Quesadillas con rajas: starring queso fresco from Gringa Dairy

Note the colours of the Mexican flag. Most delicious flag ever.

Quesadillas are not a complicated dish, but they are good for two things:

• They're doable when you don't have a lot of time to cook because you have a three-month-old baby

• They're perfect for testing out the new queso fresco you bought from Gringa Dairy in London

Actually I've been "testing" the cheese since I got it. So has my family. We keep testing it just a little more, to make sure it's still delicious.

It always is.

The cheese has been a major player in my sandwiches all week as well. It even stood up to my homemade chipotle sauce.

For those of you who are whisky drinkers, my favourite single malt is Ardbeg, which should give you an idea of how smoky I make my chipotle sauce.

You might expect a fresh white cheese like queso fresco to get lost when paired with such bold, spicy flavours, but on the contrary it was present in every delicious bite.

My family and I also got through quite a bit of cheese just on its own (pieces of queso fresco are apparently served as botanas - the Mexican equivalent of tapas - in some parts of Mexico).

Until Gringa Dairy started up, you couldn't get queso fresco in this country, so a lot of us won't know what it's like.

Especially confusing to the uninitiated is the variety of substitutes recommended by various recipes, even in the same cookbook. How can one cheese be the equivalent of feta, mozzarella, ricotta, cottage cheese, and halloumi?

Well, there are different styles of queso fresco, which accounts for some of the above, but the cheese does combine several attributes we don't often see together.

Gringa Dairy's queso fresco holds together in a block but can easily be pulled apart into small pieces (not quite the same as crumbling, as it's a bit softer than feta).

It also slices easily.

On the palate it has a gorgeous texture. I've heard some people call it queso fresco creamy; personally I find it has more firmness than that (it's not a soft cheese like brie or Philadelphia), but it does practically melt in your mouth.

It's nowhere near as salty as feta, but slightly more salty than mozzarella, and whereas some mozzarellas are so mild they almost taste of nothing, this cheese has a definite personality.

Best of all for me is the subtle tang it has, sort of like sour cream, that tells your palate "Hey, don't sit down, cuz this is a party!"

So: this cheese is delicious on its own, as a sandwich filling, or as a topping. But what I dying to do was cook with it, and I chose quesadillas con rajas (strips of chile poblano).

(Chiles poblanos aren't in season in Britain yet, so I had to use tinned.)

By far the best way to make quesadillas is to make some tortillas and fill them with cheese before you cook them, but I didn't have that kind of time so I used premade tortillas, filled them and toasted them in a dry pan.

As usual, I recommend the
Cool Chile Company's tortillas if you're not making your own.

And as you can see from the photo, I basically "sandwiched" two tortillas instead of doing the traditional fold-over.

This was purely to fit more cheese into the quesadillas.

I really love this cheese!

And of course an antojito* is nothing without a salsa or two, so I decided to make salsa verde and a red chipotle and tomato salsa cocida (meaning I fried the salsa once more before serving.

For the salsa verde I used tinned tomatillos (fresh ones are not in season here yet), fresh jalapeños, one diced white onion, two cloves of garlic, and lots of chopped coriander.

Everything but the onion goes in the blender.

Pulse-blend until you have a thick, textured salsa (some lime juice wouldn't hurt if you need to loosen it a bit, but you shouldn't need to).

Then add the onions and stir well.

(You can blend the onions too if you don't want a chunky salsa.)

Tinned tomatillos are better than no tomatillos, but because they are less tart than fresh ones, this salsa benefits from frying before serving to intensify the flavour.

("Frying" a sauce to reduce it is one of the most typical Mexican cooking techniques and really makes the difference between a Mexican salsa and a nearly equivalent one from another cuisine.)

I think I've given this chipotle sauce recipe before, but here it is again:

3 tomatoes, roasted on a dry frying pan or comal until they come up in blackened spots

2 cloves of garlic, roasted with the tomatoes

One white onion, roughly chopped

3-6 chipotles en adobo (or to taste)

1-2 (or more) tsp of the adobo sauce
1 tsp Mexican oregano

When you roast the garlic, leave the papery skins on.

It will cook faster than the tomatoes, so keep an eye on it.

When it starts to blacken, turn the cloves over and let them start to blacken on the other side. Then let them cool and the skins should just slip off.

Everything goes into a blender; just like the salsa verde, you're looking for a textured consistency (though you could also strain it for a more "refined" salsa.

I let this chill in the fridge overnight so the flavours could mingle and develop and fried the sauce again before serving.

I served one salsa on each side, with more cheese down the middle, going for the classic Mexican flag theme.

Simple, but delicious! And the cheese makes strings when it "melts", which is another reason people compare it to mozzarella.

I can already see Gringa Dairy is going to change the way I think of cheese in Mexican recipes.

Before, I would think "What's the best substitute for this type of cheese?" Now ink starting to think "Maybe we can get this cheese in Britain soon!"

(Gringa Dairy is planning to introduce more varieties in the near future.)

And finally, I served the quesadillas with fried plátanos machos ("macho bananas" ie plantains).

These were Caribbean style, rather than Mexican style, meaning the skins were still slightly green (in Mexico, they usually wait until the skins turn black before cooking plantains).

Of you've never had fried plantains before, these were kind of like potatoes, only denser, with just the faintest hint of banana flavour.

Next time I'll wait for them to ripen. Maybe.

"Enchiladas" tultecas: not your abuela's enchiladas

Unless you come from Tamaulipas in the Fifties, you have probably never heard of this dish. It ain't what you normally get when you order enchiladas.

I could be missing something, but I think the name means "Toltec 'enchiladas'" (the inverted commas are necessary), though I'm sure I don't know why. Did the Toltecs really eat this?

Considering these are a kind of quesadilla, I'd have to guess "no". Cheese is a Spanish introduction and not found in prehispanic Mexican cuisine.

Even the Diana Kennedy recipe I took inspiration from, which is light on the cheese, includes Spanish-derived things like chorizo.

On the other hand, it's entirely possible some indigenous Mesoamericans worked chile paste into their tortillas, so who knows?

But enough teasing; let's talk about what these things are.

"Enchiladas" tultecas, as I have made them, are essentially a kind of quesadilla made from chile-infused tortilla dough.

A traditional enchilada is a corn tortilla dipped in chile sauce, fried, and stuffed with a delicious filling.

(Outside Mexico, an enchilada is usually a filled tortilla - corn or flour - covered in chile sauce and then baked in the oven.)

A quesadilla, as most of us know it, is a tortilla filled with cheese (and hopefully something else too), folded over and grilled on a comal or griddle.

But there is another way to make quesadillas. You make some corn tortillas, but before you cook them you fill them with cheese and fold them over. Then you can asar-roast them on the comal or fry them.

I have always wanted to try this, and "enchiladas" tultecas seemed like the perfect opportunity.

The first step is to make the "enchillied" tortilla dough.

Unfortunately, Kennedy is one of these masa purists who don't believe in using masa harina. So she just calls for some masa (that you presumably either ground yourself or bought from your local tortilla factory) "as dry as possible".

The fact that I got mine to work is down to an accident: my kitchen scales just broke. So when I tried measure out my usual 250 g of masa harina, I got somewhat more than that.

I remember thinking "That looks like quite a bit of masa harina. Oh well."

So when I added the 300 ml of hot water, the mixture never quite became a dough. It was just too dry.

Ordinarily I'd be fucked, but in this case it was a stroke of luck, because I had a rather wet chile paste to work into this dough.

Because my scales were broken I don't really know how much masa harina went in. To recreate this I would suggest adding 300 g of masa harina to 300 ml of hot water, then keep adding masa harina a tablespoon at a time until you can no longer incorporate it into the dough.

The chile paste is made from two dried ancho chiles. Anchos are dried chiles poblanos and a staple of Mexican cooking. They look like this:

I get my anchos from The Cool Chile Company

This is them, out of the bag.

If I had peso for every Mexican recipe I've read that calls for ancho chiles, I'd quit my job and open a restaurant. If you have only one kind of dried chile in your store cupboard, it should be chiles anchos.

They are also the main ingredient in enchilada sauce, so they are the classic flavour of enchiladas.

My recipe called for two chiles to be worked into the tortilla dough, plus I used one for the filling.

Ancho chile paste

Take the stems off two ancho chiles, then tear the chiles into flat pieces.

Put the chile pieces on a hot, dry frying pan and toast them for a few seconds on each side. As these are wrinkly-skinned chiles, you'll have to press down with your spatula.

After a few seconds they should release their aroma and you'll see the skin start to blister. The red colour of the flesh will be more apparent then before toasting.

(Some books call this a "tobacco colour" but I don't smoke. It looks pretty red to me.)

Once all the chiles are toasted, put them in a bowl, cover with just-boiled water, weigh them down with a plate, and let them soak for about ten minutes.

Remove the chiles with tongs and blend to a paste, adding a bit of the soaking water as necessary to keep the blades from sticking. I use a hand blender because two chiles doesn't make a lot of paste and you don't want it trapped in the bottom of your blender jar.

Now work this paste into your very dry tortilla dough. It magically becomes the consistency of normal tortilla dough.

Keep the chile soaking water handy (never pour it down the drain!), and if your masa is still too dry, add the water a spoonful at a time until it's right.

This is normal tortilla dough from masa harina:

And this is my "enchillied" tortilla dough:

Now you need a filling.

Kennedy's filling was quite complicated, calling for chorizo, chayote, and potatoes and chicken (both precooked), but I decided to simplify.

I crumbled some feta (as a substitute for queso fresco) and mixed in some Mexican oregano, olive oil, and the remaining ancho chile.

I tried to dice the chile, but it was so soft it turned into so paste anyway.

Ancho chile cheese

• 125 g feta cheese (or use ricotta, cottage cheese, or even mozzarella)
• 1 chile ancho
• 1 tsp dried Mexican oregano
• 1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

Prepare the chile as for a normal chile paste.

Crumble the cheese into a mixing bowl.

Add the olive oil, oregano, and chile paste, and mix until fully combined. Use your hands!

Refrigerate until needed.

To finish the "enchiladas", begin the same way you would as if making tortillas, but before you cook the tortilla, put a dessert spoon of your filling on one half of it, fold it over, and press down to seal, sort of like an empanada:

Then you can cook them on a hot dry pan (asar-roasting on a comal) or shallow-fry them.

I tried both; I found the shape of the "enchiladas" made it hard to cook the tortillas through with just a dry pan.

As the "enchiladas" are dry, I served them with a bit of homemade guacamole.

It was blender guacamole, not molcajete guacamole, meaning I blitzed it to a smooth texture instead of mashing it to a traditional chunky texture.

Hey, I was in a hurry. It still tasted great.

We had a side salad too.

And about the enchiladas themselves...

The chile-infused tortillas: delicious.

The ancho-chile cheese filling. Also delicious. However a bit much all together. I think it would work better as a filling for a normal quesadilla.

Other observations: although everything tasted great, I'm not sure it was actually better than the easy way of making quesadillas, which is to take a ready-made tortilla, fill it with cheese and things, and grill it.

Similarly, I'm not sure this was an improvement on traditional enchiladas. In fact, I kind of missed the sauce (even with the guacamole, it was a pretty dry dish).

Still, I'm glad I made it. Now I know I don't need to feel guilty about quick-and-easy quesadillas, plus it was a successful first try at making flavoured tortillas.

I still don't get the "toltec" thing though.

Breakfast with MexiGeek: Quesadilla enchilada

I had some leftover "en-chillied" tortillas: tortillas which had ancho-chile paste worked into the dough.

I decided to make a quick quesadilla.

First I spread some chipotle paste over one tortilla.

Then I added the cheese. Ideally it would be queso fresco, something crumbly like feta, or maybe ricotta, but all I had left was white cheddar.

I topped it with some surprisingly good pickled red jalapenos.

Then I put another tortilla over it (instead of folding the tortilla over, which is the usual method).

I fried the quesadilla in butter, just to make it more healthy.

Typically you would fry your quesadilla in pork lard, but any oil would do. A flavourless one like sunflower or rapeseed works perfectly.

The chipotle and jalapenos really "made" this dish in terms of the filling. Both brought a beautiful mix of chile heat and sweetness to contrast the saltiness of the cheese.

But I also love these "en-chillied" tortillas. Ancho is the classic flavour of enchiladas, and it's running all through the tortilla dough.

Quite a faff to make, but so delicious!

(Traditional enchiladas are much easier.)