Mon
06
Oct 08

Chiles in Walnut Sauce

Tags: , , ,

For the September issue of my movie food project, I decided to cook a dish from Like Water for Chocolate. Yeah, I know it's actually October, but I have at least a dozen good excuses for being late. We'll settle on my quest for candied citron to explain my tardiness. Turns out that candied citron is seasonal (Christmas time – fruitcake season). This point was driven home by the fact that not a single store I checked around town had them, and each store seemed to point me to one of the others I had already visited. Fortunately I had oranges and sugar, and with oranges and sugar, you can candy citrus peels. (Now you see why I'm late with my post.)

Like Water for Chocolate is the beautiful and heartbreaking story of a young Mexican girl named Tita. She lives on a ranch with her mother and two older sisters in turn-of-the-century Mexico.  Because Tita is the youngest daughter of the family, according to family custom, she must stay with her mother to care for her until the day her mother dies. The custom is outdated, but Tita's domineering mother insists on adhering to it, forbidding Tita to marry the love of her life. Tita finds solace in the kitchen, which she eventually grows to be in charge of. She pours all of her considerable passion and emotion into her cooking, often with incredible, unbelievable results. Throughout the film, her meals, in addition to being exquisitely prepared, often highlight her emotional state at the time.

This dish, Chiles in Walnut Sauce, was one part of a magnificent wedding feast. Telling you who gets married or explaining the circumstances surrounding that marriage would ruin the film, so I'll leave it alone. Suffice to say that Tita fills her chiles not just with an intriguingly fruity, crunchy meat filling, she also fills them with love.

Chiles in Walnut Sauce (aka Chiles en Nogada)
adapted from Like Water for Chocolate, by Laura Esquivel
 
The chiles:
6-10 large fresh poblanos
 
The garnish:
the seeds of 1 pomegranate
 
The sauce:
4 oz queso fresco, crumbled
4 oz walnuts
¾ cup heavy cream
¾ cup milk
 
The filling:
2-3 T canola oil (or lard if you're feeling sassy)
1 onion, chopped
4 oz almonds, finely chopped
1 lb ground sirloin
2 t cumin
1 T sugar
2 oz raisins
1/2 lb tomatoes, chopped
1 oz candied orange peel (should be candied citron, but I evidently cannot find that in Austin in October), finely chopped
1/2 peach, peeled, cored, and chopped
1/2 apple, peeled, seeded, and chopped
pepper
salt
 
Sauce:
Add the walnuts, cheese, cream, and milk to a blender, and puree till completely combined. Ta-da, your sauce is finished. (Note: most recipes I've found call for removing the skins from the walnuts, but I didn't bother with that step and didn't detect any real bitterness in the sauce.)
 
Chiles:
I don't get to use my normal method for roasting the chiles here since they need to remain whole so they can be stuffed. In this case, oil the chiles and roast under a broiler, turning frequently to fully blister the outside. Allow the chiles to sit in a sealed plastic bag for 15-20 minutes to let the skins loosen. After the time has elapsed, carefully peel the chiles, then split them open and remove (the majority of) their seeds.
 
Filling:
Saute the onions in oil till soft and translucent. Add the almonds and continue to saute until the nuts begin to color slightly. Add the ground sirloin, cumin, and sugar and let the meat brown. After the meat has cooked completely, stir in the peach, apple, raisins, tomatoes, and candied orange peel or citron. Continue to cook till the fruits have softened and given off their juices and those juices have largely cooked away. Season with salt to taste.
 
Assembly:
Allow the filling to cool slightly. Once cooled, carefully stuff the chile cavity with the filling, arranging the stuffed peppers on a serving tray as you go. Once all the chiles have been stuffed and arranged, drizzle the walnut sauce over the top of them. Sprinkle your hard-won pomegranate seeds all over the top of that for a beautiful presentation.

I watched Like Water for Chocolate in its original spoken Mexican with English subtitles and found it quite enjoyable. The book of the same title, on which the movie is based, is also available as an English translation. In the English version of the book at least, the ingredient list for this dish didn't quite seem to match up with the recipe (I'd be interested to know if the Spanish version of the book does a better job), but in the end it's meant to be a story, not a cookbook, so I guess it's forgivable. At any rate, if you happen to have the book in front of you, you'll notice that I took a few liberties with the recipe.

Even with the modern conveniences of pre-shelled nuts and a high-powered blender, this dish is still a bit on the labor-intensive side. In the end though, after all that work it turned out really well. The flavors were really fantastic. Poblanos vary in their heat – some are very mild, almost like bell peppers. Others are fairly spicy (maybe they were grown near jalapenos and were subject to cross-pollination). Ours turned out to be on the spicy end of the spectrum, which actually worked pretty well here. The sweet meat filling and its mildly piquant roasted chile casing were nice counterpoints to the rich creamy sauce and the tart and crunchy pomegranate seeds. It is the perfect metaphor for a richly flavored, many textured feast of a movie (well, maybe if it ended up burning in the end).

» Similar Posts

  1. How to Roast Chiles
  2. Red Chile Rising
  3. Pate for Potluck

» Trackbacks & Pingbacks

No trackbacks yet.
Trackback link for this post:
http://www.thehungryengineer.com/trackback.ashx?id=100

» Comments

  1. kang says

    wow this looks amazing. I must admit, I don't think ive ever had chiles before. The colours are amazing, the pomegranate seeds against the white walnut sauce, wow! it must taste great too :D

    Really interesting post!

    October 6, 2008 4:29 PM
  2. April says

    Thanks! I was really happy with how it turned out. And while the chiles were good, I have some leftover filling and sauce and was considering making some sort of empanada-type-creature with puff pastry and my leftover goods. I think that would be good too.

    October 7, 2008 9:33 AM
  3. zestycook says

    WOW - i am with Kang on this one...This looks brilliant! I have to stumbe this :)

    October 8, 2008 8:11 AM
  4. saltpepperlime says

    I loved that book and was intrigued by some of the recipes. Those look amazing !

    October 8, 2008 10:28 AM
  5. April says

    @zestycook - Thanks so much! It was a challenge converting that recipe from movie/book to reality - I'm happy it turned out so well.

    @saltpepperlime - The book and movie were both wonderful - and yeah, I would love to try more of the recipes in the book - several of them sounded *really* good.

    October 8, 2008 11:51 AM
  6. Missy says

    I hated the book (felt it was too much like a romance novel) but liked the recipes in the book. This looks AMAZING, April.

    October 9, 2008 11:04 PM
  7. April says

    I'm not generally one for romance novels, but this one was just so strange! At any rate, the chiles were pretty good, and it turns out that the leftover filling worked really well stuffed into some puff pastry and dressed with the walnut sauce.

    October 10, 2008 8:33 AM
  8. ToKissTheCook says

    I can't tell you how excited I was to find this on Tastespotting! This is one of my all-time favorite movies and I've, genuinely, been searching for this recipe in a way that I can manage making it. AWESOME. Thanks!!!

    November 20, 2008 1:48 PM
  9. April says

    Cool! I'm glad this helps you :-)

    One thing I've been told is that "real Mexicans" bread and fry their stuffed chiles before dousing them with sauce and sprinkling with pomegranate. That isn't how the book describes it, so I'm guessing that it's acceptable to prepare it either way :-) Plus, it was yummy even without the frying.

    November 24, 2008 10:15 AM

» Leave a Comment