Pollo en salsa de cacahuates (chicken in peanut sauce)

A peanut-sauce is something most British people associate with Asian cuisine (think of satay, for instance).

But peanuts, like chiles, are a New World crop, and were brought to Asia from Central and South America by Spanish and Portuguese traders.

A sauce like this is equally unfamiliar to Americans, because most Mexican food in the US is based on Northern Mexican cuisine, whereas this sauce seems to be more Central/Southern Mexican.

For example, I got this recipe from Laura, who runs the Meetup group All Things Mexico in London. She was inspired to share it with the group after a visit to her native Veracruz State, where this dish is a local speciality. Diana Kennedy, the Julia Child of Mexican Cuisine, writes of a similar dish in she had in Mexico City.

As soon as I read Laura's recipe, I knew I had to cook this. Apart from being delicious, it's actually quite simple to prepare.

But most importantly it represents an important aspect of Mexican cuisine that doesn't get the attention deserves.

I read once that archaeological evidence suggests that nuts and seeds were what first prompted ancient Mesoamericans to settle in what is now Mexico.

Peanuts were being sold in the markets of Tenochtitlan when the Spanish arrived in the sixteenth century.

Laura's recipe was:

• 2 chicken breasts

•  150 g peanuts, shelled and skinned (I used salted peanuts and added less salt when seasoning)

• 120 ml cream (I used single cream)

• 1 onion (I used half a large onion)

• 1 chipotle

You can buy dried chipotles from Sainsbury's and sometimes Tesco. Probably the best place to get them is the Cool Chile Company though.

There are also lots of chipotle pastes for sale, but I wouldn't use a bottled chipotle sauce for this dish.

To prepare, put all the ingredients except the chicken into a food predecessor and blend to a smooth sauce. (I ground the peanuts in my molcajete first, because I like to make things harder than they have to be.)

Meanwhile, cook your chicken. I poached mine for about 20 minutes with the rest of the onion, a toasted avocado leaf, and ten black peppercorns.

When your chicken is done, heat some oil in so pan and fry the sauce for a few minutes. It reduces and darkens to a lovely medium brown colour. And it smells delicious.

Now put the chicken on a plate and cover with the sauce.

Laura recommended serving with white rice, but I had just bought some blue masa harina, so I served them with blue corn tortillas instead.

 
I did NOT turn this into tacos, however. Tacos are antojitos; this is a plato fuerte.

The chicken was tender and juicy from the poaching and the sauce is easily the most delicious thing I've cooked in a long time.

I served the rest of the sauce in a bowl on the side and Mrs MexiGeek and I happily finished it off in one sitting.

There are a couple things in particular I find interesting about this recipe.

First: nothing gets roasted on the comal. It's a very "light" sauce in terms of colour (though, as you can imagine, very rich as well).

Second: only one chipotle. Although I'm an infamous chile-head, one misconception about Mexican food I'd like to set straight is that all Mexican food is blow-your-head-off spicy.

It's not. There are some hot chiles in Mexico, and some very picante dishes; but the role of chiles in Mexican food is to enhance flavour.

This sauce has so nice "afterglow" (to use Diana Kennedy's phrase). The smokiness of the chipotle in particular gives it a depth of flavour and makes it very different from an Asian peanut sauce.

And lastly, this is so quick to make you could have this any night of the week.

If you make the sauce while the chicken and rice are cooking this dish probably represents about 45 minutes from prepping to plating.

And how awesome is it to cook an authentic Mexican meal mid-week, especially one that's a world away from fajitas and other pseudo-Mexican food?

Sopa de Lima

I've decided to name my protagonist Esteban, after my brother, who learned to cook before I did.
Although he is a Mexican, Esteban (my fictional character) was born in the US, while his parents were living there illegally, so he is a de facto American citizen (unless Bush changed that rule). However, he was deported with his parents soon after he was born, and he grew up in Tijuana.
But that's not where his parents come from. They are from Oaxaca, and that is the culinary heritage he usually looks to when creating his food.

The other cuisine he becomes enamoured of is Yucatecan. And that's where sopa de lima comes in.

Almost all Americans from the southwest will be familiar with tortilla soup (and if you're not, you need to try it). Well, sopa de lima (lime soup) is the Yucatecan variation. A the name implies, it is flavoured with fresh lime juice, which adds such a compelling lift that I've completely gone off making the non-lime kind.

Sopa de lima was the first recipe I cooked from <i>Two Cooks and a Suitcase</i> (in effect launching me on my culinary adventure), and it was an instant hit.

As with all traditional soups, there are as many versions of the recipe a there are grannies and old aunties who make it. So when I got four new Mexican cookbooks for my birthday this year, I found lime soup recipes in three of them (and standard tortilla soup recipes in all four).
I recently tried one of the new recipes, but unfortunately it just inspired me to return to the Two Cooks one.

The recipe is really very simple, which for me is part of the attraction. To make a batch for two people (until Abby starts eating dinner with us we'll be cooking for two most nights) you need:

2 chicken breasts
1 roasted tomato, roughly chopped
1 roasted red pepper, roughly chopped
1 white onion, roughly chopped
2 cloves of garlic, roasted and roughly chopped
1 chile pepper, roasted or pickled (NOT raw), seeded and diced
1 tablespoon of Mexican oregano
The juice of one lime

The chile you use is a matter of some controversy. The habanero is the ubiquitous chile of the Yucatán. It is also the hottest chile known to humankind, and it has a very distinct flavour. The only recipe I know that calls for it in the soup proper is Thomasina Miers' in <i>Mexican Food Made Simple</i>. Which is not to say I doubt you'll ever get this soup with habanero in the Yucatán; I'm just saying be sure you know what you're getting into.

The other recipes I have call for a green chile, which I usually read as "jalapeño", though it could be any green chile.

You'll also need somecorn tortillas, cut into strips and fried.

Though roasting tomatoes, garlic, peppers, and chiles is not hard, one of the great things about this soup, is that there's a cheat version. Use pre-roasted, stuff out of a jar and some diced, pickled jalapeños (even Tesco has these now). And for the tortilla strips, get a bag of tortilla chips and crush them.

Basically, bung everything except the tortillas in a pot and cover with water. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat to medium and simmer for about 20 minutes or until the chicken is fully cooked and tender.

Remove the chicken breasts to a plate, let them cool briefly, then shred them. I make a cut against the grain and rapidly shred the meat with a fork, like waiters do with crispy duck in Chinese restaurants.

Now strain the soup. The first time I did this I felt very weird about throwing away all the bits, but all the flavour by now will have gone into the broth, so there's no need to keep the chopped bits, and  they would be very off-putting floating around in the soup.

Place some shredded chicken into each bowl, add some broth, and top with the crispy, fried tortilla strips, and maybe some chopped coriander and a lime wedge.

The variation I tried recently came from Diane Kennedy's <i>Essential Cuisines of Mexico</i>.
Kennedy is meant to be the Julia Childs of Mexican cooking, so I had high hopes for this recipe. However, there were two issues with it which made it less successful than the simpler Two Cooks version.

The first issue was the amount of chile. Whereas Two Cooks calls for one chile, Kennedy gives a specific weight of chopped chile. I initially took this as good sign, as chiles can vary in size. However, the jalapeños I used came from Mexico (there was no English on the can), and were very hot. Jalapeños can very from 2,500 to 5,000 Scoville units, and these were definitely at the higher end of that. This meant the final soup was far too spicy.

The problem with this isn't that we're chile-wussies. It's that the dish ended up lacking balance.
Balance was something I heard them talk about a lot on Masterchef, bit I never really understood it until I cooked this soup for the first time. No one flavour overpowered the others; nothing got lost in the shuffle. Everything was there in just the right amount, working in harmony. It was beautiful. That kind of balance is impossible to achieve if the chiles drown out all the other flavours.

The other issue was the chicken. Kennedy calls for chicken on the bone, which is probably more authentic than breast. However, I suspect that chicken legs and thighs simply can't get tender enough in 20 minutes, the ready breasts can. The meat was difficult to shred, and still had a chewy texture. Mexican chicken tends to be more active (and therefore tougher) than battery farm chicken (we used organic, free-range chicken). As a result, Mexicans often boil chicken (and other meat) for a long time to soften it - much longer than 20 minutes. Failing that, I think you're going to need breast meat.

However, I did learn some interesting things from this experiment. Kennedy omits the roasted sweet pepper and does not use roasted tomato (odd, since she has a fool-proof method of roasting toms that Rick Bayless also cites in his book Authentic Mexican). However,as I began simmering the soup, the aroma was immediately familiar, and there was nothing in the pot at this point except chopped garlic, Mexican oregano, and water. This suggests that the true soul of this dish consists of of those two ingredients (so if you wanna make this soup, you better get hold of Mexican oregano).

The other thing I'll take with me is Kennedy's garnish idea. Although she doesn't use habanero in the soup proper, she recommends roasting some, skinning and seeding it, and chopping it finely. Then you put the chopped habanero in a dish on the table for diners to help themselves (put a small spoon in the dish as well, as it's dangerous to touch chiles with your bare hands).

This added lovely flavour and colour to the soup, and as it's on the side, anyone who doesn't want their head blown off can just leave it out.

Birriani

I swear I don't do this on purpose, but often when I've cooked something spicy, like Mexican or Indian food, I taste it and say "Good: that's got a nice tingle, but it's not too spicy." Then I look over at my wife, whose eyes are wide open, like a deer in headlights, and she says "Actually it's quite spicy."
This happens nearly every time I cook. FAIL!
I guess I just like my food muy picante. I can't help it. I find chiles are one of those things that you need more and more of. But I'd rather have that with chiles than heroin.
Anyway, in a previous post I mentioned my love of the biryani, and that the first time I had it (at Original Khushi's here in Edinburgh), it came the über-traditional way in an earthenware pot, sealed with unleavened dough that had turned into a chapati.
So when I came across a dish called a "birria" in Rick Bayless's book Authentic Mexican, a dish cooked in an earthenware pot and sealed with masa (corn tortilla dough), I immediately thought "Maybe this is like a Mexican equivalent to the biryani!"
(You'll recall from my post on Indian food that I'm a bit obsessed with the similarities between these two cuisines.)
Unfortunately a close reading of the birria recipe revealed this not to be the case. But it was too late: the idea was already in my head. I was about to unleash upon the world the Mexican-Indian fusion dish I call the birriani.
(See what I did there? Combining the two names into one? That's what linguists call a portmanteau.)
First, let's talk about the differences between the biryani as usually found in Britain and the birria as described in Rick Bayless's book. (I also consulted a birria recipe from Diana Kennedy, but chose to base my creation more on Rick's version, apart from using multiple kinds of chile).

Obviously the seasonings are very different, but apart from that:

In the UK, biryanis usually have diced meat. The birria, by contrast, is a slow-cooked full cut of meat, such as a shoulder (or even the whole animal, if you're feeding your extended familia).
No rice in the birria. This is the main difference. It ain't a biryani without the rice. It's the rice that makes it. In fact, in Madhur Jaffrey's book, the biryani is in the rice section at the back (after the bread section). In Bayless's book, the birria is in the meat section.

The birria is slow-cooked in a huge pot, on a rack, below which is some water. Thus the meat not only roasts, but steams as well, remaining moist throughout. More importantly, the juices drip down and and mix with the water to form the base of the sauce.

The biryani, by contrast, doesn't use water this way, and the finished dish remains "dry". In the UK, it therefore tends to be accompanied by a vegetable curry.

My favourite difference: the HEAT! The birria begins with a chile paste, and if you recall the intro to this post, you can probably guess the finished dish is quite spicy. The Biryani, though, contains no chile. It it is a mild dish. The heat comes solely from the side curry (which I always ask to be as hot as possible, though the chefs never believe me).

As I said, in planning this combination dish, I stayed closer to Rick Bayless's birria than Diana Kennedy's. However, there is one feature of Kennedy's version I borrowed: using more than one kind of chile.
Rick Bayless only calls for dried guajillos. Kennedy calls for guajillos, anchos, and even some cascabels.

But where to get these chiles? Lupe Pinto's, obviously. Except I didn't have time to drive all the way from Corstorphine to Tollcross, owing to being away for the Easter weekend, combined with potty-training my two-year-old (which pretty much stops you leaving the house).

But believe it or not, Tesco carries dried chiles! I started noticing it a few years ago. They often have anchos, and I have also seen cascabels. More recently they have started carrying something that really impressed me: "dried" chipotles!

In case you don't know, a chipotle is a smoked jalapeño. The word itself means "smoked chile" (in Nauhatl, I believe). Although I have developed a strong affection for the habanero, the chipotle remains my all-time favourite chile (it's the smoky flavour). But even in the US I had only every seen them tinned and soaked in a chile sauce (en adobo). So getting them in their dry form here in the UK was very exciting.
Tesco were out of anchos that day; luckily I had some left over from when I made mole poblano. The rest of the chile paste was all chipotle. This had become a smoky dish. (A significant change, as neither of the birria recipes call for chipotles).
The next decision to make was what rice recipe to use. The biryani uses plain basmati rice, seasoned with saffron milk. But I chose to use one of the Mexican "coloured" rice dishes. Originally I wanted the red rice, to go with the tomato sauce of the birria, but we happened to have a helluva lotta spinach that needed used, so I went for green rice or arroz verde (my wife's favourite, and mine as well, truth be told) instead.
And finally, the cooking method. I had flirted with the idea of keeping the rack and the water, and putting the rice in the water so both elements cook st the same time. But the lamb has a different cooking time than the rice, so it wouldn't have worked.
I still had to decide whether to marinate the meat. The birria recipe calls for the lamb to be marinated in the chile paste overnight, if possible. The biryani recipe I had called for no marinating at all.
I eventually decided to follow the biryani cooking method and the birria ingredients list (in both cases, more or less), and deemed marinating to be part of the cooking method (it tenderizes the meat). So I ditched it. No marinating.
Now, to the cooking.
(I discussed arroz verde in a previous post, so I won't repeat the recipe here.)
First, I made the chile paste: one or two ancho chiles and about 28 grams of chipotle.
Tear them into flat pieces and toast them on both sides in a dry pan until the skin blisters, then put them into a bowl, cover with boiling water, weigh them down with a plate, and let them soak for about 20 minutes. This is the standard way to reconstitute dried chiles, by the way.
Because I had no cascabels, I was worried the sauce wouldn't be spicy enough. So I saved the seeds from the chipotles, toasted them, and ground them with a bit of cumin and black peppercorns.
In the meantime I roasted three tomatoes and a clove of garlic, as described in my post on mole poblano. After I skinned the tomatoes, I put them into a molcajete with a teaspoon of Mexican oregano and ground that into a rough sauce.
When the chiles were done, I removed them from the water and blitzed them with the ground seeds, cumin, and peppercorns, along with a pinch of sugar and as much of the chile-water as needed to keep the paste running through the blades (using the chile-water instead of plain water is a trick I learned from making the mole).
Then I heated some vegetable oil in a pan to medium-high and browned the diced lamb on all sides. I removed it tho a plate, lowered the heat to medium, and fried the chile paste until it thickened and darkened a bit.
Then I returned the lamb to the pan, turned the heat down to low and covered the pan, adding more chile-water as needed to keep the mixture wet.
The lamb simmers for 30 minutes at this point, so this is when I made the rice.
After 30 minutes, I added the tomato sauce to the lamb and let the whole thing simmer another 30 minutes. By this time the rice was done.
Now, bringing it all together: I put a layer of green rice in the bottom of a casserole dish, then added all the lamb and sauce (it was still quite wet at this point, due to the slow-and-low cooking). Then I covered it with the rest of the rice.
I had considered sealing the pot with masa, but opted instead for kitchen foil as per the Madhur Jaffrey recipe. So I covered the casserole dish with foil and put the lid on. Then into an oven at 170° C for an hour.
It's a rustic dish ("birria" means something like "mess" in Spanish) but I tried to put it in as neat a pile as possible on the plate. I garnished it with cilantro (coriander), chopped white onion, and half a lime, which added a nice citrus lift.
The verdict? I can't say it's an improvement on the biryani, but that's largely because I love a good biryani. However, there's no getting away from the fact that my birriani was A) delicious and B) spicy as hell.
The dish still has a way to go before it becomes "refined". Also, I would like to try it with the red rice, and maybe a bit of diary, like crema espesa (a traditional biryani includes yoghurt).
The other thing this dish proves is the versatility of the biryani cooking technique. It's a great way to create a combination meat-and-rice dish.