Jesse Learns a New Dish: Chileatole

 

Okay, guys, I learned a new dish!  

So I was over on Quora (which is, like, the only social media I am involved with), and I was answering a question by some deluded American who thought Mexican food begins and ends with Taco Bell and La Hacienda.  I gave a fun slideshow, and asked any Mexican cooks that happened to read it to let me know if they had any fun dishes for me to try.

Like a year later, the dish chileatole popped up in the comments.  I'd never heard of it, so I decided to get down.  I checked my stack of Rick Bayless books, but this didn't look like something he'd covered.  So I did what any resourceful chef would do: I Googled it, and I found a pretty good instructional video in minutes.  It can be found here.

So what is chileatole?  

It's a green-chile infused sweetcorn stew, thickened with masa (tortilla dough made with nixtamalized corn).  It's then garnished with queso fresco (crumbly white Mexican cheese), epazote (an herb), corn husk, and a roasted serrano chile.

Wait, nixta-what now?

Nixtamalization is a fun vocabulary word.  It refers to the treating of seed corn with an alkali (originally ash), to soften the hulls and make it easily grindable.  It's the reason tortillas aren't gritty.  Nixtamalized corn flour, known as masa harina, or occasionaly just instant masa, is the secret to sopes, tamales, arepas, pupusas (that's next week), and is the thickener for chileatole.  Also, fun fact, as pointed out by my main man Jeffrey Steingarten, 'nixtamalize' is, to my knowledge, the only word in the English language that has an Aztec root.  (I checked about chocolate.  True, it got to Spanish from the Aztec chocolatl, but was preceded by the Olmec kakawa.  I'm the nerdiest guy you know, by a lot.)

How did it all come together?

Well, the first step was to make the green salsa, which consisted of spinach, poblano peppers, and jalapenos, pureed with some masa flour.  (I threw a little epazote in there, too.  I drove all over town looking for that stuff, and I wasn't about to just let it be a garnish.)  Then, I cut the kernels off a few ears of corn, and simmered them for like 25 minutes.  

This, by the way, seemed like way too long to simmer corn for, but that's what the recipe said to do.  I was ok with it, because the corn I'd gotten turned out to be kinda nasty, dried-out, end-of-season corn (this was in late September), so the long simmer really helped break it down.  I think maybe this recipe is optimized for old corn, so I kinda lucked out.  Also interestingly, as you can see from the photo, this recipe (and all others I saw) had whole, thick slices of corn on the cob, as well as just free kernels.  I'm not sure why.  Tradition?  It was good for the photo, but kind of hard to eat around.

Anyway, once the corn was well-stewed, you add in the green salsa and simmer it for a while longer, until the masa is cooked out (kinda like a roux), and the soup thickens.  Then it's seasoned with lime juice, and garnished with queso fresco (which is always nice with corn), epazote (an intriguing herb, but if you can't find it, you can still make a pretty good chileatole), corn husk (which was flavorless and inedible, but looked nice), and a roasted serrano chile.  The roasted serrano was fun.  You could take little bites of it between bites of soup, to get a customizable level of heat.

One quick funny story about me being an idiot:

So there I am at the Mexican grocery (the tiny, dingy, and awesome Supermercado Don Juan Numero Dos on Ashley Phosphate), and I've got my corn, but I'm looking everywhere for fresh husks.  They had dried husks, for wrapping tamales, but I couldn't find fresh.  I was just about to buy a big bag of dried husks (which I would never need again, because tamales are a HUGE pain in the ass and I don't mess with them at home), when my eyes came to rest on the fresh ears of corn in my shopping basket.  Still in their husks.  Unbelievable.  I quietly set the dried husks back down, and privately hoped no one there could read minds.  I felt dumber than a guy wearing a backwards ballcap, shielding his eyes from the sun with his hand.  (And I've definitely been that guy.  Let's go Cubbies!)

The Verdict: 

Cool dish!  Glad I made it!  I don't know if it will go into the regular rotation, but I could definitely see it, or elements of it, as useful building blocks in the future.  A corn, green chile, and masa ragout would make for a really nice garnish for a piece of fish, for instance, or even a piece of brined pork loin.

The coolest part of it was the marriage of sweetcorn and masa.  That kind of reinforcement of flavors is one of my absolute favorite compositional tricks, and it was super cool to see it show up in a totally traditional dish.  I could write a whole blog post about flavor reinforcement.  Maybe I will...

What I would do different: 

A couple things.  First, just nibbling on an epazote leaf as a garnish was kind of pointless.  I wish I had put more into the green sauce.  That was such a great vehicle for flavor, and I feel like it was underutilized.  Second, I'd skip the corn husk.  I take a dim view of inedible garnishes.  Three, the slice of corn cob in each plate seemed a little pointless.  What I'd rather do would be to take all the corn cobs, grill them, and then make a grilled corn stock to start the dish out in.  Then, you'd have three vectors for corn flavor, instead of just two.  Lastly, the recipe has you salt the soup before the final simmer.  A mistake, I think.  It ended up a little salty, and by that point, there was nothing I could do.  I should have known better, but sometimes, when following an unknown recipe, you can get tricked into doing little things you know are wrong.  Say it with me, kids: if you're giving something a long simmer, correct the seasoning at the end.

Oh well, it was still good.

-js