chile rellenos, red chile sauce

I've opened a pound tin of mild Hatch chiles, so it's going to be chiles chiles chiles around here for a few days. 

This morning it was a tossup between an omelet filled with a chile, or egg-style battered rellenos. Either way it would have eggs. Both would take a red chile sauce. Rellenos won.

I never did this before because they are not my favorite type to have out even though they are the more authentic version. The coating for the chile can be mostly egg, or crisply breaded, or lightly battered, or as we've seen in the previous post, completely gone off the rails with egg-roll wrappers which is my preferred method.

This made a complete mess out of my just cleaned kitchen. I do not recommend it. The whites of three eggs were whipped incompletely. The three yolks combined with two teaspoons flour and 1/4 cup milk. Seasoning is ground cumin, ground cilantro seed, garlic powder, salt and pepper. The yolk batter lightened with the incompletely whipped whites. The chile stuffed with cheese is dunked in the lightened batter and scooped out and placed into shallow oil. Three fourths of  the entire batter was discarded, so a bit of waste there. The stuffed chiles in their puffy batter cook very quickly. Too quickly. They could use a little more time for the cheese inside to melt 100%. 

These are not bad at all, the batter not the least heavy. The tinned Hatch chiles are slightly smaller than regular fresh grocery poblano or Anaheim chiles that are singed and peeled stovetop. Using floppy tinned chiles is a bit weird but a very convenient shortcut. The light batter that I used tended to drip off so the chiles were dipped and scooped full-handed and the whole thing, handful of batter containing a stuffed chile is gently placed on top of the oil. The chile tends to sit there in a pile of foamy batter. I wasn't sure it was going to work but it did work just fine. (I still prefer the egg roll style, and that's just wrong.)

None of this is shown below because the whole work area was too messy to deal. Messy hands coated with batter and rapid cooking both preclude mucking about with lighting and camera. It can be done, yes, and maybe I will, but not today. 

I'm not giving up on non egg-roll wrapper rellenos. There is still the breaded version to try as well as the virtual relleno omelet. 

[Why do I have to teach spellchecker the word relleno? Come on, get with the program already.]

Red chile sauce is easier than I'm making it out to be. Usually just one type of dried red chile is used.  The chiles are opened and de-seeded, then quickly pan fried to sort of activate their oil and flavor. They soften, they become less brittle. Water is added along with salt and pepper. Boiled for a brief 10 minutes. Processed. Forced through a not so fine strainer. The straining is a critical to the smoothness of the sauce, although a bit tedious, it is a step not to be skipped. Olive oil added to finish.

This red chile sauce uses a variety of dry chiles. This is not standard. The inclusion of a single dry chipotle pepper created an exceedingly smokey sauce. There is very little capsicum heat. The flavor of the sauce is complex, the capsicum heat gentle. The flavor is rounded with roasted garlic, cumin, cilantro, and Mexican oregano, black pepper and sea salt. 

Funny thing about the roasted garlic. I put two bulbs in a countertop convection oven and set it for 400℉/200℃, 20 minutes. They were still hard so I set it for another 20 minutes. 10 minutes to go, I intended to go outside to water the balcony plants so I reset for another 20 minutes. That's 50 minutes total. I didn't oil the garlic bulbs, just placed them on the rotating plate. I never checked on progress. Turns out, 50 minutes is too long. both bulbs extruded their juice which then baked off. Both bulbs had what appeared to be a charcoal tumor the same size as the bulb. It broke right off and disintegrated  to powder. There was very little squishy garlic left inside the toasted bulbs. I was too lazy to wrap them in aluminum foil. I'm still not convinced that's necessary. To get the last drops of garlic-y goodness, I smashed them between two serving spoons and crushed them hard using a pair of pliers. 

I'm bad. I prepared a topping to smother these rellenos as Americans are wont to do. Conceptually, that is just so obscene. The chile is already stuffed, relleno means stuffed in Spanish, and now it is smothered too. Stuffed and smothered. 

Stuffed and smothered. 

The thing that makes me bad is I really smother it. I smother is so much it's unsightly and does not photograph attractively. A photo would never make it in the food porn business. So I photograph it then go back and fix the plate as I will have it. I do this all the time. I fix a plate in accordance to my food stylist intuition, impulses and proclivities, photograph the subject as if that's the way I'm having it, then load the plate with the way I'm really having it.  Like this:

I'm a growing boy, what can I say? 

Okay, so there's that. How 'bout something entirely different and unrelated to food? 

Would you like to see a pop-up card I made for a friend? This took two days and I gave it one shot. Any problems that arose would just have to be fixed. No going back, no starting over, no trials or prototypes or little tests. The background that was started is the background that was used. Any mess would just have to stay.