- 2 months ago
In this edition of Epicurious 101, professional chef Saúl Montiel demonstrates how to make the best Enchiladas using a beloved family recipe passed down through generations. Learn how to make the perfect moist, tender chicken filling, a bright and balanced tomatillo sauce, and tortillas from scratch for flavorful, juicy, restaurant-quality enchiladas verdes at home.
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00:00Today I'm making enchiladas verdes con pollo,
00:02which is my mother's recipe.
00:04Hi, mom, I love you.
00:05I hope you're watching this.
00:06Please don't kill me if I messed up your recipe.
00:14Two ingredients of my fillings from my enchiladas
00:17are chicken and corn.
00:18Chicken is gonna add the flavor of chicken,
00:20the texture of the meat,
00:22and also the corn is gonna add some sweetness to it.
00:24That will help to kill some of the spiciness
00:26from the enchilada.
00:27I'm using the two meats, the white meat and the dark meat.
00:30I feel like the dark meat is always moist,
00:31it's always juicy, it's always flavorful.
00:33I also use the white part for texture, for flavor too.
00:36You have to do two,
00:38because one completes the other one, just like marriage.
00:41I'm gonna add the spine of the chicken.
00:43We call that guacal de pollo.
00:45This has a lot of flavor.
00:46The chicken wings also,
00:47it's the best part of the chicken to make broth.
00:49When people make chicken enchiladas,
00:52I feel like 80% of the enchiladas are dry.
00:54Why? Because they're using roasted chicken,
00:57leftover chicken,
00:58and they're only using the white part of the chicken,
01:00which is the breast.
01:01I'm using basically the entire chicken.
01:04All the buns is going to make my stock
01:06very rich on chicken flavor.
01:08I'm gonna do some aromatics, onion,
01:11some garlic, some bay leaves,
01:13celery.
01:16Mm, celery smells good.
01:17And then corn.
01:19So I'm gonna add the entire corn in the house.
01:21The corners of the corn,
01:22they will be nice, sweet, and moist.
01:25So when you eat them,
01:26they will kind of splash the flavor of corn in sweetness.
01:31So this has been cooking for 45 minutes.
01:33If you take a look at the dark meat,
01:36it's actually falling out of the bone.
01:38That's the sign that you're looking for.
01:40One of the biggest mistakes that people do
01:42when making these enchiladas,
01:44is that they overcook the chicken breasts.
01:46You don't overcook the chicken breasts
01:47because otherwise it will be really dry.
01:50But I'm removing the corn.
01:51Look at this corn.
01:52It looks beautiful.
01:54This, the spine, the chicken spine,
01:56el guacal, man, that adds so much flavor.
01:59Now I'm gonna strain this broth
02:01because I'm gonna be using this broth
02:03for my tomatillo sauce.
02:05I want the chicken flavor to be in that sauce.
02:08Look how moist my chicken looks.
02:11Now I'm gonna strain the chicken.
02:12I let my chicken cool down a little bit, not a lot.
02:15You don't want your chicken to be too cold
02:17because if it gets too cold, it gets dry
02:19and it's harder to shred it.
02:22When shredded, right,
02:23you don't want to shred it too thin
02:25and you don't want big chunks.
02:26You're gonna go medium size.
02:28When you eat your enchilada,
02:29you kind of want to feel the chicken.
02:30You don't want to feel like you're eating,
02:32you know, puree chicken or something like that.
02:34This chicken looks phenomenal.
02:36It looks nice and moist.
02:38Who likes dry chicken?
02:39Nobody, nobody likes dry chicken.
02:42So I'm gonna remove the hast out of my corn.
02:44So I can take the kernels and add it to my chicken.
02:48This is not traditional.
02:49This is me adding my touch.
02:51Now, when you cut this, don't cut straight.
02:53Cut by filling the center of the corn.
02:56If you cut straight, you don't get all the corns.
02:58Now, if you cut it straight, look, there's a lot of waste.
03:03See here?
03:04No waste, waste.
03:06Now I want to make sure that all the corn curls get separate
03:08because I want to make sure that every single bite of enchilada has corn
03:12and it has that sweetness.
03:14It's another way to balance the spiciness.
03:16And when you try this, you will take me.
03:18You're like, ah, now I know why I paid $20 for chicken enchiladas.
03:24Now I have to prepare my tomatillo sauce.
03:29Choosing the right tomatillo.
03:31The greener, the better because it has the bitterness that we're looking for.
03:36When it's too yellow, it's a little bit more overripe and sweeter.
03:39We don't need sweetness in here because I already have the corn.
03:42Now I'm using two types of peppers.
03:44I'm using jalapeno because I want that pepper taste without being too spicy.
03:48My friend serrano over here, which is really spicy.
03:51This is my favorite.
03:52I'm going to add two, some ajo and some white onion.
03:57You have to be careful because if you let your salsa boil too much,
04:01what's going to happen is the skin of the tomatillo is going to break
04:04and the taste even bitter.
04:06So we want to make sure that, you know, lose the color a little bit,
04:08turn a little brown and that's it.
04:11So I'm going to let these bad boys boil until they change the color.
04:14When they change the color, I'm going to remove them and put them into the blender.
04:18For the serrano peppers, I'm only adding one.
04:20I'm going to have one on the side just in case if it needs more heat.
04:23But if it doesn't, you're good.
04:25If you add two and you blend it, there's no going back.
04:29You can't take away the heat.
04:30Caldo de pollo, a little bit of cilantro.
04:33The cilantro, I use the entire stamps because there's a lot of flavor there.
04:36And now we're going to puree it with a little bit of salt.
04:39Something that I can always tell a cook or somebody is cooking is try things as you go,
04:44because you can always adjust as you go.
04:46But if you plate it and you didn't taste it before, you screw.
04:51All right, there we go.
04:56Let's turn the volume up.
04:59It has enough heat.
05:00The consistency, it's there.
05:02I don't know if you can see it, but it's very liquidy.
05:04Why?
05:04Because I'm going to cook it one more time.
05:06Same here for like 10, 15 minutes until the color change a little more,
05:10until all the flavors integrate together.
05:12The consistency is not thick of the sauce and it's not thin.
05:15The sauce stays on the spatula.
05:16That's a good sign because we know that it's going to stay on the enchilada.
05:20So this is the consistency that we want.
05:22Not too thick, not too loose.
05:24Perfection.
05:25This is the color that my grandma used to do it, my mom.
05:28So this sauce, I'm going to be adding in two ways.
05:31I'm going to be adding to the filling and also I'm going to pour it on top of the tortillas.
05:36So this is 50% of the dish.
05:38So my sauce is ready.
05:39Now I'm going to move into the next step, which is the tortillas.
05:45Making enchiladas, the tortilla, it needs to be a store-bought tortilla.
05:49Don't use homemade tortillas because I feel like it will be a mushy enchilada.
05:53I'm just going to do neutral oil and we want to make sure that we fry it both sides.
05:59And the reason why we fry the tortilla is because we want the tortilla to be very flexible
06:03and strong.
06:04So the oil will help to achieve that.
06:08See, the bake, that's a good sign.
06:10How do you know the tortilla is done?
06:11When the tortilla gets a little more fluffy and more flexible,
06:14like this won't give you any hard time filling it up.
06:17But I would say like around probably two minutes, one minute on each side,
06:20but you have to keep turning because otherwise it will burn.
06:23So these tortillas are ready for my enchiladas.
06:25I'm going to stop the enchiladas.
06:30What I want to do is I want to keep my stuffing here with sauce and cheese,
06:34just to keep it nice and warm.
06:35And then I'm going to fill up this tortilla, roll it up, and put it right here.
06:40People do, this is what they do.
06:41They grab a tortilla, they fill it up with chicken, with cheese,
06:46let's see, like cheese, and then with sauce.
06:48So number one, the fresh side and this side is not going to have enough chicken,
06:53or enough corn or enough cheese. Same thing with the sauce,
06:55since I always put it in the middle.
06:57Doing it this way, the whole enchilada will have the texture,
07:01the amount of chicken that we want, and the sweetness of the corn.
07:04We have to hear about chicken.
07:05Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to add some sauce.
07:08Adding the sauce in this step is going to help to keep it nice and moist.
07:14One thing that I always tell my cooks,
07:17throw the cheese when you're ready to fill up the enchilada.
07:20Don't throw the cheese before, because we want to make sure you have a nice cheesy enchilada.
07:25This is nice and hot.
07:26Now I'm going to do the cheese.
07:28So the cheese that I put inside my enchilada was queso quesadilla.
07:31Very similar to Montereyac, on the family of mozzarella, stringy,
07:36it's cauliflower cheese, it's delicious.
07:38I'm going to mix it just a little bit, because I want to keep the cheese
07:41whole without melting it.
07:43So now I'm going to grab some of this filling.
07:46I want to put it right here, rolling them up.
07:49Make sure when you roll them up, you pull it like torju,
07:53to make sure that the tortilla is nice and tight.
07:56And always, where the tortilla ends, you want to put it on the bottom of your plate.
08:01I'm going to do it one more time.
08:03If you press the tortilla torju, you will have an even enchilada.
08:07So it has to be the same thickness.
08:09See?
08:14Right now, we're going to make sure we cover all the enchiladas with the sauce,
08:17and then we're going to do the toppings.
08:19We're going to make sure that all the enchiladas get the same amount of love of sauce.
08:24We have to make sure that you don't have way too much sauce.
08:27But honestly, this sauce is so good that I will drink this sauce in a smoothie.
08:32The sauce is not running, staying on the enchilada.
08:35That's a really good sign.
08:36Now we're just going to do the toppings.
08:38I'm going to do the crema first.
08:39Adding a cold item to here is going to give you a really delicious sensation on your mouth,
08:46when you eat them warm and cold.
08:48And now I'm going to do the lettuce.
08:49A little bit of lettuce because I don't need a lot of lettuce, as you can tell.
08:52And then we're going to do a little bit of queso fresco.
08:55Queso fresco, man, it's just, it's salty, scrambly, makes the food looks really good.
09:00Look at this.
09:01I feel like I'm building a Mexican Christmas tree.
09:04And now I'm going to do some red onions because color and also texture.
09:09This is how my mom plays the her enchiladas.
09:11The avocado.
09:12It's delicious.
09:14It's fresh.
09:15This has so much textures, so many colors that it's very pretty.
09:20Now we're going to do a little bit more queso fresco.
09:23These are the queen of the enchiladas.
09:25And a little bit of cilantro leaves.
09:27Cilantro leaves is just to add a little bit more aroma.
09:30And, you know, to remark the fact that there is cilantro on the, on the tomatillo sauce.
09:35There's so many kinds of enchiladas in Mexico, but I think this is the perfect balance of,
09:39of sauce and ingredients.
09:41This is what perfection of enchilada looks like.
09:45Also the fact the chicken is filled with mozzarella, corn, and also sauce.
09:50So I know that every single bite will be delicious.
09:53When eating enchiladas, you got to make sure you got every single ingredient into one bite.
09:57They're super juicy, spicy.
10:05When you first try it because of the sauce, because that's the first thing that you try the spicy.
10:09But then as you chew it, you get the splashes of sweetness from the corn,
10:14the cheesiness, and the savory from the chicken.
10:17And then the queso fresco and crema kills that spice.
10:20It's still a little spicy, but it's a beautiful spice that you can actually enjoy without burning you.
10:25This is what family is all about.
10:27This is what Mexican cuisine is all about.
10:29It's very full of colors, spiciness, so much ingredient that Mexico is right here.
10:34It's a simple presentation, but full of flavors, colors, passion, and love.
10:40My enchiladas.
10:41My enchiladas.
10:43My enchiladas.
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11:00My enchiladas.
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