/ck/ - Food & Cooking

[Anonymous No.10168441]

A while back I posted about how I was going to try and make a chili relleno pop tart.The thread was a mild success and I got some good ideas from you guys, but I realized I needed to spend more time with the humble Chile Relleno before attempting to bastardize into a shitty baked treat. Since then I've made the dish twice and tried a local Mexican restaurants version.This is picture of my second attempt at a homemade chile relleno.

For my first attempt, I used diced tomatoes and chipotles blended together to make the sauce. It was chunky, spicy, and completely overpowered everything else. I used queso fresco for the cheese stuffing. A good cheese, but didn't melt too well. For the batter, I whipped egg whites, then folded in a beaten yolk. I read somewhere that this was the traditional way to do it. It didn't fry very well and was not as crisp as I'd hoped.

After this attempt, I decided to try a restaurants version. Their cheese was well melted, but the sauce was bland and flavorless, though I preferred the smoothness to own chunky chili sauce. The batter was soggy and flimsy, reminding me a lot of my own attempt. I came to the conclusion that this was not an especially good restaurant, further cemented by the fact that they also fucked up a chicken quesadilla. How is that even possible?

[Anonymous No.10168444]

>>10168441

As they say, if you want something done you've got to do it yourself. With two chile rellenos under my belt, I started to get a clearer picture of what needed to be done. For the sauce, I wanted to eliminate the chunkiness, keeping it simple but still flavorful. So I went with a can of tomato sauce, simmered for about an hour with garlic, cumin, chili powder, Mexican oregano, cilantro, salt, and sugar. This was a success. For the chilis, poblanos, roasted, skinned, and stuffed with shredded monterey jack cheese.
For the batter I wanted something thicker that would get crispy, so I went with a half flour/half cornmeal mix, a bit of baking powder and salt, to which I added two beaten eggs and a bit of warm water. I garnished it with a bit of crema for richness.

[Anonymous No.10168492]

Now the question, how to translate into the form of a pop tart? I've studied a lot of homemade pop tart recipes and watched a lot of videos and most end of looking like pic related. Most seem to be overstuffed with filling and more flaky than I would want. You see, a pop tart is less of a pie/tart and more of a glazed cookie. I think this has to do with the thickness of the dough. People making homemade pop tarts seem to want to amplify it a bit; bigger, more filling, golden, shiny, crust. This is all well and good, but it defeats the purpose. Pop tarts are shitty, but they know it. They aren't trying to be more than they are, and that's the sort of attitude I want to replicate.

[Anonymous No.10168568]

>>10168492
Pic related being these of course

Now with a pop tart, you have three main ingredients.
- Pie crust
- Jam filling
- Icing (Usually with some sort of sprinkles too)

A Chile Relleno has 4 main ingredients.
- Chili
- Cheese
- Fried batter
- Sauce (In the case of my rellenos, a red sauce/tomato sauce)

For my first attempt, I've decided to make a green chili and tomato jam for the filling. Essentially I'll be making a jam from the sauce I made with the addition of green chilis. I might use pectin to achieve the desired consistency. This thing has to be a flavor bomb because I only want t very thin layer like a real pop tart.

For the pie crust I'll be making a cornmeal-based crust. I think this will harken back to the Mexican flavors more than a regular store bought pie crust. The trick though will be rolling it out as thin as possible and avoiding overstuffing to best simulate an authentic pop tart.
The icing is what scares the shit out of me. I still can't find a good way of incorporating cheese into the icing. I'm aiming to make this more of a savory treat, so i'd like to avoid sugar as much as possible. One idea I had was to make a cheese sauce, then add corn syrup. I don't know what kind of product this would result in, but I'm eager to give it a try. The other road I was thinking about going down was using some sort of cheese powder.
This part is going to require a bit of experimenting for sure.