Chile is the Spanish word for the chili plant and colorado is one of the Spanish words for red (colored). This has nothing to do with the USA, Chile Colorado is a Mexican stew. Meat is stewed in a sauce consisting mainly of chili, which makes for an incredible and very delicious taste experience.
Mexican chilies often have different names depending on their degree of ripeness. The fresh poblano chili, when dried, is called ancho. Mirasol chili is called Guajillo when dried. Pasilla chilies, on the other hand, are rarely eaten fresh and are also called pasilla when dried.
These chilies are spicy in their dried form, as is the way with chilies. However, their heat is moderate and easily tolerated.
Chile de árbol is also called “bird’s beak chile” and this is reminiscent of Thai “bird’s eye chile” and all of this is screaming at you: VERY HOT! Using chile like this is for those of you who love and thrive on spicy food.
For this dish you use (clockwise from top left) ancho, pasilla and guajillo.
The small chile de árbol (bottom right) are optional and are best left out when preparing the dish for the first time.
The stalks and seeds are removed from the dried chilies. As the pods are not completely dried, but still have a leathery structure, some seeds stick to the inside. This can be ignored.
The chilies are now roasted dry in a hot pan for 1 minute to fully activate their aromas. Be careful not to inhale deeply directly above the stove and an open window helps.
Then pour plenty of boiling water over the chilies and leave to rehydrate without heat for 25 minutes.
For Chile Colorado, you use beef for braising, i.e. cuts with fat and connective tissue running through them. Chuck is the classic choice in North America. The meat is cut into large pieces of 4 – 5 cm in length.
The pieces are then generously seasoned with salt and pepper on all sides and dusted with a little flour. The flour ensures particularly good browning during the subsequent searing.
As with all braised dishes, this searing is very important for the taste. The meat must be browned well on all sides over a high heat, of course without burning. We use a little olive oil and don’t put too many pieces in the pan at once so that we can treat them individually in the best way. Then we place the seared pieces in a deep container to catch any juices that ooze out.
In the same pan and over a medium-high heat, sauté the chopped onions in more oil until lightly browned. This takes about 5 – 6 minutes. Then add plenty of chopped garlic and sauté for about 2 minutes until fragrant.
The main spice in this dish is the chili, you don’t need much more. We add ground cumin, smoked paprika powder and Mexican oregano, stir everything well and remove the pan from the heat.
The chilies are poured through a sieve, the water is very bitter and is not used. Together with the seasoned onions from the pan and beef stock (or water), the chilies are processed in a blender to form a spicy sauce.
We recommend straining this sauce through a fine sieve. In most recipes it is used as is, but its texture becomes much more pleasant and finer if you remove the remaining pieces of chili and seeds. It takes a little effort, but it’s worth it. So we patiently pass the sauce through a large chinois sieve with a ladle.
The result is deep red, but the color is also somewhat reminiscent of chocolate, which is an interesting impression given that both chili and chocolate have their origins in Mexico.
Pour the sauce into a heavy, cast-iron casserole and add the meat and all its juices. Then heat everything slowly until bubbles form. Put a lid on so that a small gap remains open, the sauce should reduce. Set the temperature to a very low level (for us: 2 out of 10). The dish should only just simmer.
2 hours is enough to tenderize the meat. However, we recommend 3 or more hours. After 3.5 in our case, it looked like this:
If you want to thicken the sauce, you can remove the lid and reduce it more (you will then need to increase the heat a little). Alternatively, you can always stir 1 teaspoon of starch into 1 tablespoon of cold water until smooth, add to the sauce and leave to swell for a few minutes until the desired consistency is achieved.
Season with salt at the very end. For an even rounder result, we also recommend adding a small amount of honey and a small amount of light vinegar to the sauce. The spiciness and depth of flavor are already there, and you can adjust the sweetness and acidity to suit your personal taste.
We serve it classically with black beans and arroz rojo. A real treat.
One more warning: the tastemaster cooked the dish with a NextGen and – embarrassingly – didn’t clean up as it should be. Madame Chilipepper quite rightly points out that this sauce stains more than the most expensive wall paint on the planet. So always clean immediately and thoroughly, unless you want to redecorate anyway.
Enjoy.
And may the taste be with you.
Ingredients ( for 4 people):
Dried Mexican chili in this or similar quantity:
5 ancho
5 pasilla
3 guajillo
Optional: 1 – 2 Chile de árbol (Warning: very hot!)
1.2 kg well-marbled beef for braising, e.g. chuck
Salt and pepper
2 tbsp flour
4 tbsp olive oil or neutral vegetable oil
2 medium-sized onions
5 cloves of garlic
3 tsp ground cumin
2 tsp smoked paprika powder
4 tsp dried Mexican oregano (alternatively: Turkish oregano)
750 ml beef stock (alternative: chicken stock)
Optional:
Approx. 1 tbsp honey
Approx. 1 tbsp light vinegar
