Nay, says I. Mexican food can be Americanized without just being bland, gigantic portions of subpar ingredients covered in melted cheese.
My first ideas for what to make revolved around what the most Americanized Mexican dish already exists. The taco and burrito in their simple and authentic forms found in Mexico have been substantially altered to have all kinds of stuff here in the US. As a fan of the San Diego style fish taco, I find their authenticity being corrupted to be a veritable boon to the culinary world. That being said, the heart of both lies in Mexico. Nachos, though, seem almost designed for Americans. Frankly, we love loading stuff onto chips. Mexican totopos are the supposed original nacho, but the story of the nacho is similar to one of the Buffalo Chicken Wing. People come into a restaurant after it's closed and someone throws together what they have left, and it turns out awesome. The story goes that the original nachos were for visiting US soldiers anyway. If this is Mexico's gift to America, we should be legit in playing with it, no?
I figured there were 3 components I must have for the dish to actually be considered nachos.
1. Chips. Hey, Mission Tortilla chips are on sale at Publix. Woo.
2. A pico de gallo salsa. This was more out of wanting to cleanse my palate from Chuy's crappy salsa.
3. A cheese sauce that was actually good.
From there, I decided to add some pinto and black beans to give the nachos a bit more body. Further, I decided I was going to make a green tomatilla sauce for pretty much the same reason I was going to make my own salsa. On top of that, I figured everyone loves guacomole and avocados were on sale at Publix, so there's no reason to pass up on those.
Conspicuous in its absence is something meaty. Just throwing some Mexican seasoned meat on there seemed almost to be missing the point of Americanizing it though. Something truly Americana must go on there. Then it came to me: BBQ. Now, every culture has their own form of cooking meat in the pit style. By BBQ, I mean the dry rubbed, slow cooked, sweet and savory style we developed here in the US. What meat though? Well...if I got pork I would probably just want to do carnitas and there goes my Americanization. I considered rib meat, but, frankly, I doubted my ability to de-rib the meat without just having ribs by themselves. Chicken was the solution. Pulling some dry rubbed chicken and mixing with some BBQ sauce would shred pretty nicely over some nachos. And what do you know, chicken quarters are on sale at Publix.
The key to a great BBQ flavor is the spice rub, and mine follow the pretty basic gambit. Here's my ratio.
1 salt
1 pepper
1 paprika
1 brown sugar
1/4 cumin
1 garlic powder
1 onion powder
1/4 mustard powder
I just mix these together in a bowl to give me the blend I need. Slow cooking chicken in just the dry rub would likely dry it out though. I needed to go wet on this. This could, in turn, double as my eventual sauce. In order to set this up, I added a can of chipotle peppers in the adobo sauce, apple cider vinegar, worsteshire sauce, and some limes that I just quartered squeezed, and dropped the remainder in the sauce. I rubbed the chicken down with my dry rub and nestled the chickens into their sauce.
This was a mistake. I used leg and thigh sections. I should have crisped the skin first before proceeding with this step. Oh well. Live and learn.
I proceeded to cover with foil and bake these for about 3 hours on 275, making sure to occasionally give them the flip around to make sure they didn't dry out. 3 hours later:
So I shredded them in the sauce. I noticed that I still had way too much sauce. I poured the excess into a pan, reduced it, and then poured it back in after thickening it up with some tomato paste and molasses to get the BBQ flavor. The chipotle pepper and paprika managed to bring enough smokey flavor that I didn't too bad about not having grilled these suckers.
What I didn't show is me skimming the fat, and using the non crispy chicken skin to rend off some more fat to cook the pinto and black beans in to get a nice flavor to those. In the end though, pinto and black beans will suck up whatever flavor you put on them, and the subtle flavors they brought were pretty good to add to their texture.
The protein base of my nachos were complete. Now I needed the accoutrement.
Tomatilla sauce requires, shockingly, whole tomatillas. La Aurora Latin Market will give you what you need in terms of tomatillas, but they do in fact sell them at Publix. La Aurora has some already stewed kinda like how they do for normal stewed tomatoes if you want to be lazy, but taking off the stems of a tomatilla isn't that hard. With some garlic, seranno pappers, and halved, destemmed tomatillas, I filled a pan partways with water, and let it all stew down until they were quite soft. You'll want just enough water as to stew all the stuff. Too much water and it just won't be as flavor dense. You'll want to season the water with salt, naturally.
I ended up adding some more water to the pan to help it stew. After the tomatillas started breaking up, I put it in a blender with a couple of avocados and blended it into a tomatilla sauce. The avocados cream up the sauce nicely. I added some pepper as well.
That's the consistency I like. It has some body, but it's mostly liquid. The avocado definitely does add some nice creaminess to it though. You like it thicker? Use less water.
The normal pico de gallo I make is pretty much what you'd expect. Tomatoes, red onion, jalapenos, cilantro, salt and pepper, and a little bit of olive oil. The ratio will all depend on your taste, but I try to build around the 1 red onion the most. I tend to use 1 red onion, 6 jalapenos, a quarter cup of diced cilantro, about 6 or 7 tomatoes. What kind of tomatoes? Whatever kind look the best. I like plum tomatoes best, all things equal because plum tomatoes have the least in the way of guts, which makes it more convenient for the next step, but there were some nice local tomatoes on sale, so those were the ones I used. You'll have to drain your diced tomatoes of the excess water in the guts of the tomato or you'll end up with something closer to Chuy's concoction. Just dice them and drain them in a colander while you do everything else. Giving it a bit of a shake in a large pot will help separate some of the seeds as well, which tends to be the bitter part of the tomatoes people who claim to not like tomatoes actually don't like. After being well drained, this is what I got:
Dice as thinly or thickly as you like. I like this thicker dice personally. Roughly the same size is better, but if you're not good at knife stuff, uneven cuts give your salsa character. At the very least, people will know it was done by hand. The white thing the salsa is in is actually my colander. As you can see, the salsa is more stuff you find in a salsa and less standing water. For the best.
The nacho cheese sauce I use already had a video recipe from Chef John at FoodWishes (seriously, this dude is awesome):
Basically, you need a roux (basically the greatest sentence in the world of the culinary arts.) I like to go butter and flour where there's more butter than flour. Why? Well, it creates a looser sauce. Why not just add more milk? Well, that's another path too. White sauce is one of those things where you can kind of go your own way. It's more by sight than by anything else. Most importantly though, cook out that flour flavor. This means you got to be patient and even though that roux is bubbling away, just keep stirring away on medium and have faith it's not burning. The smell of roux is pretty clear when it's cooking. It smells like cooked pie crust. Just don't burn the stuff at a crazy high heat. Not that hard. Personally, I like a pretty loose sauce and cheese will thicken it up something fierce, so it's good to err on the side of looseness in my mind. Here's a picture of me incorporating my cheese into my very loose white sauce:
Yeah, it gets a bigger picture, so you can better see the cheese strands. That does eventually incorporate, so don't worry. Just make sure you use a good melty cheese. Cheddar, jack, or mexican cheese blends tend to be great at melting. Melted cheese is the dubstep of the culinary world. You can pour it over any damn thing, and it'll announce and dominate your dish in victory with its exuberance. This is the base of your nachos, so try not to mess it up.
Last, I had to make a guacomole. I just used 6 avocados, 2 tomatoes, salt and pepper, and some lime. If your avocados are ripe, they should form a guac pretty easily. Just let it set in the fridge with the lime juice on top with some plastic wrap pressed into it. After a hour or two, it should be awesome. You can add more stuff, but I had enough going on, so my guac was pretty simple this time.
Voltron-style, I combined all of this to make my Americanized Mexican Nachos that I was proud to call inauthentic because, hell, it was delicious.
Little dab of sour cream hurts nobody.
From the side you can kind of see the layers. My shadow kind of fouls up the picture, but you should get the idea.
It hit the flavor pyramid. Spicy, salty, touch of sweet, and a touch of sour brought it all together into a nacho platter that I probably wouldn't want to waste on my friends when they come over for football season.
Normally, I wouldn't create a full recipe rebuttal to a restaurant I don't like, but, quoting from Chuy's mission statement:
Our commitment is to provide unique, authentic Mexican food to you using only the freshest ingredients.
Basically means they're asking for it.
-Charles
No comments:
Post a Comment