Hellfire Enchiladas

These Enchiladas Could Be a Two-Ice Cream Cone Meal!

If you’ve ordered enchiladas in your local Mexican restaurant lately, they probably came out topped with some sort of brown gravy glop, especially if the sign over the door says “Tex-Mex” or the word “cantina” appears anywhere on the premises. Some restaurants now give you the choice of red or green sauce -- red is chile colorado, while green is (unfortunately) usually tomatillo-based instead of chile verde. Commercially you can buy both red and green enchilada sauce canned by vendors like Hatch and Old El Paso, most of which tends to be salt-laden.

Here’s a version of enchiladas you can make at home with a tomato-based sauce, a sort of salsa ranchera. You can doctor it to be as hot as you want by adjusting the number of chiles in the sauce…

The Enchilada Sauce 8 ripe tomatoes, peeled and chopped 2 Tbsp vegetable oil 2 medium onions, diced 2 garlic cloves, minced 8 small, hot chiles such as serrano or cayenne 1 tsp dried oregano Salt and pepper to taste The Enchilada Filling 2 tsp vegetable oil ¼ onion, diced 1 pound ground beef * 4 ounces shredded sharp cheddar ½ Cup sour cream 2 tsp ground cayenne pepper 16 (or so) corn tortillas Spray oil

Instructions

Heat 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil in a large skillet, add the onions and garlic and cook them slowly over medium heat until the onions are transparent. Add the chopped tomatoes to the pan and cook over medium heat, mashing the chunks with a wooden spoon. Slice the chiles thin and add to the tomatoes. Cook until the tomatoes form a sort of red mush with green specks, about an hour. Add the oregano and salt and pepper to taste; cook for another 20 minutes or so. 

Heat 2 teaspoons of vegetable oil in a saucepan. Add the diced onion and cook over medium heat until transparent. Add ground beef to pan and cook until browned. Remove the pan from the heat and add other filling ingredients (sour cream, cayenne and cheddar). Stir with a fork until the ingredients are well mixed. Taste and add cayenne and/or sour cream as needed.

While the sauce is cooking, heat a tortilla griddle or cast-iron skillet over medium-high heat until hot. Drop tortillas one by one on the griddle. Heat for 15-20 seconds on one side, then flip and heat for a similar amount of time on the other. If small, burned spots appear, shorten the time by a few seconds. Stack the tortillas on a folded sheet of paper towel. If you don’t perform this step, the tortillas will be too brittle to roll and won’t cook properly.

Preheat the oven to 350° F. Coat the bottom of a large baking pan with vegetable oil spray.

Place a heaping tablespoon of filling (plus a little more) on a tortilla. Roll the tortilla tightly enough to spread the filling out to the ends, and place the enchilada in the greased baking pan. When full, spread the sauce over the enchiladas. Bake for about 20 minutes or until hot throughout.

Serve immediately, preferably with a cold beer or two.

* Purists may feel free to substitute 2 cups diced cooked chicken or shredded cooked beef

(recipe modified  from The Hellfire Cookbook, ©1975 by John Phillips Cranwell)