Jay Francis

I've been recipe testing for a year now, for a friend's upcoming book, The Tex-Mex Cookbook. I worked on an ancho chile puree for the book. After all was said and done, though, and recipe fixed, I had a day to just putter in the kitchen. I threw a bunch of stuff together, and, it turned out to be a dynamite puree for enchiladas. But, I wasn't taking notes, and for that reason had to reconstruct what the heck I thought I had done. So, here is the recipe if anyone out there likes to cook Tex-Mex and wants to play with it, and send in their comments. It couldn't really go in the book anyway, since I cheated and used Wolf Brand Chili for one segment of it.

The Will Probably Never Be Able To Duplicate It, Perfect Ancho Chile Puree

I took about 6-7 ancho chiles, and seeded and stemmed them, rinsed them under running water to remove the dust.

I brought a pot of water to boil and then soaked the chiles in the water for a while.

On top of the stove was a pot of pork broth.

When the chiles were softened, I put them in a blender and filled it to the top with the pork broth, then had second thoughts and drained the pork broth, replacing with water. The water was filled up to the 5 cup mark on my Osterizer blender.

I pureed the chiles and strained them into a pot. I added 1/2 large chopped onion, a teaspoon of cumin, a teaspoon of Mexican oregano, some salt and some sugar, not measured. I added two jalapenos en escabeche, not draining off the vinegar. I added about 1 cup but maybe two cups of Wolf brand chile and simmered.

Made enough to fill one vacu-vin container.

Ancho puree was bitter, added sugar. Wolf brand appears to be the secret ingredient. Probably because of the flour and maybe some extra sugar.