This begins by browning the pieces of short rib in a big Dutch oven — which you’ll also use for slow-cooking the beef and its sauce.

Set your Dutch oven on a high heat and add two tablespoons olive oil. As soon as the oil starts shimmering, add the beef in a single, evenly spaced layer. Drop the heat to medium-high and let the chunks sizzle away for about four minutes on each side.

You’re looking to get a dark, golden color on either side of the beef. Once that happens, use a slotted spoon to remove the beef and set it aside on a dinner plate. You’ll probably need to do this browning in two batches, using two tablespoons of oil for each batch of beef. When you remove the last batch of beef, aim to keep as much of the fatted oil as you can in the Dutch oven. That’s important because you’re now going to start making the beef’s cook-in sauce in that oil.

Set your Dutch oven back on a high heat and stir in the onion, so it all gets a coating of oil. Drop the heat to medium-high and let the onion fry for about 5 minutes until it softens and picks up a pale golden color. Now stir in the garlic, cumin, cinnamon, cloves, salt, and black pepper. Fry the mix on that medium-high heat with a few regular stirs for another five minutes or so until the onion picks up a dark gold color. Good. Add the apple cider vinegar, the roughly chopped chilies, and the water. Drop the heat to low and let the whole lot simmer gently — with a few stirs — for 10 minutes.

Now add the browned beef and all its plate-juices — keeping the heat on low. Give it all a good stir and cover the top of the Dutch oven with silver foil so that it overlaps the top by about 2 inches all round. Now put the lid on and crimp the foil to make sure you get a really good seal all around the lid. You need that tight seal, so the beef can slowly — and I mean slowly — simmer in all its sauce for 2 hours.

You want the beef to be just barely bubbling in the sauce during this slow, steamy, sealed-in simmering. And while that’s happening, you’ll have plenty of time to char the tomatoes, so they’re ready to join the saucy beef a little later

So, for the tomatoes, set a big heavy skillet — I used a deep-sided, 12 inch one — on a high heat, and add one tablespoon olive oil. As the oil just starts to smoke a little, add half the cherry tomatoes in an evenly spaced, single layer. Let them sit on that high heat for about 4 minutes. You’ll find the tomatoes flatten slightly with all that heat on their blackening undersides — that’s grand. Now give them a stirring turn to expose their upper sides to that charring heat. Let them run for another 4 minutes, and then turn them into a bowl.

Add another tablespoon of olive oil to the skillet and repeat the charring process for the rest of the tomatoes. As soon as that second batch finishes charring, return the first batch of tomatoes to the skillet, and add the oregano, brown sugar and water. Drop the heat to low-medium and let the mix bubble away with a couple of stirs for about 15 minutes. You want the tomatoes to soften enough so that you can easily crush them all apart with a wooden spoon. Good. The tomato mix is ready to join the beef — once it has finished its slow, Dutch oven cooking.

After the beef has been simmering for 2 hours, add the tomatoes and all their juices. Scrape the skillet as clean as you can so that all the tomatoey mix gets added to your Dutch oven. Give everything a good, combining stir and turn the heat under that big pot to high. As soon as the sauce starts bubbling, drop the heat to low. Check the sauce for saltiness, and adjust according to your taste.

For the next 60 minutes, you want your now fully sauced birria to cook, covered, at that same at slow, low simmer.

Once the 60 minutes are up, use a big sieve to drain — and carefully keep — all the sauce from the birria into a suitably sized pan. That gave me about three cups of sauce.

Return the drained beef to your big pot, then remove the bones and discard them. This is where I like to pull any remaining fatty pieces from the beef, chop them finely, and mix them back into the beef as I pull it all apart with my fingers. Remember, fat is flavor.

Let the pulled beef sit covered in the still-warm Dutch oven — you’re now ready to make your quesabirria tacos.

For this, I used the same skillet in which the charred tomatoes were prepped.

Follow the heating instructions on your tortillas’ pack. For me, that meant heating each tortilla on a high heat for 20 seconds on each side, then covering the hot tortillas with a kitchen towel, so they stayed warmly soft. Easy.

Pour your carefully reserved ‘consommé’ into a microwave proof jug and heat it in the microwave for maybe a minute on high. You want it piping hot, and ready to serve into four small bowls — one for each happy guest.

Now spoon an equal amount of the pulled beef onto the middle of each warm tortilla. Fold each tortilla, so you get that classic, taco-style filling in each tortilla.

Crumble some feta over the birria filling, and you’re done — quesabirria tacos!