Photo: Alejandra Mendoza Santillan · CC BY-SA 4.0
Chiles en Nogada (Stuffed Poblanos in Walnut Cream)
Puebla's late-summer dish: poblanos charred and peeled, stuffed with a picadillo of meat and fruit, covered in nogada, a white cream sauce of fresh walnuts, and scattered with pomegranate and parsley — green, white and red, the colours of the flag. The white is made by peeling: the thin brown skin on every walnut half is picked off, because it is what makes the sauce bitter and grey.
Ingredients
- poblano chillies6
- Picadillo
- minced pork · or half pork, half beef500 g
- onion · chopped1
- garlic3 cloves
- tomatoes · peeled and chopped2
- apple · small dice1
- pear · small dice1
- peach · small dice1
- plantain · ripe, small dice0.5
- raisins40 g
- almonds · blanched, roughly chopped40 g
- ground cinnamon0.5 tsp
- ground cloves1 pinch
- salt1 tsp
- Nogada
- fresh-season walnut halves · new-crop walnuts; if only dried ones, blanch them in boiling water to peel150 g
- milk · including what the walnuts soak in300 ml
- queso fresco or fresh goat cheese100 g
- sherry · optional2 tbsp
- sugar1 tbsp
- salt1 pinch
- To finish
- pomegranate seeds1 fruit
- flat-leaf parsley1 handful
Steps
The night before: put the walnut halves in 200ml of the milk and refrigerate them overnight. The skins swell and loosen.
- ⏲ 60 min
Pick the thin brown skin off every walnut half with a knife tip or a fingernail, scraping it out of the folds too. It takes more than an hour, and it is the most important step in the dish.
- ⏲ 20 min
Char the poblanos over a flame until the skin is black and blistered, leave them covered in a bowl for 10 minutes, then peel. Slit each down one side and take out the seeds and core. Do not rinse them.
- ⏲ 20 min
Picadillo: fry the onion and garlic in oil, add the meat and cook it through. Add the tomato for 5 minutes, then the apple, pear, peach, plantain, raisins, almonds, spices and salt, and cook for 15 minutes, until the fruit is soft but still holds its shape. Let it cool a little.
- ⏲ 5 min
Nogada: blend the peeled walnuts, cheese, 100ml of milk, sherry, sugar and salt until very smooth, adding milk to a thick-cream consistency. Do not heat it. Chill it.
- ⏲ 5 min
Stuff the chillies with the picadillo, shape them and set them on plates. Pour over the cold nogada to cover, and scatter the pomegranate and parsley. The chilli warm or at room temperature, the sauce cold.
Tips & Variations
Variations
- Battered (capeado): some coat the stuffed chilli in an egg-foam batter, fry it, and then pour the nogada over. Chile relleno says of this dish: "It is usually not battered at all". Fried, it is heavier.
- With pecans: where fresh walnuts cannot be had, pecans are used. Their skin is much thinner and less bitter left on, but it is a different sauce.
- Cream instead of cheese: some households use double cream in place of the fresh cheese. Softer and less tangy.
- The fruit in the picadillo: in Puebla it is that season's panochera apples, milk pears and criollo peaches. The fruit on this page is swapped for what is easy to buy.
Tips
- The white is made by peeling. The thin brown membrane over each walnut half is what carries the bitterness — the one Linzer torte notes when it says "walnut carries a faint bitterness". Blend it in and the sauce goes grey and astringent. This sauce stands for the white in the flag, so the colour is the point, and that is why more than an hour of peeling is the centre of the recipe.
- Only fresh walnuts peel. In a new-crop walnut the skin is still moist and lifts after a soak. On a dried walnut it is stuck to the kernel, and even a minute or two in boiling water gets about half of it off. This is an August and September dish because of the walnuts as much as the pomegranates.
- The sauce is never heated. Satsivi, another walnut sauce, gives the reason: "Heat it and the walnut oil separates and the sauce breaks." Nogada is blended raw and served cold as well. Satsivi grinds its walnuts skin and all and is beige; nogada is peeled and white. One skin divides the same ingredient into two dishes.
- The chilli skin is burned off. Chile relleno already covers that: char it black, cover it so the steam lifts the skin, and peel it without rinsing.
- Warm chilli, cold sauce. Poured over a hot chilli, the sauce warms and can weep oil. Let the chillies come down close to room temperature, then pour the cold sauce.
- The fruit in the picadillo should keep its shape. Cooked to mush it becomes a sweet jam; meat and fruit bitten separately is the point of this filling.
The basics behind this dish
- Browning and the Maillard ReactionMeat fails to brown for one of three reasons: it is wet, the pan is cool, or you put too much in at once. Plus how the brown film stuck to the pan becomes your sauce.
- Cooking Meat: Temperature, Resting, and Cutting Against the GrainDoneness is a core temperature, not a number of minutes. What resting actually does, how to handle a thick cut, and why the direction you slice changes the texture.
- Knife Skills: Grip, Cuts, and Why Size MattersHow you hold the knife matters more than how fast you cut. The pinch grip, the claw hand, and why uniform size is a cooking decision rather than a cosmetic one.
More of the same kind
More from this country
Sign in to edit.
AI-drafted, editor-reviewed · edits: 0 ·Edit history
https://cookiki.com/en/r/chiles-en-nogada · cookiki · User contributions are licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.