The Enchilada Queen Cookbook: Enchiladas, Fajitas, Tamales, and More Classic Recipes from Texas-Mexico Border Kitchens
224
The Enchilada Queen Cookbook: Enchiladas, Fajitas, Tamales, and More Classic Recipes from Texas-Mexico Border Kitchens
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Overview
Better than going out for Mexican food!
Mexican food—by which most of us mean Tex-Mex—is a favorite from Los Angeles to New York and everywhere in between. And the heart of great Tex-Mex cooking comes from home kitchens along the Rio Grande. In THE ENCHILADA QUEEN COOKBOOK, Sylvia Casares gives you the best of the best, including tricks and simple techniques to turn any dish from appetizing to amazing. You’ll learn how to make her Holy Trinity spice paste; why you should use certain key shortcuts, such as chicken bouillon, in some dishes; and how to do her tortilla-changing Texas Two-Step marinating technique. And after you’ve picked your favorites from her 14 key sauces, you’ll make unbelievable food for a family or a crowd, including:
--Cheese Enchiladas with Chili Gravy
--Spinach Enchiladas with Salsa Verde
--Shrimp Enchiladas with Salsa Veracruzano
--Stewed Chicken Breast Enchiladas with Salsa Mole
And the Enchilada Queen is an expert in more than just enchiladas. Here you’ll find appetizers, sides, breakfasts and desserts, such as:
--Guacamole and Picamole
--Kitchen Nachos
--Gulf Coast Fish Tacos
--Frontera Beef Fajitas
--La Fonda Tortilla Soup
--Arroz con Pollo
--Huevos Rancheros
--Refried Beans
--Tamales with a variety of fillings
--Sopapillas, Polvorones and Bunuelos
The Perfect Margarita’s here too, and so much more. In The Enchilada Queen Cookbook, you’ll get kitchen wisdom from a lifetime of learning recipes from madres and abuelas who make food specific to their border towns on the Rio Grande. You’ll also get a resource for hundreds of family dinners—and a party between covers!
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781250082923 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2016 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Sales rank: | 543,875 |
| File size: | 11 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
SYLVIA CASARES is the “Sylvia” in Sylvia’s Enchilada Kitchen. A former food scientist, she opened her first restaurant in Houston twenty years ago. When Texas magazine anointed Casares “The Queen of Tex-Mex Cuisine,” she was positioned as the cuisine's official spokesperson. Sylvia’s Enchilada Kitchen was recently selected by USA Today as one of the “Top 10 Great Mexican Restaurants” in the country, and was selected by Texas Monthly as one of the Top 50 Tex-Mex restaurants in Texas.
DOTTY GRIFFITH is a food journalist with a passion for Southwestern cuisine--particularly Texan! She has written more than eight cookbooks, including The Texas Holiday Cookbook, Wild About Chili, and The Contemporary Cowboy Cookbook. With Sylvia Casares, she coauthored The Enchilada Queen Cookbook. Though firmly rooted in Texas, Griffith considers herself an international citizen of the food world.
Read an Excerpt
The Enchilada Queen Cookbook
Enchiladas, Fajitas, Tamales, and More Classic Recipes from Texas-Mexico Border Kitchens
By Sylvia Casares, Dotty Griffith
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2016 Sylvia CasaresAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-08292-3
CHAPTER 1
BORDER CUISINE
Eating Along the Rio Grande
When it comes to food, there are no boundaries. Especially with Tex-Mex, America's first fusion cuisine. What is Tex-Mex? It is a blending of Mexican ingredients, traditions, and flavors with the ingredients, traditions, and flavors American settlers brought as they moved into the area that would eventually come to be known as Texas. In the early 1800s, most of that territory was claimed by Mexico. Definitely more Mex than Tex at the time.
There's a long history and tradition of blurred cultural and culinary lines between Texas and Mexico. Sometimes that means there are different names for the same thing. Texans think of the river along the border as the Rio Grande, while Mexicans call the same flowing water Rio Bravo. On the other hand, a word may have different connotations, depending on where it is spoken. Both Mexicans and Texans speak and eat enchiladas. Yet the basic dish called enchiladas has different fillings and sauces depending on where they're made. In Mexico, enchiladas are more likely to be filled with chicken, white cheese, or pork. In Texas, beef or yellow cheese are the favored fillings. Also in Mexico, tortillas are traditionally made with ground dried corn. When European settlers arrived, they adapted the Mexican tortilla technique to use white flour. Is the chicken or beef enchilada, the flour or the corn tortilla, more Tex-Mex or more Mex-Tex? They all are. That's the beauty of this blended cuisine.
I point this out to show that the only hard line between Texas and Mexico is the manmade boundary drawn on maps. And even that has changed over the years. At one time, the Nueces River, about a hundred miles inside what is now Texas, was la frontera. It wasn't until 1848, after the Mexican-American War, that the Rio Grande (aka Rio Bravo del Norte) was established as the border.
That's the back story on mi tierra (my land) and the biculinary, bicultural world I know. I grew up in Brownsville, the very southern tip of Texas. On the other side of the river lies Matamoros, Mexico. I have family ancestry on both sides. During my childhood and until the horrors of 9/11 made border security a national imperative, people routinely traveled back and forth without passports. No different than travel between Brownsville and another Texas city, McAllen, only not as far. So did residents of Laredo and Nuevo Laredo, El Paso and Juarez, and other cross-border sibling cities. Each pair is separated by a river, but joined by bridges, tradition, business, geography, climate, language, family, and friendship. The culinary traditions blend and meld as smoothly as chile con queso, the staple cheese dip of Tex-Mex. Yet there are subtle differences. Made in Mexico, what we call queso for short uses white cheese. On the Texas side, yellow cheese dominates.
I think of the cuisine on both sides of the river as "border cuisine," a reflection of the land and people who populate both sides of a major river that happens to be an international border. They share the same climate, land, plants, and animals. At the same time, there are differences. Some are ethnic, some are national, some are tradition-based or influenced by historic events. The common thread, however, is a hard-scrabble, close-to-the-earth way of cooking and eating that uses what's available to the best advantage. There have, of course, been other factors.
On the Mexico side, French and Spanish colonial influences greatly inspired many culinary practices, such as flour tortillas, tortas (French baguette or Spanish bolillo sandwiches) and flan; crème brûlée in France, crema Catalan in Spain.
On the Texas side, settlers with German, English, and Irish heritages, as well as southern tastes, melded their traditions with the food as well. Fondness for flour tortillas is a key example. But so is the emphasis on beef, as many of the American settlers came to build a life as cattle ranchers.
Tex-Mex is a beautiful blend of cuisines and cultures. Sometimes people tell me they love my food because it isn't Tex-Mex. They're mistaken, because what I cook is Tex-Mex, made the way people make it all along both sides of the border. Some of my dishes may be more Mexican, others more Texan, but they are almost always Tex-Mex, at least as I know it. Sadly, what is often called Tex-Mex is mass-produced, commercial food; heavy, even greasy, and varying shades of brown layered with too much bright yellow cheese. If that's all you know of Tex-Mex, no wonder you dismiss Tex-Mex and "the enchilada plate" as a gooey brown blob.
That's not what the way I cook. Whether in my restaurant or in my home, I use only the freshest and highest quality ingredients to make dishes from scratch the traditional way, with a few, well-considered exceptions. At my students' request, I've finally given in to using convenient canned pinto beans in the recipe for refried beans that I teach in my cooking classes. (At the restaurant, though, we still start with dried pinto beans.) I don't believe canned beans sacrifice too much flavor for the amount of convenience gained for my students. That's a good trade.
In my restaurants, I've used enchiladas to explore the sauces and ingredients that reflect Hispanic cooking traditions on both sides of the Texas-Mexico border. I grew up eating honest homegrown cuisine influenced by centuries of tradition. That's what I know and love. In this cookbook, I go beyond enchiladas. I share my recipes and techniques for Tex-Mex and Mexican classics, including nachos and flautas; tacos and fajitas; tamales as well as South Texas–style mesquite-grilled beef, chicken, fish, quail, and cabrito (baby goat). Recipes include many of my signature restaurant sides including the Mexican classic, rajas poblanos con crema (creamed poblano chiles) and basic Rio Grande–style refried beans. Of course, there's a recipe for my customers' favorite dessert, chocolate tres leches (three milks) cake.
These recipes are written with the same attention to detail and precision learned in commercial test kitchens and that I have trained my staff to use in my restaurants. They have been adapted to home kitchen amounts, techniques, modern ingredients, and equipment. That's why my classes are so popular and successful. I've translated restaurant recipes into recipes for cooks at home. I don't horde professional secrets. What you get with this cookbook are fail-safe recipes that reflect the flavors, ingredients, and dishes that have been prepared and eaten on both sides of the Rio Grande, or Rio Bravo, for hundreds of years. Many are just as you would get in my restaurants. Some are recipes that I reserve for home and family. All are authentic and easy to replicate.
I want this book to grow respect for and appreciation of the oldest regional cooking style in the United States, Tex-Mex, America's first fusion cuisine. I draw on recipes from both sides of the river since Mexico is anything but foreign to those who live just north of the border. Likewise Texas is not unknown to those who live to the south. There's a long history of interplay. Nothing symbolizes mi tierra better than the cuisine.
My brother, Oscar, calls me a purist. That's his kind way of saying I'm old-fashioned. And I'm proud of it. Whether you call this cuisine Tex-Mex, Mex-Tex, Border, or Mexican, it's a reflection of a way of life in which culinary traditions are blind to everything but flavor.
One of the best ways to express this is with a map, a mural in my restaurants. This reflects the geographic range and some of the regional inspirations for my cuisine and the recipes in this book. The core of my cuisine is a set of fourteen sauces that I have developed over the years. Made daily in each restaurant, these sauces represent the cooking traditions along the Texas-Mexico border as well as in other parts of Texas and Mexico.
Some dishes, like the Sarita enchilada (calabacita — squash — enchiladas with queso and cream sauce), are named after small Texas towns. So is the Refugio plate (cheese enchiladas with chili gravy), and Crystal City (spinach enchiladas reflecting the town's reputation as a major south Texas vegetable growing area). The El Paso entrée features stacked, not rolled, enchiladas for which the far West Texas town and New Mexico are known. Dishes named for locales in Mexico include Mexico City–style chicken enchiladas, mole from Puebla, and Gulf Coast port Tampico shrimp enchiladas.
CHAPTER 2THE FOUNDATION
Tortillas, Basics, Flavor Tricks
The building blocks of Rio Grande cuisine are tortillas and key spices, including the Tex-Mex Holy Trinity, a seasoning paste of cumin, black pepper, and fresh garlic. I'll introduce you to them by sharing my philosophy about recipe development. It is both a science and an art.
Almost every recipe in this book has a story about when I first experienced it, what inspired it, how I developed it. Since many of my recipes are actually classics for which a standard exists, I often experience some anxiety when developing a recipe, knowing that there will be customers and foodies whose expert palates will know if my recipe is "real" and whether the dishes are exceptionally flavored and expertly prepared.
Since my goal is always to earn a perfect grade of "10," I take a very pragmatic approach when developing a recipe. I put on my lab coat, pull out my note pad, and go to work!
One example of my process was the challenge of creating my formula for marinating beef fajitas. During the early years of my first restaurant, my focus and passion were dedicated to the enchilada side of my menu. It is a natural human tendency to gravitate toward things that come easily or naturally. Sauces and gravies are my favorites for sure.
So when it came to fajitas I needed to do some research. I had no idea where to begin, so I started by studying every recipe I could find to start to understand what other cooks were doing to flavor and tenderize beef for fajitas. I tested these recipes and found the results unacceptable. I found that all too often the beef flavor of fajitas was lost to the flavor of the marinades and the strips of skirt steak weren't tenderized enough. Though I'd never eaten much beef, especially steaks, my goal was for my fajitas to be tender and taste like a great steak.
It took two years, off and on, to reach my lofty goal with beef fajitas. What really spurred me on was one day a very loyal customer, who is also a big foodie, very kindly pulled me aside and brought to my attention that my enchiladas were a "10" but my fajitas were noticeably lower on the food rating scale. It was no surprise, but, nevertheless, a bit embarrassing to be reminded that my fajitas were an afterthought — second in priority to my enchiladas.
That reenergized me to finish my quest for a great fajita marinade. Eventually I achieved my goal after months of trial and error and dozens of "taste panels" with my staff. I have learned through all these years that setting a goal, then applying patience and perseverance to the development process, will birth a winning recipe.
Be assured that the basic recipes in this chapter, and throughout the book, have undergone the same rigorous development process.
Equipment
Throughout this book, recipes have lists of special equipment needed to complete the recipes. This is a list of the tools mentioned throughout the book; specialized equipment (like the comal, molcajete, tamale steamer, and tortilla warmer) can be ordered at mexgrocer.com if you're unable to find the items in a store near you.
Of particular importance are tools for blending dried chiles, spices, and cooked vegetables to make smooth sauces. Traditionally, a stone molcajete and pestle was the way to get this done. Today, a blender, food processor, mini-chopper, and spice grinder achieve the result quicker and with considerably less effort.
• Blender
• Board for pastry and chopping
• Charcoal or gas grill
• Cocktail shaker
• Comal or griddle
• Electric mixer
• Food handlers' gloves for working with fresh and dried chiles
• Food processor
• Heatproof gloves to handle hot food while grilling
• Immersion blender
• Large saucepans, Dutch ovens, stockpots, skillets
• Long tongs for grilling
• Mallet or small hammer
• Molcajete or mortar and pestle
• Mini-chopper
• Spice or coffee grinder
• Tamale steamer
• Tortilla warmer
Ingredients
Many of the foods used over and over in this book are indigenous to Mexico and the Southwest. Many are widely available. Put them on your weekly shopping list if you're cooking and eating the Rio Grande way. See Resource List and information boxes throughout the book for additional information about where to get ingredients and how to prep them.
• Avocados, Mexican preferred, if in season
• Chiles, dried: arbol, guajillo, pasilla, pequin
• Chiles, fresh: jalapeño, poblano, serrano
• Chocolate
• Cinnamon, Mexican preferred for some dishes
• Cumin seeds
• Corn, fresh and frozen
• Crema
• Epazote, fresh or dried
• María galletas (tea biscuits or cookies)
• Masa harina (instant corn flour)
• Mexican oregano, dried
• Nopales (chopped cactus pads)
• Piloncillo (Mexican cone sugar)
• Tomatillos
• Vanilla: pure extract, not imitation, authentic Mexican vanilla preferred
Enchilada Queen Tortilla Bootcamp
Whether corn or flour, tortillas are icons of border dishes and mealtimes. No Rio Grande meal, from breakfast through dinner, is complete without some kind of tortilla or variation thereon.
Rio Grande cuisine has for centuries relied on the corn tortilla. As a bread. As a wrapper. As a nutrition booster. Corn tortillas, when eaten with beans, add up to a complete protein and increase the absorbability of important minerals like iron. Pre-Columbian cultures were into corn tortillas hundreds, possibly thousands, of years before Europeans arrived with wheat flour. Eventually tortillas were adapted to use wheat flour as well.
In Tortilla Bootcamp, we start with basic corn tortillas and work our way through to flour tortillas.
Before plastic wrap and tortilla presses, making corn tortillas was a strictly by-hand endeavor. Today, making fresh corn tortillas is tricky even using a tortilla press but still much easier. Imagine the skill and time it took to produce dozens of corn tortillas, shaping them by hand, for big families or work crews and ranch hands.
To make corn tortillas, buy a good-quality tortilla press. It should be heavy metal, not plastic. You'll need to cut pieces of plastic wrap slightly larger than the surface of the tortilla press. This keeps the dough from sticking to the press.
Freshly pressed tortillas are very fragile and should be cooked immediately after shaping. Once cooked, they hold well in a tortilla warmer or towel-lined bowl or basket while you shape and cook your way through the dough.
Tortillas cook best on well-seasoned cast-iron griddles called comals that have been used and loved by several generations. But all of us have to start somewhere. If you buy — instead of inheriting — a comal, make sure it is cast iron or heavy steel. And season it well before using.
The temperature of the comal or griddle is critical for proper cooking. The temperature of the surface should be about 400°F so the tortilla is marked with light brown spots after about 15 seconds.
If the grill is not hot enough, the tortillas will take longer to cook, and will harden or dry out before the light brown spots appear. If the temperature is too hot, the outside of the tortilla will burn while the interior remains doughy.
Use handmade fresh corn tortillas for tacos or as bread at the table. Delicious as they are, handmade corn tortillas are too thick for successful enchiladas. Rely on top-quality, fresh factory-made corn tortillas to make good enchiladas.
My corn tortillas require three ingredients: masa harina (instant corn flour); a little wheat flour; and salt moistened with water to form masa, dough. I add a bit of flour because the gluten helps the tortillas hold together. If you want to go gluten free, just omit the flour. Once the dough is the right consistency, form small balls of masa to press between the plates of a tortilla press lined with plastic wrap to prevent sticking. Flat discs of masa are "baked" on a hot flat griddle known as a comal. Just-cooked corn tortillas hold well in a tortilla warmer.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Enchilada Queen Cookbook by Sylvia Casares, Dotty Griffith. Copyright © 2016 Sylvia Casares. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Map,
Dedication,
Foreword by Oscar Casares,
INTRODUCTION How I Became the Enchilada Queen,
CHAPTER 1 Border Cuisine,
CHAPTER 2 The Foundation,
CHAPTER 3 Enchilada Queen Sauces,
CHAPTER 4 Enchilada Queen Wisdom or Why Sylvia Is "the Queen",
CHAPTER 5 Salsas, Appetizers, and Snacks,
CHAPTER 6 A la Parilla,
CHAPTER 7 Enchilada Queen Homestyle,
CHAPTER 8 Tamale Tutorial,
CHAPTER 9 Enchilada Queen Sides,
CHAPTER 10 Enchilada Queen Sweet Endings,
CHAPTER 11 Sipping with the Enchilada Queen,
Resource List,
Acknowledgments,
Index,
About the Author,
Copyright,
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