The newest idea involved making authentic chile verde without benefit of Mexican friends to guide me. Love Food Network, right? It empowers us to try anything and everything. So I hunted around and compared 2 or 3 recipes, and came up with a plan.
Normally I chunk and dredge the pork in seasoned flour and sauté it in onions, bell peppers and other seasonings, and then smother it in canned sauce and it's done. Our version of chile verde is good - but friends have a salt free diet, and I was cooking for them, so we moved into uncharted territory.
The Hubs is daring and brave with pressure cookers, so he did the first step - and expertly added just the right amount of water and seasonings and the 7 lb pork butt turned out perfectly. I think there was about 5 lbs of meat after cooking, which we cooled overnight and reserved the liquid to de-fat and reuse. When you refrigerate the broth, it just skims easily off the top.
Each recipe had its own ideas on how to use peppers, and not working with them often, I kind of interchanged types which is an entirely different story for another time but kind of pertains to the story. I wore gloves, removed the membrane and seeds from 1 Anaheim, 1 Poblano, and 1 big Jalapeno and Cuisinart-ed them until chunky and tossed them in a big pot with 1 1/2 cups fresh tomatillos and 2 large green bells, done the same way. We added that to 3 big white onions and 3 cloves of chopped garlic that had been sautéed in olive oil and let it simmer a while.
{Next time I'll bake all the peppers or broil them until they brown a little, to deepen the flavor and tone down the heat.}
After 5 or 6 minutes, 7 cups of pork butt stock was added and spices too -- bay leaf, coriander, pepper, cumin, a small handful of cilantro and oregano. Cover and simmer for an hour or so. You can add them up or down to taste. I'm not a fan of coriander, but it was good for this.
The house smelled really good and I of course had to test it to see how things were going. Whoa. It was FIRE HOT, so hot in fact I couldn't even imagine serving it. So here was 10 qts of green pepper broth and no real idea on how to fix it.
Like any normal person, I started to freak out. I threatened to throw it out but the Hubs talked me off the ledge. And anyway, it was for friends, and there wasn't time to start over. But obviously I couldn't serve anybody something that would light their butt on fire.
So
- I added a little more pork butt juice. It just made more of the problem.
- I hunted for internet recipe fix ideas. That was surprisingly unhelpful.
- I tossed in a mild can of tomatillo sauce. Also unhelpful.
- I added some smushed up pork to help absorb the heat. Maybe that helped a little bit. I wanted it to work.
Now the consistency was perfect but it was still too hot. And then I skimmed the top of the soup. It turns out, all those little undissolved bits of jalapeno were floating there, and once they were out, the problem was solved.
Now all the cooked cubed pork was added, and after heating through the depth of the sauce was great but I can't believe I'm saying that it seemed a little bland. It cooled in the fridge, and a decision was made to let everyone season it individually.
Our salt-free friends could do their thing, and we found adding 5 tablespoons of hot Tomatillo sauce to the 7 quarts we had put the heat level just about perfect. Served over brown rice. Delicious.
The only problem now is everyone loved it and there's no recipe to share. We'll come up with an actual recipe eventually. I love happy endings.
