Quick Enchilada Sauce Recipe

Getting to the Sauce of the Matter

Enchiladas taste great and are easy to make and it is the sauce that makes them great. After we figured out the enchilada recipe for the low fat cheese enchiladas, Chefette and I started to work out the sauce recipe to go with it. Enchiladas are cooked before they are assembled so the sauce is vital to keep them moist and to add flavor, but it is not a cooking medium like a poaching liquid. Knowing this helped us work out the flavor of the sauce. We know that the sauce will add a primary flavor, the first flavor you taste when eating the enchilada, and, of course, contribute to the overall flavor profile of the dish, but it does not deeply affect the overall taste of the enchilada itself. This makes the sauce different than a poaching liquid, which will affect the flavor of the food being poached.

For instance, if you are poaching eggs and add too much vinegar to the water, the egg will taste like the vinegar. If you are poaching fish in cream or in wine, the flavor of the fish will be different depending on which liquid you choose to use.

Knowing this gave me some room to play. Instead of thinking of the enchilada as the primary flavor, I worked off the theory that the enchilada was the finishing flavor and the sauce would be the primary flavor. Allowing the sauce its own space to be its own taste and putting the enchilada in a supporting or finishing role drastically altered the way I approached this sauce.

Spice is Nice

I stopped by a couple of restaurants where I know the cooks and asked them what they put in their enchilada sauce when they are making it. Everybody had the same question for me "Here or at home?" Apparently what is served to the public and what is made at home are two slightly different sauces. The home sauces of my chef friends have more chili powder and are generally red sauces. A few cooks said that they made green sauces at home and the ones who made red sauces said they did so because they usually have tomato sauce in a can on hand. I checked my local supermarket and tomatillos and green chilies where available, so a green sauce could be made as quickly as a red sauce. Then I thought of something...I live in California, a state were tomatillos and green chilies are part of the culture. I emailed some friends who live in other parts of the country and they had never heard of tomatillos, a sad fact considering how tasty tomatillos are.

I decided that it would be better to base my quick enchilada sauce recipe on a product that I knew was readily available to everybody and went with a red enchilada sauce. The other thing that I noticed was that every recipe that my friends used contained chili powder, ground cumin, and garlic powder. Other repeated but not prevalent ingredients were cocoa powder, creating something closer to a mole sauce, cinnamon, and flour used to make a roux to thicken the sauce. Armed with these ideas, I went back home to try my hand at creating my own quick enchilada sauce recipe.

Quick Enchilada Sauce Recipe

Because I have been classically trained, I could not conceive of starting this recipe in any way other than heating some oil and sweating some onions. Yes, I was approaching this like a marinara, but as I said to Chefette, enchiladas are just a variation of manicotti and manicotti are served with marinara. So my quick enchilada sauce recipe was going to start like marinara with olive oil and sweated onions. In the end the recipe looked like this:

• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 1 medium onion, diced
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1/2 teaspoon cumin
• 1/2 cup chili powder
• 16 ounces tomato sauce
• 2 cups chicken stock (or vegetable stock if you want to go vegetarian)
• 1/4 cup flour

Instructions

1. Heat the oil in a skillet and add the onion.
2. Sweat the onion until it is translucent.
3. Add the garlic and, as soon as the garlic starts to become fragrant, add the flour.
4. Stir the combination until it becomes a bit thick.
5. Cook your roux for a few minutes to cook out the raw flour taste.
6. Add the stock and the sauce.
7. Add the chili powder and the cumin.
8. Taste for salt.
9. Adjust the chili powder until the sauce is hot enough for you.
10. This should make enough enchilada sauce for enchiladas to serve four people.