Rellenos 101

After following my own link to the Hatch green chile web-site, I quickly realized that fresh green chiles are currently difficult to come by. This is due to massive summer and fall flooding in southern New Mexico. Fortunately, the majority of my family is still in New Mexico and a quick call to my grandmother resulted in the procurement of the twelve lovely green chiles seen here. However, while the NM green chile is best suited for this, many varieties of peppers can be used including poblano, jalapeno, anaheim and if you enjoy the occasional stomach ulcer even the habanero pepper is suitable. Canned whole chiles are also suitable, though they lose a great deal of the texture and flavor of a fresh roasted chile.

As this was to be my first organized attempt at relleno making I decided to keep it simple and start with the basic, traditional cheese stuffed chile. In order to aid the reader I did a comprehensive search (ahem, Wikipedia) and chose to use the linked recipe with some minor adjustments. I found the instructions to be clear and they produced a light egg batter to accompany the smoky flavor of the chile. The tweaked version of the recipe can be found on the recipe version of this blog.

A cautionary note: if the egg whites are not beaten long enough to establish structure they will only form a loose foam. When exposed to the high temperature of the oil, the small air structures in the foam will become large air structures resulting in a messy, oily relleno. In addition, because of the simplicity of this dish, two things that should be mentioned are the need for a more flavorful cheese as well as a proper sauce to accompany the rellenos. I hope to address these matters in a subsequent blog.