Holly Birria: slow-braised beef, a crisp Ozzo, and a dip you pour
Beef braised for hours in a dried-chilli adobo, folded into an Ozzo crisped in its own fat, with a cup of consommé for dipping. Mexico's birria, rebuilt on our bread.
Birria started as a celebration dish from Jalisco, in western Mexico: meat braised for the better part of a day in a sauce of dried chillies and spices until it falls apart at a look. Traditionally goat, often beef, always slow. For most of its life it was a stew you ate from a bowl at a wedding or a Sunday.
Then someone folded it into a tortilla, fried that in the braising fat, and served it with a cup of the cooking liquid to dip into. The internet lost its mind, deservedly. The dip-and-bite is one of the great eating rituals.
The Holly Birria is that ritual, rebuilt on an Ozzo. We didn't want to make a taco, there are people who do that far better than us. We wanted to find out what birria does when it meets 72 hours of fermented bread and a proper crust.
The braise
This is the part that can't be rushed, and we don't try.
Beef goes into a sauce built from dried chillies, the deep, fruity, barely-spicy kind that give birria its brick-red colour and its warmth rather than its burn, along with garlic, tomato, and a warm-spice backbone of cumin, oregano, and a little clove. Then it cooks. Low. For hours. Long enough that the connective tissue melts and the meat gives up any resistance and starts pulling into strands on its own.
What you get at the end is two things, and both of them matter. The meat, dark and soft and shreddable. And the liquid it cooked in, now rich with rendered fat and dissolved chilli, which is the second half of the dish.
The consommé
That braising liquid, strained and skimmed, is the consommé, the cup that comes on the side for dipping. This is not a garnish and it is not optional. It's the point.
Warm, deeply savoury, a little fatty, gently spiced. You dip the sandwich in, or spoon it over, and every bite gets a hit of the braise in its purest, most liquid form. It's the reason people eat birria with their sleeves rolled up and a grin on. Dip, bite, repeat.
The Ozzo, crisped in the fat
Here's where we do the very un-traditional, very deliberate thing.
Instead of a tortilla, the braised beef goes into our Ozzo bread, and the bread gets crisped on the flat-top in a little of the rendered braising fat. The crust drinks up the colour and the flavour and turns deep, savoury, and crackly, while the 72-hour crumb inside stays soft enough to soak the consommé without falling apart.
A tortilla goes soggy fast, that's part of its charm, you eat it quickly. The Ozzo holds. It crisps on the outside, stays structured on the inside, and survives the dip. It gives you a birria you can take your time over, which is a slightly different, and we'd argue better, kind of pleasure.
Cheese goes in too, melted against the hot beef so it stretches, because melted cheese and slow beef is a combination older and wiser than all of us.
How to eat it
Don't overthink it. Take the sandwich, dip a corner into the consommé, and bite. The bread will hold. Repeat until both are gone. Somewhere in the middle you'll understand why this dish took over the world.
If you like heat, ask, we can point you at the hot sauce. As it comes, the Holly Birria is built for warmth and depth over fire. It's about the long braise, not the burn.
Where to eat it
It's on the menu now. This is one we'd steer you toward eating in, at least the first time, because a hot, crisp birria Ozzo with a cup of consommé is not a sandwich to eat one-handed on the walk to the light rail. It deserves a table, two hands, and five unhurried minutes.
Why we keep building this
Because birria is one of the most exciting things to happen to slow-cooked meat in a decade, and we couldn't resist finding out what it does on our bread.
A dish that traditional and that good is a high bar to borrow from, and we didn't want to make a novelty. So we kept the parts that make birria birria, the long dried-chilli braise, the shredded beef, the consommé, the dip-and-bite, and swapped only the vessel: a tortilla for an Ozzo that can take the crisp and hold the dip.
The name's a wink. The braise is dead serious. Come find out.
The crust that survives the dip is the whole reason this works. Read the bread story →
Order at Pyrmont or Marrickville →
