I have a funny story. I don't really like chili.
That's the whole story. But this book has a whole section on chili (5 recipes). Four of them use this chile paste. My goal was to make enough chile paste in one batch that I could make all of the chilis once without making more.
I started at HMart.
The recipe is written so that you are grabbing one type of chile from 3 different categories Kenji has created. I didn't have options, I grabbed what I could find that matched his categories. I ended up with Ancho, New Mexico, and Arbol.
One thing I learned from the book was that you should be buying dried chiles that you can still bend. If they just snap and fall apart they are too old.
The first step is to take the stems off, deseed them, and tear them into pieces. This was easy but a little bit tedious.
OH. Okay. His recipes says 6 ancho chiles (about 1/2 ounce). Easy right? Well this 3 ounce bag came with 8 chiles and I don't know about you but to me that math ain't mathing. I decided to go with 6 chiles because of I went with half an ounce it would be like one pepper. And those doesn't not sound like it would make paste in 2 cups of liquid.
Here are all of my prepared chiles. I ended up doing 1.5x the recipe just because I didn't have enough ancho to double.
You toast them dry on the stove for a few minutes. I was reading a paragraph in the recipe book (he has so much useful information and it's so fun to read) when I turned around and it was smoking so I quickly added 3 cups of chicken stock.
Let it simmer for 5-7 minutes. And then blend.
I don't have many uses for my stick blender but when it's useful it is very useful. Although in this case it was MESSY. I had a little regret.
Chile paste. Oh, this is meant to be used to replace chile powder. For every tablespoon of chile powder you would use 2 tablespoons of this chile paste.
My mom and I smelled it compared to chile powder. They don't smell dissimilar but the paste is more fruity. It's a little spicy. I only added one Arbol when according to the recipe I should have added 3. I got scared lol.
I'm excited. I plan to use it this weekend. I can imagine this being much better than using chile powder and it is easy enough that I would do it again if I think it's worth it.
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