I’m gonna fuck around and try to make chili verde for my first time this weekend. Southwestern cuisine is one of the great underappreciated gems of American culture. People all around the world know of Texas chili, but what about New Mexico and its green chili? There isn’t even a proper wikipedia entry for chili verde! And what about blue corn chips or chile rellenos or even the Denver omelette?
I’ve never done this before, so it may be a hot mess. I’m taking a very wild guess as to what the proportions for the salsa verde ingredients should be, but so far I think it’s going well. Toasting the poblanos and tomatillos in the oven and blending everything:
All set for chili making tomorrow, imo. It’s easy to forget how intense fresh jalapenos are compared to the ones you get at Subway. The tips of my fingers and my cuticles are sort of burning right now. Smells great, though.
Be careful interacting w your junk. Or the junk of others.
And touching your eyes.
I was a chef for years and my most painful injury came at home, when I thoughtlessly removed my contact lenses without properly washing my hands. It was an AWFUL 72 hours.
I rubbed my eye after chopping up serannos once and oh boy that’s not good at all. You just don’t want to do that.
It really is striking how much more powerful jalapenos are when they’re fresh. They’re bleh when they’re frozen and put on fast food burgers, but jalapenos are no slouches when they’re in their prime freshness. I always think of Southwestern cuisine as being kind of mild, but maybe that’s because I’ve never really had the authentic version of their food.
I eat fresh jalapenos with some regularity, usually fresh from the farmer’s market, and my experience is that it’s very much jalapeno roulette. Some are hardly spicier than a bell pepper. Others, using half of one in the whole dish is too much.
I’ll be smoking turkey on the Weber kettle for thanksgiving this year. Well, turkey parts, as I don’t think I’d be able to fit a whole bird over indirect heat.
Anyway, in preparation I’ll be smoking a whole spatchcocked chicken at some point this weekend. I haven’t tried smoking on the kettle in cold weather and I assume I’ll need to make some adjustments to maintain the correct temp.
@MrWookie do you do the snake method? If so any tips? In the summer I do a snake with two coals on the bottom row and one on the top, with my wood chunks resting on that. I’m able to stay at around 225 by keeping my lower vent at around 25% open and the top vent around 75%. Should I keep my coals setup the same but just keep my vents more open to adjust for cold (40ish degrees) weather or do you think I need to stack my coals 2x2?
For a chicken? No, I don’t do it that way. I actually like to smoke my chickens hot, 400-450 or so, so that the skin crisps up and, when spatchcocked, they cook up in just about an hour or so. I haven’t really experimented with the snake method for anything tbh.
Update: chili verde turned out excellent imho. Normally the first time I try out a new thing it’s a disaster, but I think this really worked. Surprisingly spicy, which may be because I got lucky picking jalapenos. This is supposed to be made with pork shoulder, but I used beef because that’s what I’m familiar with --next time def going to try pork. Southwestern cuisine really deserves more love; it’s outstanding.
So instead of taking a 4th year of Spanish in high school I took a cooking class. Best decision I’ve ever made because the wife is a Jew and I’m Irish/English ancestry. You couldn’t pick a worse culinary combo.
