Beef Mechado - Free Filipino Recipes by Beef Gourmet Recipe

This traditional Spanish favorite braids beef strips and pork-back fat strips that get marinated in calamansi juice (from the Calamondin Orange - an orange believed to be the love fruit of the seeded union of the mandarin orange and the kumquat), vinegar, crushed garlic, soy sauce, bay leaves, salt, spices, and black pepper. Once marinated the meat is quickly browned in a skillet of hot oil or butter and then braised in the marinade along with tomato sauce, beef stock and onions. It is slow cooked until the meat is tender and the juices have thickened into bountiful, rich gravy.

Origin and preparation
The traditional dish uses a Spanish culinary practice of threading strips of pork back-fat through thick pieces of cheaper lean beef to render them more tender and less dry. Hence the name mechado from the Spanish mecha meaning wick. The larded pieces of beef are then marinated in vinegar, soy sauce, calamansi juice, crushed garlic, black pepper and bay leaf, browned quickly on all sides in hot oil or lard, and then slowly braised in its marinade with the addition of soup stock, onion slices, and tomato sauce until tender and the liquid is reduced to a thick flavorful gravy.

Over the years, the name of the dish has increasingly come to encompass variations that use thinner slices or even bony cuts of beef and that have dispensed with the larding process altogether. A newer variation of the dish can appear more like a beef stew.

Beef tongue can be similarly treated with little or no variation to produce another dish called lengua mechada

From: http://beef.gourmetrecipe.com/Beef_Dishes_Mechado_l59