Hola amigos!

Or as Jim Nance would say “Hello friends.” But seriously fuck Jim Nance right in his smarmy smug-hole.

We’re starting to hit some rarefied air in the Sunday Gravy world. I’ve been doing the Sunday Gravy posts for officially over one year!

Happy anniversary to me!

In a bit of symmetry today I am making my first real attempt at “made from scratch” chile verde. The symmetry comes from the fact that my very first Sunday Gravy post was about a whole ‘nother type of chile, chile tepin. Look at how quaint I was! Just a couple of hundred words to describe something that I now blow up into thousands of words. And hardly any fucking swearing at all! What the shit was wrong with me? Chile tepin is a condiment as opposed to a strait out chili or “chile.” See the post for a more formal discussion of it’s uses. I still have some chile tepin almost every damn day of my life and yes, there is a container in my refrigerator as we speak.

This particular dish today has a little more of a nod to a standard chili. Remember this badass motherfucker? That’s a bowl of Texas red chili and gatdamn is it a beauty. Chile verde does lean a little more to the Texas style but it is more Southwestern and traditional Mexican in origin as opposed to Texas chili which originated in, well no shit, it originated in Texas. Some swear it was invented in San Antonio actually. Today’s application is similar to Texas style in that it involves cooking large chunks o’ meat slow simmered with chilies, spices, onions and garlic. Texas red is cooked in a tomato based sauce while chile verde is cooked in a tomatillo and green chile based sauce. I also will be using pork for the chile verde instead of beef as we did for Texas chili.

As for the rarefied air thing, I’ve given you folks a whole lot of my “arsenal” of personal recipes and in fact I’m starting to run out of my original ideas. I’ve got a couple in reserve but in order to not duplicate myself, well not TOO much, I am going to be bringing in some brand new recipes, including some that are “new to me.” Yay! We can experiment together and you get to watch me walk the tightrope and possibly fuck some recipes up!

Drama!

To be honest I have dabbled with some bastardized versions of chile verde in the past that involved a Crock pot and some jars of green salsa or enchilada sauce and actually some of those were ok. You could call them “verde-ish” in execution but I would never share a recipe that involves anything that’s not from scratch.

Or would I?

Nope, this one today is as straight from scratch as the shit gets.

Chile verde means “Green Chili” in Spanish and it is exactly that. Check out the banner photo again and you will see the chilies that I used to make this.

Clockwise from upper left those are Anaheim chilies, a mass of tomatillos, some jalapenos and on the lower left we have pasilla chile peppers. I want you to repeat after me, “This dish is not too spicy!” This dish really isn’t too spicy. Even with all of those chilies going in the pot it is more of a floral or flat out “green” flavor you will be getting instead of a big old capsaicin rush. To further mellow everything out we will be roasting these lovely green things to add a slow roasted flavor that will calm down the heat and enhance the chile flavor.

Since this was a first effort, rather than make a whole big elaborate meal, I decided to just cook a bowl of the green and judge it’s merits straight-up. I’ll give you details, future applications and the results at the end of this post.

Chile Verde:

First of all here’s the recipe that I used for inspiration. Thanks Simplyrecipes.com! I did a few of my own variations but it’s not too far from their recipe. Here we go.

1 1/2 pounds of tomatillos. Yes you can find these in most regular grocery stores but certainly at your local “mercado” or Hispanic grocery store.

2 Anaheim chilies. Anaheims are the chilies used to make chile rellano, you know, the chile that’s stuffed with cheese and battered and fried?

2 large fresh pasilla chile peppers. If pasillas aren’t available you can use poblanos. When dried, poblanos turn into “ancho” chilies and you can usually find anchos in your store.  Just rehydrate them before adding to the recipe if you can’t find fresh Poblanos

3 large fresh jalapenos

1 bunch of cilantro leaves, I guess about 1/3 cup. If you don’t really dig cilantro you can leave it out.

4-5 pounds of pork shoulder (Boston butt) cut into chunks.

3-4 tablespoons of cooking oil. I used canola oil because of it’s higher smoke level.

2 onions chopped

5 cloves of garlic minced.

1 tablespoon of crushed dried Mexican oregano.

3-4 cups of chicken stock. Homemade is obviously better but you can use store bought stock in a pinch.

Salt to taste.

1 tablespoon of freshly ground black pepper

First thing we’re going to do is roast the tomatillos and the assorted chilies/peppers.

Have you ever fucked around with tomatillos? They’re like little green tomatoes in a sticky paper bag. Get those things out of their husks and rinse them off. Also rinse off your sticky-ass hands. Cut the tomatillos in half and place on a lightly oiled baking sheet. Get another baking sheet if you have one, for the other chilies and peppers. Please note: we will only be roasting 2 of the jalapenos at this point, we will use the other one still fresh a little later. If you have just one pan then just crowd the rest of the chilies on the same pan as the tomatillos but since they roast for different times try and separate them.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Place the baking pans(s) in the preheated oven. Roast the tomatillos for about 20 minutes. The chilies should cook for about 30 minutes total. Flip the chilies over after 15 minutes and let go for 15 minutes more. You won’t have to do this with the tomatillos, just get them out of the oven after 20 minutes. With the tomatillos just go ahead and put them in your blender after they’ve cooled off a bit. Give them a light crushing when putting them in the blender to make the blending a little easier.

When the chilies have roasted for 30 minutes there should be some char on the chile skins. Take the chilies and put them in a paper bag for about 10 minutes to let the charred skins steam a bit to make them easier to peel and clean.  Try and remove as much of the charred chile skins as possibly. Remove the seeds and stems from all of the chilies, give them a little chop and put them in the blender along with the tomatillos and the cilantro. Pulse/blend until blended. The sauce can be made a day or two in advance and refrigerated to make the cooking day a little less challenging.

What was that?

Yes we DID blend some different green shit last week. So what? Wait until I make pesto and we’ll have even more green shit!

Now we’re gonna hack up a big ass slab of pig.

In one of my earlier posts I mentioned that I can usually find a 3-4 pound pork roast, or “Boston butt” in the meat case at the store but every once in awhile they only have a 10-12 pound behemoth pork slab. This was that once in awhile. The above photo is about 5 pounds of pork cut into chunks, the rest I wrapped in plastic wrap and foil and stuck in the freezer.

There will be porky deliciousness another day! Fuck yes!

One of the variations from the recipe that inspired me today was adding some raw jalapeno and instead of roasting the garlic I will be using raw garlic. I like the bite that each bring to the party.

Get a big ass pot or dutch oven out and get it up to temp on the stove top. Add the cooking oil and get it to just under the smoke point over a medium-high flame. Sear the chunks of pig on each side until browned, about 5 minutes per side. Season the pig chunks with salt and pepper on each side. Work in batches to keep from overcrowding the pan. Remove the seared pork and put in a large bowl for a moment.

When all the swine has been seared, remove all but about 1 tablespoon of the rendered fat and oil from the pan. Now add in the chopped onion and jalapeno and cook in the pork fat until slightly tender, let’s say 7-8 minutes. Toss in the minced garlic until just fragrant then add in the green sauce that we made before. Next add the seared chunks of pork and enough chicken stock to cover the meat, probably about 3 or so cups. Add in the crushed oregano, lower the heat to LOW, place a lid slightly askew over the pot and let this simmer for about 2 1/2 hours. Stirring every 20 minutes or so.

You’ll want the pork to become very tender but not to the point where it basically becomes a part of the sauce itself. You still want this a little chunky. Season with salt and pepper at the end. If you add salt too soon the dish may become too salty after it cooks and reduces down.

And that is pretty much some chile fucking verde!

Now what do we do with it? You could just grab a big ol’ spoon and lean over the pot of stewed chile and commence to shoveling but use a little goddamn restraint here.

What I did in order to keep the chile verde near it’s pristine state is to serve it kind of sort of half-assed chiliquiles style.  Chilaquiles are from the Nahuatl word chīlāquilitl. Instead of cooking chunks of corn tortillas I just put some tortilla chips in a bowl, ladled some chile verde over the top and sprinkled with some shredded cheese and then got after it. Yes, I did momentarily consider adding an over easy egg on top but I wanted to keep it fairly simple.

Like so.

For my regular readers you will notice the staging and composition of the above photo and recognize it as what I like to call the “Sunday Gravy Money Shot.” After looking at all of the photos I just thought the raw chilies and tomatillos fit the overall green theme a little better so I used that photo instead.

So, the verdict?

Who doesn’t love slow cooked porky, stewed wonderfulness? The taste was fresh and green and like I mentioned before “This dish is not too spicy!” Very savory and brimming with fatty unctuousness. Very tasty with a warmed flour tortilla and quite satisfying. The pork was cooked perfectly. The slow simmered sauce itself was better than restaurant quality and much better than store bought.

But!

Next time I will add 2-4 roasted serrano chilies to increase the heat. Brother DJ Taj said “This isn’t as spicy as I thought it would be. That’s a surprise coming from you.” He was right. I ended up adding my chile tepin on top of the chile verde to ratchet up the heat level.

Chile on chile violence!

In it’s outlined state I thought of a perfect application for this exact dish. Chile verde enchiladas. I would use a slotted spoon to remove the chunks of cooked pork, wrapped the pork up in corn tortillas, ladle the reserved green sauce over the top, cover with some shredded Monterrey jack cheese and bake in a 350 oven for about 1/2 hour. I bet that shit would be fucking magnificent!

Yes, I will make this again with some of the alterations mentioned.

Final summation:

3.5/5! Would bang!

Adios kind folks and thanks for taking the ride with me again.

A whole fucking year already! You believe that fucking shit? I’m practically a goddamn institution!

Happy Father’s Day to all you dads out there.