For Christmas dinner this year I chose a Cuban theme for the menu and Vaca Frita was the main dish. Vaca Frita is, simply put, lime-marinated crispy beef.
The Cubans would probably serve this over white rice, and you can certainly do that, depending on your tolerance for carbohydrates. For a purely Paleo meal, you can always substitute with cauliflower rice.
Plan Ahead
This is a good recipe to plan ahead, so you can let the meat sit in the marinade. As the instructions say, you can let it sit for as little as thirty minutes, but the longer it sits, the more the meat will absorb the flavors of the marinade. I usually recommend marinating meat for at least a couple hours.
Downsides to Crisping Meat
Any time we crisp meat, we create heterocyclic amines (HCAs) and advanced glycation endproducts (AGEs). HCAs have shown some carcinogenic effects, while AGEs can increase insulin resistance and deplete our antioxidant stores.
The good news is that, by marinating the meat before crisping it up, we can largely prevent HCAs and AGEs from forming (source). As is so often the case, we can make our food more delicious while simultaneously making it healthier.
