about half of that. That is exactly an eighth of a cup. I'm just saying. It also calls for a tablespoon of tomato paste, so I'm getting half of that right here. I'm going to take about half of this little cilantro, and I'm just going to chop it up real fine. This is supposed to be about a quarter of a cup. Let's add all this deliciousness to these charro beans right here. We're also going to add two pickled jalapenos. I'll poke a little hole in here, and that way the juice and the flavor from inside the jalapeno comes out. One of the essential ingredients for frijoles especiales is, of course, bistec. I have thin slices here that I'm cubing up really small for the cook. I'm going to season them up with some OG while I get my pan nice and hot with some oil. Crank up the heat. It'll evaporate, you'll get your browning, and it'll be delicious. So, you can see it's starting to brown a little bit. I'm ready to get this meat out. It's nice and cooked. That's the way I want it for my charro beans. So, I'm going to go ahead and scrape some of this meat out right here. Let's serve up some frijoles especiales. I'm going to get some of this bistec here, put some on the bottom, and we're going to take some frijoles charros and put those in a bowl here. Next, we're going to put a little bit of guacamole over here. Just a nice little dollop. We're going to put some queso fresco. Next, we're going to put a little bit of extra cilantro on here, little bit of onions, and a little bit more bistec. Yeehaw! I'm looking forward to this bite. This is going to be so good. Man, this is really, really good.