Food Notes: 3/31: Chile Relleno
Cooking chilies, baseball stadium food, new food magazines, Sexy chocolate.
Back in February, I made some jalapeño poppers, and ended up talking about how their culinary cousin is a dish known as Chile Relleno. So naturally I decided to cook some.
Chile Relleno translates to literally, stuffed pepper. Peppers were, after all, a new world crop, and have a long history with the people of Mexico who no doubt stuffed them with tasty fillings for centuries.
The pepper is a natural bowl for holding food, so it’s not surprising to find stuffed peppers in the Mediterranean basin, (not unlike this Greek-inspired stuffed pepper I cooked up a few months back). A lot is owed to the Ottoman Empire in this regard, but we aren’t digressing that far afield tonight.
Stuffed peppers in Medico typically use a poblano pepper, a dark green pepper 4 to 6 inches long and about 2 or so inches in diameter near the stem and coming coming to a point that reminds me of the hats that gnomes wear. The Poblano originates in the Puebla state in Mexico, (also known for mole poblano, one of the best known mole sauces).
Puebla has several traditional stuffed pepper dishes, such as Chiles en nogada, a dish where the pepper is stuffed with ground meat, fruits, spices, and has a walnut-based cream sauce on top with pomegranate seeds. However, certainly in the United States, a chile relleno is a recipe with a poblano pepper stuffed with cheese, battered with flour and egg, deep-fried, and served with a sauce made from roasted tomato and onion. A Tex-Mex variation is often topped with cheese and placed under a salamander broiler to make that melty gooey goodness, and served with rice and beans to become a complete meal.
Much to the surprise of my wife, I wasn’t attempting to recreate the Tex-Mex version that’s fairly common as the go-to vegetarian item in taco shops around the city. Instead, I was going for what is typical in the southwest. new Mexico, for instance, takes the dish so seriously they even invented a New Mexican chile just for the task (I was using old fashioned poblanos). Instead of a big pile of cheese with a pepper hidden underneath, I was looking to highlight the pepper itself and the roasted salsa underneath it.
The traditional stuffing for Chile Rellenos is just cheese, but since I had ground pork leftover from making the epic dumpling lasagna, and also because I was following this recipe that included ground pork, we stuffed up the peppers with a mixture that included cheese and meat.
I actually just followed the recipe from J. Kenji López-Alt this week, so I don’t have an original variation to go alongside this. However, in the post-mortem, I can acknowledge two mistakes.
First, I didn’t see the bit about adding water or broth to the sauce, so mine never really sauced up. It stayed a bit chunkier, which was totally fine and also makes a great salsa. I would probably modify this sauce to bring out more umami flavors and add some acid. Winter tomatoes! What can you do.
The second mistake I made was in mixing the batter. I didn’t realize I needed to separate the eggs. So I didn’t end up making stiff peaks out of the whites, which would have obviously changed the consistency of the batter significantly while frying. My batter just didn’t stick well enough.
Despite these foibles, they tasted absolutely amazing. I definitely want to replicate this again, maybe correctly following the instructions. I’d also love to try the cheese-only filling some time. And of course, we served it with a side of Rancho Gordo beans.
The Latest
Baseball Season
Opening day means one thing: new abominations to eat at the baseball stadium. I went through all the newly announce stadium dishes and compiled a big long list of what to eat, and what not to eat.
Tomato Season
Alicia Kennedy launched a new food-focused web magazine, Tomato Tomato, featuring food stories. There’s a great mix of topics, food related of course, and I happen to know some of the authors with bylines. My friend Devin Kate Pope examines food writers writing fiction, and Layla Schlack, (who commissioned my piece on San Gennaro) comes to the defense of 30-minute meals. There’s a bunch of other great pieces, like a nod to the Williamsburg sandwich shop Saltie and tomato martinis.
…And Speaking of Alicia Kennedy
Now is good time to mention that Kennedy has a new book, On Eating: The Making and Unmaking of My Appetites, an exploration of her journey “from eater to cook.” I previously reviewed her debut, No Meat Required: A Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating, which looks back at how Americans came to fall in (and sometimes out of) love with vegan cuisine.
Big Pancake Season
The latest diner food trend is apparently extra fat pancakes. Bettina Makalintal looks into why puffy pancakes are suddenly on the rise.
Hot Chocolate
A batch of chocolate has been recalled because it has undisclosed amounts of a pharmaceutical common in sex enhancement drugs.
KitKat Heist Marketing
12 tons of KitKat’s official F1 chocolate bars were stolen in Italy. Now, all the cool brands are putting out social media content to exploit the theft.
A New Pies-N-Thighs
New York’s Pies-N-Thighs is opening a second location, reports Melissa McCart at Eater. The petite restaurant on the Williamsburg waterfront has played an outsized roll in New York’s culinary history. Not only was it instrumental in fried chicken fad that swept the city in the aughts, but was where the famed Alison Roman started out baking biscuits. We stopped in last year and the original spot was still humming.
Is Froyo Back?
The Infatuation claims froyo is going trend this year. Sure, that’s what I was saying back in 2024 when I was pitching out the history of Tasti-D-Lite. After a few rejections, I wrote the article anyway and posted it on blog. 29,000 pageviews later, I think I can say I was right.
Inflation Comes for Iceland’s Hot Dogs
As a hot dog enthusiast, I can say the small island nation has some excellent choices. But apparently this long inexpensive food has seen prices rise quickly, but its a still a cheaper alternative to proper sit-down restaurants.