Let's make Pork in Pasilla

Hello everyone and welcome back to my kitchen. The next page in our taco manual takes us to something that's like super near and dear to my heart. It is a pork braise in chile pasilla. So pasilla is those really dark long ones and this flavor is just so spectacular. I'm really excited to share it with you and you make it just like any kind of red chili braise. So we'll go through all of those steps. I said that this is the pasilla sometimes goes by pasilla black or pasilla mexicano depending on where you are in Mexico. It's a wrinkle skin chili and it should always look almost black. These are super fresh so I'm going to show you a way to to clean them that's a little different than what I usually show you. I'm going to dump out the seeds into this compost bowl here. So I usually just kind of like run it between my fingers like this to loosen it up and then with a small pair of scissors go in here and cut it open. Okay and then I'm going to open it up and dump out all of the seeds that are in here. Now when they're super fresh like these are you will notice that a lot of the seeds are kind of sticky in here because they will they there will be a sticky substance on the inside of it which sometimes sort of dries out on some of the older chilies and means that they'll all the seeds will just fall out. But with these very fresh pasillas I had to work quite a bit to get them all cleaned out but it still doesn't take very long to do that. Pull the veins out this is a medium spicy chili not too spicy but if you pull the veins out that's where all the heat is and so you'll want to pull those out if you want to make it a little less spicy. Tear it into flat pieces like that and I've got all of the ones that we are working with for this particular braise here already cleaned. The first step in this is to take four cloves of garlic. I've already heated up here some of the well I'm working in a very traditional way here so this is going to be cooked in lard because the flavor of lard really rounds out the flavor of these chili skewer and we'll start with those four cloves of garlic that are peeled going straight into this warm lard and cook till they are brown on the outside. We want to take away all of that raw chili raw garlic flavor and make this a super well-rounded flavor because it really is a dried chili braise. They're nicely golden here now if you don't want to be working in lard like I am here or you don't have access to good lard that would come from a Mexican grocery store from the meat counter in a Mexican grocery store or from a butcher you can use any kind of vegetable oil for this. Okay so I put those into the blender jar because we're going to come back to that in a little bit and then a small handful at a time of these I am going to toast them in the same lard here and just lay them down. This goes fast and that's why I say a small handful at a time because they will only need a few seconds in here to toast. You'll notice that the color will lighten up on the inside of these and you will smell them. They will really release their aroma into the room. That's when you know that they are ready to now pull out of here. You want to leave as much of the fat behind as possible and we will go through the rest of these and toast them. I'm collecting them into a bowl over here. Now you don't want to get the temperature too high on this because if you over toast these guys they will be bitter. So it's a sort of light toasting as I said changing color on the inside and then the smell is one of the things that I always go by here. So these guys are now just right so the last batch of them has come out of here. Now I have to tell you that I'm going to turn this down here but I have to tell you that the city cut off all of our hot water today so I don't have hot water from the tap to work with. So I've got a big pot of hot water right here and I'm going to ladle it over all of these toasted pasilla chilies here and then I have a small plate here that I think that's enough. You want them to float freely here so that they will rehydrate quickly and we're going to leave them in here for rehydrating for about 30 minutes. I have a little plate here to kind of keep them submerged so they will rehydrate really evenly here. Next step is I've got this pork. So this is a pork shoulder roast and it has been cut up to pieces that are a little smaller than an inch and I am going to salt it and then sort of mix it all together here. Give it another little bit of salt here so it's everything is evenly coated and then start browning it. We'll have to brown it in a couple of batches here right in the same pan. Okay I got the second half of the meat in there. Remember you need to have a pretty high fire underneath this and you want to make sure everything is spread out into an uncrowded even layer so that it doesn't steam but browns instead. Well that one is frying there. I'm going to go with the mushrooms that are going to go into this. This dish can be made without mushrooms but I will say the flavor of pasilla chili and mushrooms is like a match made in heaven. I've got three different kinds of mushrooms. You can easily make it with just one. I've got these are shiitake mushrooms which have a really tough stem on them and then these are cremini mushrooms. You could use button mushrooms where the creminis are just a form of a button mushroom and these oyster mushrooms which I love for their silky texture there and I am going to just slice them all up while the pork is frying. Okay these stems of the shiitakes you can use them if you want but you have to cut them thinly across the grain like that. Kind of an ugly little piece at the base there that I'm going to discard and then the same is true with the oyster mushroom base. You want to cut it real small. So I've got about eight ounces here four cups of the chopped up mushrooms. We're working with two pounds of pork here and that was three ounces or about eight large of those pasilla chilies. So we're looking really good right now. All of this meat is nicely browned. Why do you brown them? Because it will add much depth to your finished braise here. Same thing with toasting the chilies. If you don't toast them you will have a much lighter flavor which some people may like but I think that it's really essential to toast those chilies for full depth of flavor and for them to give you everything that they can. Okay so we've got that done. I'm going to turn this down for a second because we're going to come right back to it and we're going to make the sauce base here. So we have some spices to go in with the garlic that's already in there. So I've got some black pepper here. I'm putting about a half a teaspoon or so of that. A little bit of cumin not too much cumin about a quarter of a teaspoon or so will go into. I like to grind all this stuff fresh because it has so much better flavor. Teaspoon and a half or so of this this beautiful whole leaf Mexican oregano and grind all of that up. Classic combination for central Mexico for some of the chili sauces is Mexican oregano, black pepper and a little bit of cumin. So we'll set that to the side there. Okay now let's talk the chilies. They have had about 20 minutes. I say 20 to 30 minutes typically is what you want to soak these to get them nicely rehydrated. And I'm going to take the chilies out of the water and put them over here in the blender jar. You can see how hot that water still is after 20 minutes there. So we'll slide those guys in there. Our next step is to taste this soaking liquid and I always encourage everybody to do this because your chilies may have a fair amount of bitterness in them. So I need to just give this a little taste to see if I want to use it. Okay I'm going to tell you that I don't want to use that. That's got quite a lot of bitterness to it. So I'm going to just set that over there and what we will do is to work with a little of this hot water that I have over here. And I'm going to go to a cup and a quarter of it to do this blending with here about right there. And when you have anything hot in your blender make sure you always take the center piece out of the lid. Then I like to take a damp cloth and put it over the top of that and then we're going to make this into an absolutely smooth smooth puree. Okay just a little note about blenders. Okay this is a high speed blender. I can blend it really really smooth. Standard issue blender might not get it this smooth and so you might want to take a medium mesh strainer and put it over your pot of hot fat here and strain through it to pick out any of the stray seeds any little bits of skin that didn't get completely blended up. In this situation I know that it's going to work just fine and so I'm going to scrape this mixture into the hot fat here and you should hear a good sizzle when it goes in there and then just continue to to stir it for five minutes or so until it's completely it's reduced and darkened in color. Now darkened in color from something that's this dark will be a relative judgment on your part but basically what we're trying to do is get it to the consistency of tomato paste. So I'll get that blender jar out of our way back there and stir this. Any little ground bits at the bottom of the pot should dissolve into this mixture as you're cooking it down. This is another one of those things in the cooking of Mexico that I find really fascinating because if you don't do this cook down of the chili base you're going to have disparate flavors and it'll be tasty it'll be fine but it won't have that really beautiful homogeneity of flavor where everything comes together and all of the flavors are just really really lovely. This is an essential step. So we've browned we've toasted our chilies we've browned our meat and now we're cooking down this chili base here. So I can easily see the bottom of the pot which indicates to me that it is ready because that's exactly the way it would look if it was tomato paste and I'm going to take the meat that we have here and grab the wrong thing there put that meat in there we've got all of these beautiful or this beautiful variety of the mushrooms to go there and then I want a cup and since I don't have I'm not using any of that soaking liquid I'm going to go back to this warm water that I have here and I'm going to do a cup and a half of that. We've got some salt on the meat there so that gives us a little bit of a start with that. Stir all of this together and then we're going to let it cook just simmer over medium low heat until all the meat is completely sort of fork tender fall apart tender whatever you want to call it there the mushrooms will release a lot of liquid and make this into an absolutely spectacular dish. Now while this is simmering let me tell you a little bit about this dish itself. It is a dish that comes from the places that do what are called tacos de guisados or tacos de cazuela in the central section of Mexico in Mexico City. I love El Jarocho right in the center of town also there's a really famous place called Tacos El Guero or Tacos Ola. It goes by both of those names and they all both of them always have this dish on hand and just spooning a little bit which you will see in just a minute but spooning a little bit to a fresh made corn tortilla a little bit of queso fresco on the top it is one of the most glorious flavors of the of the country. Okay so I have another pot here where it has been simmering for all of that time and I want to show you what that looks like here it's a little touch over reduced here just a touch so I could put just a drop of water back into it but do you see how that dark sauce is just enveloping everything there and so stir that in you've got to give it a taste and I'm going to season it now and with salt and then because it's chile pasilla and I want to bring out its natural fruitiness I'm going to add just a touch of sugar to it super rich super delicious so now the first thing is to season with salt I'm going to stir that in and give it another taste before I add that little hint of sugar that brings out the natural fruitiness see some people may just love it just like that really good but I find just this little pinch of sugar makes all the difference in the world here okay okay I'm just going to let that simmer for a minute and then come back and show you what it looks like in a taco. All right it is payoff time here I'm going to take a couple of these really warm corn tortillas that I brought from the restaurants that we work with an heirloom variety of corn from the southern part of Oaxaca and I'm going to put the spoonful oh that looks so good this pork and pasilla chili braise with mushrooms and then there's the queso fresco that I promised you that really nice contrast to have that fresh milkiness of good queso fresco over the top of these guys here like that and I've been waiting for this for several hours and I'm very excited to dig in I know some of you are going to want a little bit of onion on top of it or onions and cilantro I've got a little bit of chopped green onion that's really good on this as well so if that suits your fancy that's what you're going to do