On this week’s culinary tour we go to Mexico for the wonderfully rich dish of Enchiladas
Now I’ve seen a lot of recipes online for enchiladas, and there are a lot of variations.
So when making your own enchiladas – Just wing it. Go with what tastes good.
However there are three main components to this dish for me.
1. Fried ground beef.
2. Tomato and cream cheese sauce.
3. As much cheese as can be tolerated.
Here is a picture of the results, I’ll provide a recipe below.
Recipe and a bonus vegetarian version after the jump.
Ok so here’s the rundown of how to make very basic enchiladas. I’m not going to give measurements and all that sort of jazz because this is a very open ended recipe and you can customize it as you feel you can. However – Onwards.
1. Brown ground beef in a frying pan while adding spices and vegetables. There are packets of Taco Seasoning for sale in most shops, add one along with some water. I tend to also use oregano, chili powder, onion salt, and garlic powder. Mushroom works, but it must be well cooked as should the onion if used. A tip is to add gravy powder [Not too much] or flour to make the mix nice and sticky so it doesn’t fall out of the wrap.
2. Take a tortilla wrap and microwave for 40 seconds to soften it up. Apply salsa, refried beans or sour cream. It’s up to you. Then spoon in a generous amount of the meat and sprinkle cheese onto the meat, red cheddar works fine. The more cheese the better. Roll the tortilla around the filling and place it into an oven dish. Repeat until the dish is full or you run out of either meat or tortillas.
3. Now it’s time for the sauce. I’ve seen jars of fajita sauce for sale, but it’s not that hard to make your own sauce. A jar of pasta sauce might work too. If you’re making a dinner from scratch, just do as much as you can yourself. It’ll taste better. Dump a can of chopped tomato into the blender, add spices blitz until smooth. My trick is to add a couple of heaping tablespoons of cream cheese to the blender at this point. It thickens the sauce and during the next stage it helps a lot.
4. Pour the sauce over the wraps and apply cheese, cheese, cheese. This is a very cheesy recipe. Pop the dish into the oven and bake at about 200 C for maybe…. 20-30 minutes. Make sure the cheese is nice and melty. Give it a minute or two to cool and then serve.
If you use 800 grams of mince you’ll fill 6 big tortillas and use about 3/4 of a block of cheese and 2 cans of chopped tomatoes. That’ll easily feed 4-5 people. Have fun with this one.
Now – the vegetarian recipe.
Repeat the process as above. Substitute mushrooms and peppers for the meat, and don’t add the gravy powder. Add half a can of tomatoes and a few squirts of tomato paste during cooking. then do exactly as above for the cheese and the baking.
Maybe use Quorn mince instead of beef mince.
Results below.
So do you want meat or mushrooms? Spicy or with sour cream?
It is up to you, what isn’t up to you is eating crap night after night when you now know how to make this dinner that will taste amazing.
If you like rice, that’s the preferred side dish to this.