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Red or Green?
“Red or green?” A seemingly odd question coming from your waiter or waitress. Just about anywhere else, but New Mexico, where it is, in fact, the official State Question.
It refers to these guys, and is asking which one you want smothering your food: red and green chile. They’re the same thing, except the red has been allowed to ripen before harvesting.
Not “chillies,” “peppers,” or “chilis.” And they are a way of life around here.
Chile grow natively here, but it wasn’t until the 1950s that researchers at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces created a hybrid variety that was actually mild enough to eat. Called the “Big Jim,” that chile is the grandfather of all New Mexico chile.
When I say that chile is a way of life around here, I mean it. We put chile on eggs, hamburgers, pizza, beans … pretty much everything. Including, of course, tacos and burritos.
Unlike many Asian chillies and real firestorms like Ghost Peppers and Scotch Bonnets, New Mexico chile aren’t exceedingly hot. (At least, we New Mexicans don’t think so.) But they are flavorful, which is why we love them so much. (New Mexico grows the vast majority of the world’s chile, and we keep 80% of it for ourselves!)
Until relatively recently, it was impossible to get green or red chile outside of this state, but these days, grocers like HEB and Wegman’s are trucking in shipments of fresh chile in August, so you might be able to get some fresh chile and roast them yourself. Otherwise, you’ll have to content yourself with powdered or frozen chile from Amazon or these guys.
Once you get some, you can try out the helpful recipes in the comments, which are some of my favorites.
Published in General
Green Chile Enchilada Sauce
Ingredients
2 teaspoons extra virgin olive oil
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 ½ cups Hatch green chile peeled, seeded and chopped
½ cup tomato, chopped
½ teaspoon salt
1 ½ cups water
Roux made with 1 teaspoon olive oil and 1 teaspoon all-purpose flour or potato starch
Directions
Heat a saucepan over medium heat, add the oil and garlic and cook just until the garlic has softened, but do not allow it to brown, about 30 seconds. Add the remaining ingredients, except the roux, and simmer for 10 – 20 minutes or until most, but not all, of the liquid has evaporated. Add the roux and continue to simmer until the sauce is bound together and no longer watery.
Makes enough for 4 servings of enchiladas.
Green Chile Chicken Enchiladas
New Mexico enchiladas are assembled and served flat, not rolled!
Ingredients
2 cups green chile enchilada sauce
3 boneless skinless chicken breasts (about 1.5 lbs)
Chicken broth
Mexican Oregano
Shredded Cheddar cheese (about 2 cups, the sharper the better)
Corn tortillas, preferably blue corn, if you can find it
Directions
Poach the chicken breasts in broth with a couple of pinches of oregano, for about 20 minutes. Remove breasts, and shred in a bowl.
Heat the enchilada sauce in a large skillet, but do not let it boil.
Heat the oven to 300°F and set out your oven-safe plates.
Heat tortillas, one at a time, in the enchilada sauce until flexible, about 20 seconds. Make sure both sides get covered with sauce!
Assemble enchiladas in a stack on each plate: tortilla, chicken, sauce, cheese, repeat–make three enchiladas per plate. Place finished plates in oven to melt cheese.
Serve with Spanish rice and refried beans, and top with shredded lettuce, diced tomatoes, and sour cream.
Taco Meat
Obviously, this can be used to fill tacos, but we also use it on pizza around here!
Ingredients
1 lb ground beef
1 cup water
1 tbsp red chile powder
1 tbsp cumin
1 tbsp ground black pepper
1 tsp salt
2 tsp garlic
1 tbsp Mexican oregano
Directions
Brown ground beef in large skillet for about 7-8 minutes over medium-high heat, making sure to break the meat up well.
Add water, then remaining spices, and mix. Bring to a boil, then turn heat down to medium-low and simmer for about 30 minutes, or until most water has boiled off.
For tacos
Fill freshly-fried corn tortillas with beef, sour cream, lettuce, tomato, salsa, shredded Cheddar cheese. Serve with Spanish rice and refried beans.
For pizzas
Cover 16″ pizza dough with cooked beef and top with roasted diced green chile and shredded Cheddar cheese. Bake at 500°F for 10-12 minutes.
Carne Adovada Burritos
If I had to pick one food that I miss most when I’m out of state, this would have to be it
Ingredients
2 tbsp lard
3 tbsp all-purpose flour or potato starch
4 tbsp New Mexico red chile powder
2½ cups warm water
3 cloves garlic, peeled and minced
1½ tsp dried Mexican oregano
Absolutely no cumin
1 tbsp salt
3 lbs cubed pork
Directions
Melt lard in large skillet over medium heat
Stir in flour or potato starch and brown until golden brown
Blend in chile powder
Slowly add water, stirring until lumps are removed
Add garlic, oregano and salt
Simmer on medium heat for 15 minutes
Remove and cool
Place pork in large resealable bowl or bag
Pour cooled sauce over pork and mix to thoroughly cover pork
Marinate overnight
The next day, bake in 350° oven for several hours until pork is extremely flakey and tender. Alternatively, cook in a slow cooker on low for eight hours.
Add water during cooking to ensure carne adovada doesn’t dry out.
Place about ½ cup carne adovada in a burrito sized flour tortilla with shredded Cheddar cheese. Fold and smother with more cheese and either left over liquid from baking or red chile enchilada sauce. Bake burritos at 350° to melt cheese, and top with lettuce, diced tomatoes, and sour cream.
Oh, and the answer to the question, according to most people, is “Christmas”.
Me? Red on pork, green on everything else.
Everything on Ricochet is mouth-watering. Often, it’s the exciting new foods I’ve never discovered. Sometimes, it’s the SEC cheerleaders that @mikelaroche and @roberto post. Sometimes it’s exotic cars. Once in a while, it’s a juicy economic theory.
Well, okay, usually it’s the chile and the cheerleaders.
SEC cheerleaders? Roberto’s in NoCal, and Lash posts TTU girls. That’s not the SEC, man. ;)
Damn you! Giving away all our secrets…
Texan.
Roberto is not among the geographically prejudiced, I assure you. Now, Lash, yeah, there you got me. Somehow I associated his pictures of blonde beauties with the SEC. Foolish me.
Hey! I resemble that remark!
Why do you damn people have to post all the delectable recipes in the middle of the night while all the damn stores are closed?
And why am I cursing so much? Because you made me hungry. That’s why Ricochet needs the online alliance with overnight food delivery services that could be custom co-branded.
The Right’s Night Kitchen.
Not a bit of cilantro in any of them. I approve.
Hell no.
Nor onions.
And, while you’re on your own to find flour tortilla replacements, the recipes themselves have gluten-free alternatives built right into them.
Let me know and I’ll hook you up with the good stuff. And the other stuff for your wife.
No.
I have a jar of El Pinto salsa in my fridge right now.
Hot, of course.
But this is the best salsa in the state.
Even if their food’s gone downhill. Especially their carne adovada.
This is a bit too forgiving to Colorado, and I think overestimates Mexico by about 100 times.
But it shows how serious we are about chile.
Which is, of course, pronounced “CHI-la”.
Not “CHILL-ee”.
Just so you know.
After I moved to Los Angeles, I went back and forth to New York a lot. But I didn’t do, or have to do any real cooking back east until a trip in the early Eighties. I was hosting a brunch, so I figured it was a hot time of year. My friends all knew I was living in California, so I’d do a Mexican one. I drove to the supermarket and looked for the Mexican/Latino/Spanish foods aisle.
It wasn’t an “aisle”. It was two different brands of canned refried beans. I hadn’t done much of the shopping before we moved west, so it just never occurred to me that being about 2000 miles farther away from Mexico might, you know, mean that my home town didn’t have foods I’d gotten used to.
To be fair to New York, it and a lot of other places have more ethnic food choices than ever. Smacked upside the head by the great invisible guiding hand of capitalism, the supermarket industry now offers an almost bewilderingly varied selection.
Yeah, it’s a little PC. But not much. As long as I, the consumer, am the winner, I like today’s world better.
There really wasn’t a Mexican neighborhood in NYC up until the 1990s or so — you had Latino ones, but they were more likely to be Puerto Rican or Cuban (IIRC, there are three Mexican neighborhoods now if you really want to shop for authentic stuff — East Harlem south of 125th Street, Jackson Heights/Corona in Queens and Port Richmond on Staten Island, with the middle one along the Flushing elevated line being the largest of the trio).
The ‘green or red’ question on enchiladas pops up here in the Permian Basin every other Friday or so, especially since enchilada plates are pretty much the de facto fundraiser lunch meal for the locals. But we’re only about 50 miles from New Mexico, so no surprise there.
We got y’all here in the Carolinas. The Carolina Reaper has 1.5 million scoville units…..
Green chiles (especially Hatch) are the way to go. Every birthday, my wife makes my favorite meal: Death Star Barburritos. They are basically a burrito stuffed with hamburger, onion, cheddar cheese and a slathering of green chile. They’re sealed with refried beans (homemade when she’s in the mood).
On the outside, she slathers on more green chile and tops them with even more cheddar cheese. She then throws them in the oven and bakes ’em until they bubble. I should mention she makes a huge pot of green chile the day before. Anyway, here’s a picture from a year or two ago:
Most of the Tex-Mex places around here are owned by immigrants from Zacatecas – red salsa only (but very good). Few places offer red or green.
When I was a corporate guy the Pace Picante sauce plant was right across the street. The number of semis delivering raw ingredients 24/7 was amazing.
There oughta be a law! This is precisely the kind of injustice for which the Commerce Clause was written!
I knew I had moved to a bizarre place when I asked for green chile at a burrito place and the clerk replied “what is that?” Fortunately, things have improved a great deal here.
(On a side note, the spellchecker on my iPad still doesn’t recognize the word “chile.”)
For good reason.
The last couple of years we lived near Rochester, NY (home of Wegman’s), Wegman’s had roasters outside some of their stores in late August to early September so they could roast chiles on site. When we moved to north central Texas last year, I saw roasters outside the local Albertson’s (though I never saw the roasters in operation).
Mrs. Tabby is more of a fan of chile (and green chile in particular) than I am (I’m not a fan of spicy or hot food in general). She really likes green chile on hamburgers.
We were introduced when our daughter and son-in-law moved to New Mexico almost six years ago, and quickly learned the what waitresses meant when they asked “red or green?” You New Mexicans (and our daughter is following along) do put green chile on everything.