Enchiladas Are the Saucy, Cheesy Addition to Your Dinner Table

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/01/dining/enchiladas.html

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HOUSTON — Excellent new restaurants are blooming in this sprawling city built on the banks of the muddy Buffalo Bayou, but the pull of classic old Tex-Mex cuisine remains strong.

You can sense it in the huge and crowded dining room of El Real Tex-Mex on Westheimer Street, where locals gather to eat enchiladas and drink cold beer, and in the cramped and crowded one of Teotihuacan on Irvington Boulevard, north of the city center, where they do the same. It is present at the outposts of Molina’s Cantina around town, at the Original Ninfa’s on Navigation, at the Ninfa’s apostate El Tiempo Cantina next door, at Spanish Flowers, at Sylvia’s.

I came here to eat at those restaurants, and in particular to eat their enchiladas, plate after plate of fat-dipped tortillas wrapped around their filling, topped with cheese and broiled into molten excellence. I ate enchiladas with intent. Because: It would be great to make enchiladas at home. It would be great to make them casually, often, for a weeknight meal for family and friends.

For anyone interested in doing that, in deploying the American home cook’s standard mechanism of taking a delicious restaurant dish or regional specialty and making it into a casserole (that’d be me!), the restaurants of Houston are a good place to start.

Enchiladas come in three basic varieties in South Texas, though there are dozens of variations served there and all across the country, in restaurants and homes alike. (El Real Tex-Mex counts 10 different kinds of enchiladas on its menu. Sylvia’s has 19. Expand the search to the enchilada’s ancestral home in Mexico, and the number becomes nearly countless.)

It was these three basic styles I sought to emulate at home: cheese enchiladas served in a red-hued chili gravy or sauce; chicken enchiladas served with a tomatillo salsa; and enchiladas stuffed and topped with chili con carne. All three are served with cheese — the chicken with queso fresco, the other two with Cheddar, processed American cheese or a combination thereof. Some may quail at the use of American cheese.

“That’s the Velveeta debate,” said Robb Walsh, the eminent historian of Tex-Mex cuisine and a proprietor of El Real. He was standing in the restaurant’s kitchen, face deeply tanned from fishing the coastal flats near his home in Galveston, and he was smiling a big come-at-me smile. “If you use a straight Cheddar, you only have seconds to act before it sets up and gets congealed,” he said. “We use a processed cheese because it stays melty and perfect.”

So stipulated. Processed cheese can take on flavor from other cheeses, and provide them with melted stability as well. I ended up using a blend of Velveeta and Cheddar on the enchiladas with red sauces. For the chicken, I used queso fresco, firm-textured and slightly salty. “At home, sometimes I use cotija or feta,” Mr. Walsh said.

Enchiladas are what you make of them. I set out to cook.

For the chicken, I made a simple salsa verde — tomatillos, onion, garlic and Serrano peppers whizzed up in a food processor with a few sprigs of tender cilantro. You can buy fresh tomatillos, then husk and rinse them and use them raw, which gives the sauce great vibrancy, but using canned ones is no crime. I poached some chicken, too, though Mr. Walsh told me he most often uses leftovers at home, or picks up a roasted bird at the supermarket. For home cooks, that is a sensible move.

For the cheese enchiladas, I made chili gravy — really just a roux amped up with chile powder. Some restaurants use lard as the base, thickening it with flour or masa harina. In the old days, Mr. Walsh said, people used beef tallow. A neutral oil, like canola, will do.

And for the chili con carne, I made a skillet version with ground beef, thickening it with toasted flour.

All that, and a tall stack of tortillas, and I was set.

To make enchiladas — literally, to enrobe a tortilla in chili, from the Spanish “enchilar” — you must first prepare the tortillas for rolling, and it is this preparation that scares off many home cooks. You take a firm, fresh corn tortilla and dip it in hot oil to soften it and make it pliable. You do so one or two at a time, depending on the amount of oil you have in the pan, and after three or four you’ll find it’s no more difficult than making toast.

“Dip the tortillas, then roll them around whatever you’re cooking, place them seam down in a pan and sauce the middle so the edges get brown and crunchy next to the cheese, and that’s a nice presentation,” Mr. Walsh said. “If you totally sauce them in, it can get kind of gloopy.”

Then bake. Sometimes raw onions are scattered across the top of the finished dish, occasionally sliced jalapeño or a drift of chopped cilantro. The smart set adds a fried egg, and not just at breakfast. Rice and refried beans can provide ballast — at Teotihuacan to such an extent that a plate of cheese enchiladas is roughly the size of a stretching cat. But enchiladas can also stand, and at home perhaps ought to stand, as a one-pan meal — a casserole for dinner that starts out as a project and ends up the sort of thing you may eat once or twice a month.

“You have to judge food not by the hype that it has or the ridicule that people heap on it,” said Gustavo Arellano, the author of “Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America,” when I called him to ask about the state of the enchilada.

“It’s a classic American meal,” he said. “Don’t hate until you’ve actually tried it.”

Recipes: Enchiladas Con Carne | Chicken Enchiladas With Salsa Verde | Cheese Enchiladas With Chili Gravy