Scientific Approach

The following is not a recipe for Chile Rojo. It is a scientific experiment in making the perfect chile rojo. I've been married for 15 years and during this time I've learned to make some awesome chile rojo. I've even gotten the approval of my husband's family which is high accolades.

Recently, my SIL Lupe and I were discussing chile verde and how she has found the right ratio of certain # of chilis to x # of tomatoes. With red chile it becomes harder since chiles come in all sizes and for the purpose of this experiment I used pujos (sp?) only and tomatillos.

Again this is not a recipe although it is very simple to make. Chiles, tomatillos, salt & garlic. That's it. You can use it for tacos, buritos whatever you want or my hubby's favorite with pork.

First, I roast the chiles...low to medium since I don't want to smoke myself out into a coughing fit with burning chiles/seeds. My Chinese nature comes out and I use chopsticks to turn the chiles over which comes in very handy.


After all the chiles are roasted, I break them in half and take out the seeds (as much as I can) since they cause the heat & I can't take that much. There. If you want to keep the heat, by all means grind them up with your chile.

For science, I weighed the chiles + paper plate after they are seeded on my digital scale. 23 grams (plate) +  72 grams chiles (de-stemmed/ seeded) = 95 grams total. For the intuituve part, I eyeballed it to a full plate of chiles.


Grind up the tomatillos...I use canned (28 oz)  because 1) it's easier and 2) consistent flavor. Throw the whole contents of the can in the blender. I start adding the red chiles into the blender. At first, I throw in 5 or so in the blender and keep adding thru the little hatch while it's still blending. Lots of blending...



You're aiming for the right color and consistency. Lupe had the right color but wrong consistency. You want the chile to stick to the spoon. It turns out that my eyeball guess was dead on. I added all those chiles to get this color and consistency. Now to add it to the fried pork with some water and let it simmer for 2 hours to get back to the almost the original consistency.

And that's it, I hope that takes the mystery of making the perfect chile a bit easier. I can't totally vouch for this scientifc method since this is the first time I tried it this way but I had a lot of fun adding in the scientific element to cooking. It'll be interesting to see what Hector will rate this later tonight. :)