Chile Class with Rick Bayless

we're talking about chilies today and when you talk about chilies in Mexican food the first thing that you have to sort of step aside from is that chili equals hot because lots of places in the world if you say something has chili in it all you mean is it spicy from Chile and like all through Southeast Asia they don't really work with that many different varieties of chili and they're all really hot that's not the case in Mexico in Mexico there is a wide variety of chilies some of them hot some of them not and each one is used for its distinctive flavor so I thought today what we could do is to go over some of the most common ones and what their flavors are so let's just start here with some of the fresh chiles and I've got four different fresh chilies here in front of you I always say that color equals flavor in the smaller the chili the hotter it is so if you're thinking about the poblano chili here that one is going to have the deepest richest flavor because it has the deepest richest color and of course this one over here which is called gueto chili in the US we talk about it as a banana or Hungarian wax pepper and this one was going to have the lightest brightest flavor this one is really hot and so are the smaller ones but this sort of flies in the face of what I said about the smaller the hotter because the the heat level of the hot Hungarian wax / banana pepper / Guerro chili is really intense but then let's talk about these other two that are here that are the workhorses of the Mexican kitchen the long bullet-shaped one of course is Serrano chili in the fatter one usually about the same length is the jalapeno so in the United States the most commonly found small chili in the grocery stores will of course be jalapeno and probably lots of people have grown up eating them and thinking of that as the typical hot green chilly if you're going to make salsa or ceviche or whatever personally I leaned more toward the Serrano as my first choice why because the jalapenos have really been I will say bored they have been bred to boredom which means for me that you can find some jalapenos that have no heat to them at all their flavor tends to be a little bit lighter crisper and more bell pepper like even though there's usually heat in them whereas the Serrano it's compact flesh it's much drier flesh let's juicy than the jalapeno and it's got what I consider to be the quintessential green chili intensity about it both of them can be very hot but the Serrano is more uniformly hot when you look at a jalapeno you don't know if it's one of those varieties that has been born has been bred to be really mild or whether it's a really hot one so for consistency sake I always suggest using the Serrano chili now let's talk also about the the large one here so that looks a little bit like a bell pepper and some people would look at and go it's the Mexican bell pepper it's not that at all because first of all it's got so much more flavor than a bell pepper and secondly it's used in different ways yes both of them are thought of as a vegetable not as that spicy little thing that you chop up and put into something they thought of as a vegetable that you would use in a finished dish but this one the flesh is not super juicy like it is in a bell pepper secondly this is a really tough skin on the outside of it and its flavor doesn't really come into its own until it is cooked in some way shape or form so usually we deal with the skin and bringing out the flavor by cooking it at the same time by roasting this a lot of people would think of the Rose poblano as being like the roasting of a red bell pepper lots of people do that and then pull that blackened skin off of it now I'm going to set the the unroasted one down the raw one down and I've got a roasted one here so this has just been turned over a flame until it's charred on the outside evenly charred all over and then once it's cooled down that skin will just slip right off and then once you've got all the skin pulled off of it like that then what I like to do and this isn't everybody's cup of tea but for me I like to tear it open and pull out that seed pod like that and then I like to just rinse it off really quickly to get the little stray bits of seed and skin off of it and that is one way that you clean a roasted poblano chili now there's a second way well the cleaning is the same but there's a second way that we can blister that skin off and cook the flesh of the poblano and that is by putting them into a deep fryer not really a home sort of thing but in the restaurant we do that a fair amount when we want to barely cook the flesh and we want to blister the skin and then let pull that skin right off of it so there you've got your finish roasted and peeled poblano chili the all of these chilies can be roasted the small ones are typically not peeled like the jalapeno in this runner are typically not peeled before they are put into a salsa but most of the time they're just chopped up and used raw whereas the the poblano is often cooked it's really not used raw hardly at all in Mexican cooking now let's take and move all the way over to the dried chilies now in Mexico the dried chilies have a different name for the most part from the fresh versions of it even if they started with one name in the fresh they will change the name when they over to the dried so let's talk about the poblano chili when the poblano chili is dried it becomes what is known as an ancho chili this wrinkled skin one that I have in my hand right now that um lots of stuff has gone on here in the drying process and mostly it will change the flavor but the uses are so different for a dried chili than a fresh chili that the name needs to be different okay the uses are so different between the fresh and the dried ones now let's talk about where that shows up in the American kitchen it always shows up with a grapes and raisins and obviously you wouldn't substitute one for the other in spite of the fact that a raisin is just a dried grape same thing for prunes and plums they're not the same and are not used in the same way and that's why we have different names for the fresh versus the the dried one now sometimes people will say to me it's like oh I would never use dried chiles because I can get fresh ones well that's not a point I mean they're just used in very different ways and you have create different dishes with them and the dried chilies actually have one of the greatest roles in the Mexican kitchen so this is an ancho chile but let's talk about the the variety of dried chilies that we have here and this is only the tip of the iceberg so I have shown you this the dried ancho which is Coe I mean dried poblano which is called the ancho here and right next to that we have the guajillo chili this may look a little bit like a New Mexico chili for those people that are familiar with the beautiful reefs trous that they make in the American Southwest the big the hanging groups of these dried chilies but you'll notice a big difference between these besides color the the entre obviously is a little bit darker and the you get more of that bright cranberry color out of this guajillo but what you really notice is that this has a smooth skin on it whereas the ancho has the ring old skin that's just two different classes of Chili's and it doesn't really relate to flavor so if we're talking about now the ancho and the guajillo in terms of flavor I always say that the ancho is going to bring you some sweetness it's actually like what I would call a sun-dried tomato kind of sweetness and the guajillos going to bring you a lot of brightness you can see that if you put those two together you have a wide range of flavors and they often go together in the Mexican kitchen now let's talk about a couple of small ones so we have this one looking kind of cranberry red as well but if you if you smell it it will have a smoky quality to it so this is a variety of that very very famous chili called Chipotle and this variety is typically sold as moretta and it's going to be on the sweet hot and smoky side now where you see this being coming or relating to the fresh world here is that it's a variety of jalapeno sort of small variety of jalapeno that is forstride over a smoky fire giving it that really smoky flavor that Chipotle is the first of the smoked dried chilies that was ever invented in Mexico and it was invented thousands and thousands of years ago now right next to that is the workhorse chili of the Mexican kitchen where this one is sweet smoky and spicy this is really just spicy and it's called an arbol chili this is the variety that doesn't have the stem connected to it you can usually buy it in both ways and this is going to have a slight nuttiness a little peanutty in flavor but it's just really hot and it's used when you want that kind of heat then we've also got this is a what I would call more of a specialty chili here and this is called pasilla chili or pasión negro or just Negril chili and you can see it's almost black and I've chosen this one here because it gives you one of the specialty things that goes on in the Mexican kitchen and that is that when all chilies are ripening on the plant they will go from mature green there it's a mature Chile but they go go from green to mature red and in that process we all know is seeing green bell peppers and red bell peppers but in that process that transition from mature green to mature red we will since this change of chlorophyll flavors what we think of as green think about biting into a green bean that's pure chlorophyll and then think about the when you change to red and you lose all of that that that chlorophyll flavor and you have nothing but the red part of it there think of biting into a sweet carrot or something that is beta-carotene and that's what you're doing is replacing chlorophyll with beta-carotene and you lose the first and you gain the second this one has both so when this one ripens - from mature green to mature red it doesn't lose the green and so it comes out as a chocolate brown very simple you mix green and red together and you get brown and so that's what you will see this looking like when it's in its mature state and then when it's dried it's almost jet black so it will have some of the flavors you would excel thats that chlorophyll that's in there and then you'll find some really deep robust sort of chocolaty notes in it chilli pasilla chili negative is one of my very favorite flavors okay so let's go back here to working with the chilies I'm going to just tear the stem off and hopefully the stim pod came out with it but it didn't think of the stem just cracked right off there so I'm going to open up the chilli like this and dump out all of the seeds and then we will open it up if you want to be very picky about all of this as like I call this the Mexican grandmother touch you will take the veins out the veins are the part that have all of the heat we'll come back to that in just a second here and then you're ready to do the toasting of it which is really essential and the the working with dried chilies in the Mexican kitchen and there's two different ways that we could do our toasting that I'm going to show you today there's actually a third way that we'll talk about here in a second I'm going to turn this guy down just a little bit here because I want to I got a little bit too hot here I'm going to do it what's an oil toasting and lots of times you'll see us in our restaurant doing this in a deep fryer you can do it that way but it's just a little skim of oil on the bottom of this pot will allow me in just a couple of seconds to toast it so look at the difference between these two okay so we can see that this is dark on the inside and the one that is toasted is turned it to a lighter color Brown this side is a little blistered whereas you don't see that on this side at all this is a super thorough toasting and it's often used when people are making mole egg so I'm going to set that back down over there and to turn this guy off and then I have just a dry skillet heat it up over here and I'm going to show you dry toasting which is used very commonly in the Mexican kitchen but it takes a little tiny bit longer and I'm just going to press down with a spatula like this and toast it and you'll notice that when I flip this over it's turned to that lighter color that's what we're looking for and then give it a couple presses down on the other side and you'll notice some blistering that's what I'm looking for I'm not looking for a lot of darkness or color in any of this but what we end up here with in these two cases is a light toast on this one and a completely thorough toast because of the oil on the other one next step with all of this is to soak these in water then make a puree out of that out of the chilies and then you have to cook that down that's a subject for a whole different class about making red chili sauces and moley's and all of that sort of stuff but to wind this up I just wanted to talk about one bit of what I would call chilly anatomy so that you'll know these things I'm going to do this with a jalapeno let's see if this works it all depends on where I cut down through this thing but I think we did a pretty good job okay so what we have exposed here is a vein so that's the tip of my knife is just going over the vein and then you see it widens out at the top and that becomes the seed pod now that is where a hundred percent of the capsaicin for the chilies is located so capsaicin is the heat and you've probably heard people say that all of the the heat is in the seeds so if you want to make something less spicy take the seeds out of it that's not true the seeds have almost no capsaicin none of that heat in it but because they are embedded in the veins and the seed pods you will find that they taste to your tongue they taste spicy they are not spicy it is that seed pod and that vein that has all the capsaicin in it so if you want them to make this a less spicy and I'm not sure I want to know you if you do because you put little hot chilies into something because you want it to be spicy but for those people that are interested in that aspect of it you have to actually cut out that whole vein part as well as take the seed pod out so I'm just going to show you what that looks like there you just release it like that and then you would pull that vein out and then actually tip for me if you want to make sure that this doesn't have any heat in it or very little heat in it then you want to really be careful that take that vein out all the way on the other end there's a little touch of a vein that was from the other side and we take that part of it out and then that would be actually what sort of talked about in Mexico is a castrated chili because you've really taken the guts out of the of the chili but that is where all of that I like to cover that as part of the anatomy of a chili so that everybody knows we're that capsaicin is is really concentrated so what we've done today is to go through some of the the fresh chilies the ancho chili being the sort of vegetable one that we talked about the most and how it's roasted and then peeled and cleaned for most use as a kind of vegetable then we have the two small Chili's the Serrano which is my favorite to use on a regular basis and then the jalapeno which can be used in the same way and you know sometimes people will stop it and do other things with it and then we talked about the ringer which is the Guido chili which has light bright amount of heat but can be chopped up and used that way it can be pickled it's a lot of times this pickled or it could be used as a vegetable just the same way that the poblano is as well then we moved over into the dried chilies we talked about that sort of sun-dried tomato like flavor that you can often get in an ancho and then the really bright flavor that you get in a guajillo and how those are perfect pair we talked about the small chilies the Chipotle that's usually sold as Moneta it's not the this variety of Chipotle which you'll often times see in the markets as well which is a kind of woody looking one this is called in the Mexican markets called Chipotle mikkel and usually use for stuffing not usually used for salsa making and it has a unique flavor but more round it is the other one that I showed you that Chipotle they typically goes by the name edita and then of course the long skinny one that is the arbol chili which is hot and bright and just like a great chili to have on hand and will remind you of very hot flakes that you might sprinkle over a pizza and then the ringer chili for that part of it was the the long skinny dried pasilla or pasilla negative or negative chili and that one has those sort of wonderfully deep robust flavors of bitter chocolate and hay and then a couple of ways to toast them before you would make the large dried chilies into a sauce and we've hopefully launched you onto a better understanding of what Mexican the Mexican kitchen has to offer when we're talking about dried chilies

Channel: Rick Bayless

Views: 103,523

Rating: 4.93578 out of 5

Keywords: Rick Bayless, chiles, class, chile class, cooking class, recipes, dinner, education, pasilla, ancho, arbol, chipotle, morita, serrano, jalapeno, poblano

Id: YnhVSrZJHGk

Length: 20min 0sec (1200 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 10 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/rearls]

I hope this is the first part of an on going series.

[u/asvpdirk]

I loved watching his show on PBS when I was younger, I think it would come on Saturday mornings, this takes me back.