Chile rellenos

These chiles are small.

Cheese is cut into wedges. How much cheese? As much as you care to eat. As much as the chiles will hold. 

A batter is prepared with one egg and water, flour and masa harina. 

Masa is where the corn flavor comes from. 

Chile with a cheese wedge inside is is rolled in flour to help batter adhere. The batter is thinner than you'd imagine. The consistency of thin pancake batter, or thin as batter for crêpes. 

Water will make crispier batter than milk.

Cooked on medium low so that the cheese inside melts before the egg in the batter cooks. 

Chile rellenos, Spanish rice, white beans with Swiss chard

I never saw a guest clear their plate so thoroughly and so quickly. This is unusual. I notice that Joe does not eat that much. 

"I can see you didn't like that so I won't bother offering more."  

Joe laughed.  

"Well, you didn't lick your plate." 

The only thing on Joe's plate were smears and the stem of a poblano chile, and I am only halfway done with mine.

I must record, Joe kept remarking how fantastic this meal is. He told me about top restaurants in Phoenix, how he bought two sets of two tickets for well-known restaurants, how they all have great views but not one of them, not one, has food good as this. Joe is a bullshitter, yes, an unusually successful salesman by trade, yes, but it did sound perfect, and he did clear his plate surprisingly. And I feel the same way.  

The combination on the plate is tremendous each element so homely so humble, the result so tremendously satisfying. The usual beans would be black beans but here I am using my own white beans with Swiss chard that has a pork chop in it and smoke included with a touch of sweet/sour. The beans are a meal by themselves and in combination with anything tastes even better. I had a bowl of these beans with a large spoonful of sour cream and I was in heaven. 

The sour cream also moderates the lingering heat of the red chile sauce. 

It is a small chicken breast and that is sliced laterally for two undersized chicken scallopini. The scallopini are fried in butter with salt/pepper, keeping everything simple. 

The poblanos are roasted to deep flavor, left to sweat it off by themselves in a bowl covered with a plate and then peeled. And the chicken is cooked. Cheese is sliced. Once the elements are arranged it goes very quickly so the plates must be ready with the reheated rice and reheated beans with Swiss chard, right there at the pan where these rellanos are fried.

Rellanos are strange things to bread up and fry.

Because there is no being tidy about it. Three bowls. 1) Seasoned flour 2) scrambled eggs 3) panko bread crumbs

That is all usual, the unusual part is handling these conical shaped peppers sliced open without bothering with toothpicks that only make things worse 

A small chicken scallopini is wrapped with the floppy roasted green chile and with a slice of cheese inserted as a booklet. The loose green booklet is pressed into the flour and coated. This allows the egg to adhere.

The dusted green chile pepper booklet is lifted into the whipped egg and coated completely. Now it is really a mess. The egg allows bread crumbs to adhere. 

In this manner, a coating is built up with a crunchy breadcrumb outer layer. You still have bowls with some egg remaining and still some more bread crumbs remaining.

A pan is heated with butter that has bubbled, fizzed out and turned nutty brown.

"Oh, you just move the whole thing over."

Joe is watching on the other side of the dividing wall. He was surprised to see the wood-block cart moved next to the stove so that the mess of bowls with flour, scrambled egg, breadcrumb and messily coated chile-chicken-cheese booklets are right next to the hot pan.

The plates with rice and beans are on the counter on the other side of the pan, so, everything is close together.

The intention is use all the egg and all the bread crumbs. The rest of it is added in the pan while it is cooking, so, very fast. A bit of back and forth between the bowls of both whipped egg and bread crumbs, added to the pan in pools, then the coated chile relleno, then pour more egg over it, allow it to pool and roll it around as it is frying until the chile is coated and toasted all around. 

It's fun to fry but a little different from other things. It's not exactly a stuffed chile within a crunchy conical pancake, but close. It is a way to think about how to cook the thing. 

And it is wonderful if not a bit of a fried mess. The depth of the roasted chile flavor cannot be overstated and this combination delivers two doses of it in both green and red forms. The red sauce has a very deep flavor on its own, one taste from your fingertip says so. The two together, deep red sauce, deep roasted poblano, with cheese melted in there are all awe-inspiring flavor combinations, so powerfully reminiscent of some lost ancient home and hearth that the chicken becomes nearly incidental, but of course it is not, it is the thing at the center of the glorified wrapping. 

Chile rellenos, red chile sauce

I've opened a pound tin of mild Hatch chiles, so it's going to be chiles chiles chiles around here for a few days. 

This morning it was a tossup between an omelet filled with a chile, or egg-style battered rellenos. Either way it would have eggs. Both would take a red chile sauce. Rellenos won.

I never did this before because they are not my favorite type to have out even though they are the more authentic version. The coating for the chile can be mostly egg, or crisply breaded, or lightly battered, or as we've seen in the previous post, completely gone off the rails with egg-roll wrappers which is my preferred method.

This made a complete mess out of my just cleaned kitchen. I do not recommend it. The whites of three eggs were whipped incompletely. The three yolks combined with two teaspoons flour and 1/4 cup milk. Seasoning is ground cumin, ground cilantro seed, garlic powder, salt and pepper. The yolk batter lightened with the incompletely whipped whites. The chile stuffed with cheese is dunked in the lightened batter and scooped out and placed into shallow oil. Three fourths of  the entire batter was discarded, so a bit of waste there. The stuffed chiles in their puffy batter cook very quickly. Too quickly. They could use a little more time for the cheese inside to melt 100%. 

These are not bad at all, the batter not the least heavy. The tinned Hatch chiles are slightly smaller than regular fresh grocery poblano or Anaheim chiles that are singed and peeled stovetop. Using floppy tinned chiles is a bit weird but a very convenient shortcut. The light batter that I used tended to drip off so the chiles were dipped and scooped full-handed and the whole thing, handful of batter containing a stuffed chile is gently placed on top of the oil. The chile tends to sit there in a pile of foamy batter. I wasn't sure it was going to work but it did work just fine. (I still prefer the egg roll style, and that's just wrong.)

None of this is shown below because the whole work area was too messy to deal. Messy hands coated with batter and rapid cooking both preclude mucking about with lighting and camera. It can be done, yes, and maybe I will, but not today. 

I'm not giving up on non egg-roll wrapper rellenos. There is still the breaded version to try as well as the virtual relleno omelet. 

[Why do I have to teach spellchecker the word relleno? Come on, get with the program already.]

Red chile sauce is easier than I'm making it out to be. Usually just one type of dried red chile is used.  The chiles are opened and de-seeded, then quickly pan fried to sort of activate their oil and flavor. They soften, they become less brittle. Water is added along with salt and pepper. Boiled for a brief 10 minutes. Processed. Forced through a not so fine strainer. The straining is a critical to the smoothness of the sauce, although a bit tedious, it is a step not to be skipped. Olive oil added to finish.

This red chile sauce uses a variety of dry chiles. This is not standard. The inclusion of a single dry chipotle pepper created an exceedingly smokey sauce. There is very little capsicum heat. The flavor of the sauce is complex, the capsicum heat gentle. The flavor is rounded with roasted garlic, cumin, cilantro, and Mexican oregano, black pepper and sea salt. 

I'm bad. I prepared a topping to smother these rellenos as Americans are wont to do. Conceptually, that is just so obscene. The chile is already stuffed, relleno means stuffed in Spanish, and now it is smothered too. Stuffed and smothered. 

Stuffed and smothered. 

The thing that makes me bad is I really smother it. I smother is so much it's unsightly and does not photograph attractively. A photo would never make it in the food porn business. So I photograph it then go back and fix the plate as I will have it. I do this all the time. I fix a plate in accordance to my food stylist intuition, impulses and proclivities, photograph the subject as if that's the way I'm having it, then load the plate with the way I'm really having it.  Like this:

I'm a growing boy, what can I say? 

Okay, so there's that. How 'bout something entirely different and unrelated to food? 

Would you like to see a pop-up card I made for a friend? This took two days and I gave it one shot. Any problems that arose would just have to be fixed. No going back, no starting over, no trials or prototypes or little tests. The background that was started is the background that was used. Any mess would just have to stay. 

Chile rellenos, egg roll style

These are far from authentic, but I sure do like them. 

My first apartment when I was seventeen was a super place. Exploring the neighborhood, I discovered a Mexican restaurant nearby. I had no idea what anything on the menu was. I didn't know the difference between a tortilla and a burrito so I ordered things without knowing what I would get. Chile relleno was one of the last things I tried. They prepared them this way with egg roll wrappers. It's entirely wrong, but I didn't know that. It's what I learned first so it's what I thought chile rellenos were. They became my favorite things with their red chile sauce and smothered in onions and tomato and lettuce. Later when I had authentic rellenos with a fresh egg coating it came as a surprise. I didn't care for them as much and it took awhile to acquire a taste for them. 

For real rellenos you'l want to use fresh poblano chiles and roast the skins off them and de-seed them. Fill with a Mexican cheese. One approach for the coating is to separate eggs, beat the whites, mix in the yolks. (I would be inclined to prepare a batter.) Flavor however you wish. Dust the chiles with flour and coat with the egg and then shallow fry.  

These are much simpler. I didn't bother tonight with a sauce.  My only regret is these chiles are mild. They have great flavor, but they need to be enhanced with another chile type for capsicum heat.

Wedges of cheese are cut from this block and inserted into the chiles. It melts wonderfully and stretches ridiculously like mozzarella. 

The name Queso Quesadilla doesn't even make sense. Cheese little cheese things. (¿)

Here we have the collision of Asia and Central America. I use the won ton version of these wrappers along with diced jalapeños for hors d'œuvre poppers. Modern life is wonderful innit. 

The cheese is stuffed inside the chile. 

If the cheese leaks when it melts you'll hear it in the oil. Remove immediately, they'll be done anyway and it makes a huge and dangerous mess if left in. It cannot always be avoided even with complete sealing. 

These things are great. Since I have the egg roll wrappers opened, and the pound tin of chiles also opened, I'll undoubtedly be having these over the next few days. Maybe I'll make up a batch and freeze them.