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?

A Real Oaxacan Smoked Chile Paste: Gran Luchito (product review)

This is possibly the most exciting Mexican product to arrive in the UK since I’ve lived here: a real Oaxacan smoked chile paste called Gran Luchito.

It’s exciting not only because it’s delicious - which it is - but because it used to be available pretty much in only one part of Mexico.

Gran Luchito is made in Oaxaca, a state in the south of Mexico (bordering Guatemala). Oaxaca is one of the culinary capitals of Mexico and is world-famous for its distinctive regional cuisine, including chiles so rare they aren’t even widely available in the rest of Mexico, let alone all the way across the Atlantic.

Chief among these is the pasilla de Oaxaca, a smoked chile exclusive to the region. I’ve read about this chile many times, in many books. They all say the only place to get it is a market stall in Oaxaca - if you’re lucky, because it’s becoming increasingly rare.

The elusive pasillas de Oaxaca.

You can’t just nip down to Tijuana and pick up some of these chiles. They ain’t there. But they are the star ingredient in Gran Luchito.

So how does it taste?

Gran Luchito is a smoked chile paste, somewhat like a chipotle paste, but much deeper and more complex.

It has a gorgeous aroma, and because it’s sweetened with agave nectar (agave is the plant from which mezcal and tequila are made) rather than sugar, the sweetness is more natural and subtler than that of commercial chipotle pastes, which tend to use refined sugar.

Heat-wise it’s at least as hot as a chipotle paste, which most people seem to rate as 7/10. I can’t quite decide whether I think it’s slightly hotter, because for me chile heat takes a backseat to chile flavour, which Luchito has in spades.

I’m a guy who LOVES chipotles, but Luchito could honestly make you switch.

How do you use it?

The producers advertise its versatility, because it can be used on its own or as an ingredient in other dishes.

On its own I like to spread it on toast or a warm tortilla. It can really liven up a sandwich as well. I also mixed some in with my homemade Sikil p’ak (Mayan pumpkinseed and tomato sauce) for a Yucatecan/Oaxacan fusion.

Mixing some Luchito into a sauce or mole will give it a beautiful, smoky dimension, and it would be an incredible marinade for roasting or grilling meat.

You can also transform it into a delicious salsa by simply blending a tablespoon or two with a of couple roasted tomatoes and one or two cloves of garlic.

Don’t overdo the garlic because there’s already some garlic in Luchito, and make sure you blend to a rough, textured consistency.

This salsa will blow your mind, and it's great for dipping or to spoon on top of tacos or other dishes.

You can also substitute tomatillos for the tomatoes (if you have some). The contrast between the smokiness of the Luchito and the tartness of the tomatillos is incredible.

The other great thing about Luchito is that’s it’s easy to use. Many, many Mexican recipes call for you to make your own chile paste, usually by toasting dried or smoked chiles in a dry pan, soaking them in boiled water, and then grinding or blending them down. Luchito have basically done that for you.

Así se hace en México. They grind the chiles with a metate so you don't have to!

As making a chile paste is one of the more labour-intensive steps in making a sauce or mole, having a jar of Gran Luchito means you can have a authentic Mexican meal midweek. And how can you not be amazed by the possibility of cooking with authentic Oaxacan flavours after work on a Wednesday?

Now, I like to be balanced in my reviews, so I tried to think of any negatives, but I really can't. This is just a delicious and exciting product and I'm amazed that we can actually get this here in the UK.

So where do you get it?

Probably the easiest way is online from Gran Luchito’s website. (They also sell dried pasillas de Oaxaca. Awesome!)

Or you can check your local Mexican deli, grocer, or shop (if you’re lucky enough to have one near you).

I’ll be ordering another jar of this shortly, as well as some of the dried chiles (which I need to make mole negro). And a lot of my chipotle-based recipes are already becoming Luchito recipes.

MexiGeek can’t go to Oaxaca, but Oaxaca has come to MexiGeek!

Burritos al pastor

¿Burritos al pastor? ¿Que?

That's right. I put the al pastor filling in a flour tortilla. Now what would possess me to do that?

Well, I've been looking for something Mexican to cook after those disastrous polvorones, and the same friend for whom I baked them loaned me Down the Rabbit Hole by Juan Pablo Villalobos, which, by the way, you all should read.

Apart from the usual things you'd expect from great literature, this book made me want to do two things: learn Nahuatl and cook tacos al pastor (shepherd's tacos).

These tacos are apparently quite famous, but I'd never heard of them. And whenever I discover a Mexican dish I've never heard of, I have to cook it.

First, allow indulge in a bit of background and literary criticism (because old habits die hard). The tacos al pastor come into the story when the boy narrator, Tochtli, lists the foods he likes. It is interesting to note that all the Mexican dishes on his list (including enchiladas and tacos al pastor, but without the pineapple, which is "ridiculous" in a taco) are antojitos: starters or snacks. Proper Mexican main dishes like pozole and mole don't float his boat.

This could be simple childish fussiness, but it could also be Americanization of Mexican cuisine, for it is Americans who have taken a small number of Mexican antojitos and turned them into main meals, while ignoring the more challenging dishes. This is especially likely considering that, of the several world currencies he and his drug-dealing family have, their favourite are the US dollars.

Anyway, I looked up the recipe online and found a promising one on Rick Bayless' website. However, I had made tacos fairly recently, and while I enjoy making and eating them, it is quite a faff. Also, being antojitos, I don't anticipate they will feature prominently on Esteban's menu.

Also, I had remarked to my wife that, whereas for like 9 years whenever I made Mexican food I made classic American-style "combination plate" beef and bean burritos, since embarking on my journey through real Mexican food I haven't made one burrito.

But I still like burritos, even if they were possibly invented in San Francisco. And like tacos, they can be filled with anything. So I thought, why not make burritos al pastor?

This was an exciting opportunity for me, because it was my first chance to make Yucatecan achiote paste (recado rojo).

So what is achiote? It's a tree/shrub that grows in Mexico. It's called achiotl in Nahuatl (bizarrely, since the Yucatán is a Mayan region and Nahuatl is the Aztec language). You might know it by its Brazilian name, annatto.

The seeds of this tree are these tiny super-hard red pyramid-looking things, which are ground up with other spices and used to season meat throughout the Yucatán. Since I first read about it I've been dying to make it.

Where do you get achiote in Edinburgh? Lupe Pinto's of course. While I was there I also got some homemade flour tortillas, a tin of chipotles en adobo, a tin of tomatillos, three kinds of dried chile, some deadly hot naga chile sauce, and some pumpkin pie mix before the fucking Canadians kipe it all.

(By the way, though more and more supermarkets are stocking dried chipotles, Lupe Pinto's is still the only place in Edinburgh to get them en adobo; ditto tomatillos.)

Of course I cheated a bit. Lupe Pinto's sells both whole achiote seeds and ground achiote - for the exact same price. Having read about how hard the seeds are (Rick Bayless says even a spice grinder will have trouble with them), I opted for the pre-ground. I love my molcajete, but I'm only so strong.

Anyway, I made up the paste on Tuesday. I followed the Rick Bayless recipe exactly, so I won't repeat it here, but it's basically achiote, some cumin, some coriander seed, some cinnamon, rather a lot of garlic for a Mexican recipe, and some cider vinegar. Oh yeah, black peppercorns and a bit of wheat flour.

Interestingly, though this paste would seem über-traditional, it has clearly been augmented with Asian spices (and European wheat flour), introduced by the conquistadores. Mexico's complex relationship with its former oppressor strikes again.

This paste will keep for months well-sealed in your fridge.

On Friday, I made the full-blown al pastor marinade for the diced pork shoulder. Again, this is a Rick Bayless recipe, so I won't repeat it verbatim, but basically you combine the recado rojo with (for the amount of meat I was using) two chipotles and three tablespoons of the adobo sauce. Add some olive oil (another contemporary innovation I'm sure, as olives are traditionally scarce in Mexico), and blend.

I used pork shoulder that was already diced, and I marinaded the meat overnight.

Pay attention to the cut of meat you use, by the way. Pork shoulder has enough fat in it to be suitable for slow cooking. Strictly speaking, Rick Bayless' recipe called for you to marinade the un-diced shoulder overnight. Then you grill the cuts on a barbecue. Then you dice or shred the meat. This would make these tacos al carbón (tacos with a grilled or roasted meat filling). However, I had a side dish to prepare, and I needed the meat to just go away and cook slowly for a while.

So I browned the meat cubes on all sides, then added all the marinade (most recipes recommend keeping some back for other dishes) along with the pineapple chunks, covered the pot and put it in a fan-assisted oven on 160° C for an hour. This makes the tacos (or burritos in my case) de cazuela (tacos/burritos with a stewed or casserole filling).

Now, two Mexican things I'm particularly obsessed with are the Yucatecan pickled onions (cebollas en escabeche) and Thomasina Miers' warm sweetcorn salad. So I made batch of the cebollas to go top of the burritos and designed my own variation on the salad.

First, I made a salsa verde. However, I did not add any chile because I'm taking a lesson from Indian cooking and trying to include something non-spicy to balance out the meal. This salad was meant to be the "cooling" counterpart to the chipotles in the burrito filling. But ordinarily you'd want a couple jalapeños in the salsa verde.

Salsa verde

1 tin of tomatillos
1 bunch of cilantro/coriander
1/2 a white onion
A couple cloves of garlic (optional)

(Here is where I would list the chiles, which I didn't use this time. Just remember use pickled jalapeños or else roast them first, unless you intend to fry the sauce before eating)

Put all this in a blender, add some water to keep it loose, and blend to a fairly thick consistency (I made mine smooth and velvety, because of what I planned to do with it).

I may have accidentally ripped the above recipe off, by the way, but salsa verde, like the basic tomato salsa, is simplicity itself, so it's hard to write a recipe for it that differs significantly from all the other ones.

For the bulk of the salad I cut the kernels of one cob of sweetcorn (it is vital that you use raw corn on the cob for this or the corn will probably turn to mush. Tinned sweetcorn will have been heat-treated and thus cooked). Then I heated some butter and olive oil over a medium heat and added the corn, stirring constantly for about five minutes. Then I turned the heat way down and stirred occasionally for a further ten minutes.

Meanwhile I shredded one raw carrot, one raw courgette (zucchini), and about five raw radishes.

Mexicans love radishes, by the way. In Oaxaca they even have a holiday, la noche de los rábanos (night of the radishes), when people get together and carve radishes into various shapes. If I wanted to be truly authentic with this dish, I'd have kept one radish back and carved it into a rose or something. But I don't know how.

Anyway, when the corn had gone all sweet and carmelized (but not burnt), I took the pan off the heat, tipped in all the salsa verde and gave it a stir. Then I added all the shredded veg, gave it another stir, and covered the pan.

By now my stewed pork al pastor was ready. I scooped a bit of the filling into each flour tortilla, wrapped them carefully, and toasted them on a dry pan.

Then I put a long rectangle of the salad across each plate, lay the burritos perpendicular on top, and finished with the cebollas en escabeche. Behold: Burritos al Pastor con Ensalada de Verduras en Salsa Verde (photo below).

How did it taste? The veg, salsa verde, and cebollas are old friends of mine and were delicious as expected. Honestly, you can't go wrong with those things.

But the real star was the burrito filling. When I first opened the achiote, I was amazed that such a red powder could have such a "green", almost minty scent. However, after maturing a few says, the finished recado had a darker, spicier smell (and not spicy in the sense of "hot"; remember there's no chile in the recado).

Combined with the pineapple and chipotles this marinade became utterly addictive. So much so that I saved some of the sauce and cooked my eggs in it the next day.

Intriguingly, the sauce had a vaguely Indian flavour, which was either a coincidence or the result of the combination of cumin, cinnamon, and coriander seed (a classic trio in Indian cuisine). Whatever the explanation, it occurred to me this would make an awesome flavouring for my birriani.

The pork was well-cooked. Because I was unsure how it would turn out I served it with steak knives. But while it didn't quite fall apart under fork pressure it put up absolutely no resistance in your mouth.

In terms of spice, I could (as usual), probably have had it hotter, but it was pretty much at my wife's limit of chile tolerance (though thankfully not over it), and she was glad of the cooling salad.

I made this with two persons in mind, but we each had seconds of both meat and veg so this could easily stretch to three or even four servings.

Two final notes: achiote is also used to dye clothing, so wash everything it touches as soon as possible unless you want it to turn red; and no offence meant to Canadians. It's not their fault they celebrate Thanksgiving on Columbus Day.

Salsa, and further adventures with tortillas

I never read recipes for salsa, because I learned how to make it from my mom, like a real Mexican would.

And my mother's salsa is delicious, so why would I use anyone else's recipe? That is the prologue to my adventure with what I call Shut the Front Door Chipotle Sauce.

But first some exposition.

Salsa means "sauce" in Spanish. In English, the word denotes the chunky tomato sauce that is ubiquitous in Mexican cooking (and a "spicy" Latin dance, but that's of no concern to us).

Just take a moment to reflect on how incredible it is that such a general word in Spanish has come to mean such a specific thing in another language. It is an indication of how important the basic tomato sauce is to Mexican food, but also of how thoroughly Mexico has occupied its niche in the international culinary world.

Of course, salsa also means sauce in Italian, and Italy has definitely embraced the tomato (though Mexico, as I love to point out, was born with tomatoes).

But as Rick Bayless writes, there is a marked difference between the taste of a Mexican tomato sauce and an Italian one. I always thought it was down to the chiles. It ain't. It's the asar.

Bayless writes that there are three techniques that make Mexican food distinctive. One of them is braising, charring, blackening, or otherwise cooking things by placing them on a very hot flat metal thing called a "comal". This is how you make carne asada. It's also how you make tortillas. And if a Mexican recipe calls for roasted tomatoes, they mean "tomates asados".

Of course, I don't have a comal. Outside of Mexico, we use a large dry frying pan on a high heat.

Discovering the asar technique was quite exciting for me, because even my own mother often bulks up her salsa with some tinned chopped tomatoes. Purist that I am, I couldn't help wondering what you did before there was such a thing as tinned tomatoes.

But why was I experimenting with other salsa recipes in the first place?

One of my favourite cookbooks is Thomasina Miers' Mexican Food Made Simple, and as I've written before, her approach to tacos is to prepare some fresh, seasonal ingredients with some Mexican herbs and spices (or their equivalents), wrap it in a homemade corn tortilla, and enjoy. This, after all, is what the Mexicans do.

So when my wife said we needed to use up some asparagus, I decided to dice them with some mushrooms and carmelized corn, sauté them in butter with some tarragon (Mexicans love aniseed) and make Spring tacos.

But what kind of sauce to go on top? Well, Thomasina recommends her sweet chipotle paste, and you know how much I love chipotles.

I had no intention of copying her recipe exactly, but I did take some inspiration from it. However, I wanted a sauce, rather than a paste, so mine was much looser. She calls for chipotles en adobo, but I used dried chipotles. She calls for fish sauce, which I didn't use. She doesn't call for Mexican oregano, but I used it, hoping for a kind of barbecue sauce effect when combined with the smoky chipotles. Also, I put in some white onion, just for the helluvit.

I had high hopes that this sauce would be kick-ass, and I was already planning to call it Shut The Front Door Chipotle Sauce. I did not think of it as a salsa, because it was not going to be chunky (I was even planning to sieve it, but when I tasted it, I rather liked the thicker,puree texture).

Now I know I haven't always been very structured in how I communicate recipes. Partly it's because I use a lot of other people's recipes (and they're copyrighted), and partly it's because I view this blog as more a chronicle of my journey with Mexican food, rather than suggestions of what my readers should cook. However I will put down my recipe for Shut The Front Door Sauce before continuing with my story.

Ingredients
6 medium tomatoes
3 cloves of garlic
1 medium white onion, diced
15 g dried chipotles
1 tbsp brown sugar (UK) / raw sugar (US)
1 tsp Mexican oregano

Method
Stem and de-seed the chipotles, reserving the seeds. Reconstitute the chipotles as you would any dried chiles.

Roast the tomatoes and garlic: put a large, dry frying pan on high heat. Put the tomatoes and garlic cloves (still in their papery skins) on the pan. When one side begins to blacken, turn it over (the garlic will blacken first, so keep both eyes on it). Once the tomatoes and garlic have black spots on all sides, remove from the pan and let them cool.

In the same dry pan, roast the seeds for a few minutes, stirring constantly, until they start to change colour. Then grind them immediately with a pestle and mortar.

When the garlic and tomatoes have cooled, remove the skins and core the tomatoes.

Remove the chiles from the boiled water (reserving the water for the sauce).

Put the chiles, tomatoes, garlic, onion, and ground seeds into a blender and blitz, adding some chile water as necessary to keep the mixture running through the blades. The consistency should be loose, with a soft texture, but no visible chunks or lumps.

Taste for seasoning and then add the sugar and oregano, mixing thoroughly. You can add more seasoning if you wish.

Now, right away I thought the sauce tasted good, but was it Shut The Front Door? Not until the next day. This is one of those things where the flavours need to mingle and marry overnight, so make it a day in advance.

Also, the six tomatoes make loads of salsa, without having to resort to any tinned toms, so that's one mystery solved.

Back to my story:

Although I was always happy with mi madre's salsa, I did notice that at some of the better Mexican restaurants the salsa they gave us had a certain je ne sais quois that our family recipe didn't have. However, I never thought to seek it out.

But I found it, practically by accident, while making this sauce! The secret to Mexican salsa is roasted tomatoes and oregano, of all things. (That's Mexican oregano, by the way.)

I love this sauce so much that I am pretty much scrapping my family recipe. From now on, I will use this as the base of my chunky salsa, adding some diced fresh tomato, chopped jalapeño, and fresh herbs to compete it.

I had wanted to take a photo of my sauce in a nice dish, but ended up eating most of it instead. Sorry about that.

The other news is that my tortilla-making skills are coming along nicely. This time I used a combination of traditional hand-patting with rolling in the ziploc bag. The edges were still a bit rustic, but definitely improving.

And finally the two photos: the first is leftover salsa on a sandwich the next day (delicious); the second is my latest batch of homemade tortillas.

Now I'm taking a holiday from the kitchen, but before I go, happy Cinco de Mayo! By the way, this is not Mexican Independence Day. That would be September 16th. Cinco de Mayo is the Battle of Puebla.

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.