Mexican Shredded Beef

I once, many (maybe 40) years ago, had a recipe for slow cooking Mexican shredded beef in a regular oven. It was a very interesting, indeed an apparently impossible, recipe, but when I cooked it according to the instructions it came out JUST RIGHT, exactly what I wanted, tender, juicy, and ridiculously (and “authentically”) tasty.

It was a very strange recipe, involving putting a chuck roast on a regular roaster pan, or maybe in a metal pot of some sort with some water or oil, at a ridiculously low temperature (I seem to remember 160 degrees but my memory is hazy – it might have been 125 degrees but I just don’t remember and the actual temperature setting is one of the things I want to find out) for an outrageously long time – some time between all day and all day PLUS all night.

I also seem to remember that no, or virtually no, spices were involved at all. There was maybe a little salt, maybe regular black pepper (but I don’t remember any spices at all), but no jalapenos or Worcester sauce or cumin or tarragon (etc.) or anything beyond the simplest, most basic things, if even those.

Note that this was in a regular oven, not a “slow cooker” like every recipe I have been able to find on-line.

Does anyone have this recipe or even know if it was real, or did I dream it?

Please help. After I mentioned it to my wife she has been bothering me on daily basis to make some of this.

I definitely remember the cooking temperature being lower than 200 degrees, and since you generally only need to get the temperature of the interior of meat or poultry up to 140 or so to kill off all those bad little critters, I would presume that 160 might do the trick over such a long period in the oven.

I really appreciate your help and, except for the oven temperature, it is what even my increasingly senile brain seems to remember through the thickening haze of all those years.

I seldom trim the fat. I like to let the HDLs and LDLs fight it out.