Lupe Pinto's Tollcross Chili Cook Off: Why I picked the runner-up

Last year I attended Lupe Pinto's annual Chili Cook Off as an ordinary punter. This year I got a Judge's Ticket.

Once again, Tollcross was decked out in papel picado and Mexican flags, making the coolest city in Scotland even cooler.

This is a great event with a great vibe. People dress up. People paint their faces. People bring their kids. Nobody goes hungry.

Let me explain how this works. Ten venues in the Tollcross area, most of which are pubs, cook up some chili. People buy tickets from Lupe Pinto's, which entitles them to sample the chili. Then they rate it from 1 to 10 on three factors: taste; texture; and originality.

Entering the Tollcross from the west, I stopped first at Lebowskis on Morrison Street, last year's winner.

As before, they advertised the ingredients list and the concept, this year a "green chili" made of slow-cooked pork ("slow-cooked" is an adjective you're going to see a lot in this post) and three kinds of green chile (note I spell it differently when it refers to the ingredient instead of the dish), cooked in chicken stock to give it a pale colour, and served with a slice of lime.

The concept was certainly original. I've never made green "chili" before. Whereas last year the chili had a few different meat ingredients, this year it was just the pork, kind of like carnitas. It was soft as you like, but one piece in my sample was a wee bit fatty, so I had to deduct a bit on texture. The flavour, however, fired on all cylinders. In fact, it was the most Mexican-tasting chili I've ever had. (Chili is not actually a Mexican dish; it's the state dish of Texas, which used to be part of Mexico, but definitely has its own cusine.) So my soft spot in this area caused me to pick Lebowskis as the winner on flavour again this year.

However, there was a new kid on the block this year: Burger, on Fountainbridge. Their star ingredient was slow-cooked beef short rib, which really paid off in the texture. But the taste was the real asset. They managed a perfect marriage of sweet and smoky. It was a more traditional idea for a chili (beef, rich dark sauces, smoke), so I gave it less points on originality, but in all other ways it was masterful.

It was also quite the crowd-pleaser. Everywhere I went the buzz was about Burger's chili. I could tell it was going to win.

Burger's winning chili, with its ample accompaniments.

At this point I could have considered revising my original scores, but for me, the Mexican flavour of the three green chiles, one of which was a poblano, is still my personal number one.

But, Burger's chili was equally excellent, and I accept the people's democratic choice.

Tamale Pie (no, really)

I still remember when I first got Two Cooks and a Suitcase, the Lupe Pintos cookbook that effectively launched my journey into authentic Mexican food.

Near the beginning Doug Bell and Rhoda Robertson wrote "if you make only one recipe from this book, make tamales or tamale pie". I made both on the same night.

Now, "tamale pie" isn't something I remember eating as a kid. In California we mostly have norteña style tamales with a savoury filling, wrapped in a corn husk and steamed.

But the amazing thing about tamales is that they have about a million variations throughout Mexico.

One of those variations is a kind of tamale pie called Muk-Bil Pollo, typical of the Yucatán.

(The Yucatán is one of the regions where Doug Bell and Rhoda Robertson lived in Mexico; Two Cooks and a Suitcase is teeming with Yucatecan recipes.)

So this year, for día de los muertos, I decided to make a tamale pie as a kind of simplified version of Muk-Bil Pollo.

With limited success.

The main issue with anything tamal-related is time, because you but only have to mix up some tamal dough, but also make a filling, and then the dish will need 45 minutes to an hour's cooking time.

For the pie version, you can dispense with the faff of rolling the tamales into corn husks, but this doesn't save as much time as I'd hoped.

The other issue I had in particular was the filling itself. I read a traditional recipe for Muk-Bil Pollo and found it was another of these achiote-marinated fillings, which I've been eating a lot of recently.

I simplified the dish by omitting the pork (Muk-Bil Pollo is traditionally a combination of chicken and pork) and the banana leaves (again, traditionally you would wrap the pie in a banana leaf before baking it).

Even so, I was cooking for several hours.

The finished dish was good. But it wasn't really great. It was certainly not the best thing I've ever put into a tamal.

However, the kids loved it (I made them a chile-free version); my four-year-old ate about twice as much of it as she usually does of things I cook.

I just kind of ended up wishing it was filled with pollo en salsa verde.

Definitely not pollo en salsa verde

If you want too make this, you'll need to make the filling first.

I poached some chicken breasts with a quartered white onion, 3 cloves of garlic, 10 black peppercorns, and a teaspoon of Mexican oregano.

Then I shredded the chicken and reserved the stock for the tamal dough.

I roasted some red, yellow and green bell peppers on a hot dry frying pan until they blackened a bit, then cut them into strips (rajas).

I made a sauce by reconstituting two chiles guajillos and blending them with one recipe of recado rojo, adding enough of the chiles' soaking water to make it a loose, pourable sauce.

Then I diced half a red onion and sweated it for a few minutes in a frying pan over medium high.

Then I added the rajas and fried them a few minutes more.

Then I added the shredded chicken and fried it until the chicken took on some texture.

Then I added the sauce and continued cooking until everything was heated through.

For the tamal dough, I sifted 300 g of masa harina with 1/3 tsp of baking powder.

Then I poured in 150 g of melted butter (you can also use pork lard) and mixed it gently until it was fully incorporated.

Then I gradually poured in 250 mL of chicken stock, mixing all the time, until I had a soft dough.

Then I greased a casserole dish, lined the bottom and sides with dough about 5 cm thick.

Then I added the filling and covered it with the remaining dough. This is hard, because if you pat the dough down too hard the filling will squidge out.

Cover the dish and bake at 180° C for 45 minutes.

I sold this to my kids as "Mexican cornbread", and it does have a "breadier" texture than steamed tamales, verging on being too dry. It's possible I overbaked it slightly, or perhaps if I'd used the banana leaves I could have preserved some of the moisture.

In any case, I have to admit I still prefer steamed tamales, especially considering that tamale pie isn't much less work.

If you're going to spend three straight hours in the kitchen you might as well have classic tamales.

I served the tamale pie with some salsa verde I got from La Costeña, which was very good and the perfect complement to the richness of the filling.

On the side I whipped up a "winter salad" of watercress, avocado, sliced radish, satsumas, and pomegranates, with a dressing of lime juice, extra virgin olive oil, and minced shallot. Delicious!

This was the highlight of the meal.

Next year I think I'll opt for pumpkin and chorizo tamales. Can't go wrong with that!

By the way: if you wanna have a go at this but don't wanna use the same filling, try poaching the chicken and prepping the rajas as above, but fry them in salsa verde (store-bought or homemade) instead of the achiote sauce. You can even loosen it up with a bit of crema or sour cream. Simple but delicious.

And on a final geeky note, in Spanish, the singular of tamales is tamal, but in English tamale is an acceptable singular. 

Breakfast with MexiGeek: more fun with queso fresco

The morning after making queso fundido I found myself with leftover cheese and tortillas, plus my homemade coriander pesto and a bottle of Cholula.

So I fried two tortillas (because one just wasn't enough), then fried an egg over-easy in the same oil.

The tortillas were homemade too, by the way. I had replenished my supply of Maseca on a recent trip to Lupe Pinto's. I pretty much bought everything they had in the shop.

I spread one tortilla with my coriander pesto, put the egg on top, then sprinkled it with Cholula and crumbled queso fresco from Gringa Dairy.

For the record I topped the lot with the other tortilla and sprinkled some more Cholula, but I went for an open-faced presentation for the photo.

The coriander pesto doesn't show up in the photo (drag) but it was still delicious.

Mole poblano 1: The Meaning of Mole

[First published on 9 January 2012]

I have made the mole poblano. It really does take four days.

Out of respect for the epic (or baroque) undertaking that is mole, I will be posting this episode of my culinary adventure in several parts so you can experience, as much as possible, what it was really like to create this dish.

I would also like to point out that I prepared the sauce entirely from scratch with the following three exceptions:

1) the turkey was leftover Christmas turkey, which I didn't cook (that was my lovely wife)

2) the slice of stale brioche was from a store-bought loaf; I don't know how to make brioche (though I did make some killer French toast over the holidays)

3) the stale corn tortilla I bought from Lupe Pintos (Cool Chilli Company brand); I do know how to make tortillas, but  I didn't want to make a entire batch of tortillas just to let one go stale

I didn't end up making the mole on Christmas Eve as I originally intended. I was busy making carrot and star anise soup (our starter for Christmas dinner), and the rest of the time the kitchen was a flurry of prepping the Christmas veggies, making bread sauce, and preparing Christmas Eve's dinner (saumon en croute).

Mrs MexiGeek also made port wine jelly for dessert, so it was definitely worth delaying my own cooking plans.

So my ingredient odyssey begins on 30 December, when my wife picked up some tomatoes, onion, and garlic for me from the local shop, along with the brioche, pumpkin seeds and whole almonds.

The next day was Hogmanay, and I a trip into town to visit Lupe Pinto's. As expected, they had the holy trinity of chiles: anchos, mulatos, and pasillas (and if they hadn't, no one else would've).

I also picked up some unground coriander seeds and, from the Co-op across the street, raisins and sesame seeds. That, combined with what I already had, completed the ingredients list. It doesn't sound like a lot now, but a full catalogue follows in the next instalment.

Now, I hope you will forgive me a moment of baroque grandeur when I insist that the meaning of mole is manifest in its ingredients.

Mole poblano may be Mexico's national dish, but it is not its most frequently eaten and is certainly not its oldest.

Instead, mole dates back to the colonial period, when Mexico was ruled by Spain. The factual origins of mole have long vanished behind a much-questioned but oft-repeated legend that a nun called Sor (Sister) Andrea was tasked with preparing a special dish for a visiting Spanish cardinal.

She tried to concoct something new. Something that no one had ever tasted before. Something that no one could have tasted had Spain not established a great empire in five continents (two of which were entirely new to Europe), and spread the culinary riches of each throughout their territories.

Mole, you see, combines the best of the New World with the best of Africa, Asia, and good old Europe. It is both an expression and celebration of the extent of Spanish power. How strange that it should in time become an expression of national pride for Mexico, which fought so hard to free itself from Spain.

Next time I will list each of the 20+ ingredients of mole, along with their significance.

In the meantime, here is a picture of the three chiles. The large, somewhat reddish bunch on the left are the chiles anchos (wide chilies). The smaller, black chiles in the middle are chiles mulatos, which I don't have to translate. The long dark chiles on the right are pasillas ("little raisins").

And lastly, for my non-Scottish readers, Hogmanay is New Year's Eve. It is a noun, not a greeting. And though its etymology is unknown, it is probably not Gaelic.