Chilaquiles

"Mexican soul food" Diana Kennedy

And that's basically it - the main variants being it can be a green salsa, and the eggs you top it with can be cooked however you like them. Originally this was in my oddments list, because, as I've just said, there's not really much more to it, and then it seemed to pop up here and there of late, and so I thought there might be more to say and started this post, only to find that actually there isn't much more to say. Nevertheless I'm into it now so I'll give it a go.

I confess, probably influenced by my recent post on Indian street food snack chaat, that originally I thought this was another street food. But no - it's mum using up the leftovers from yesterday's meal - particularly the now stale tortillas - for breakfast.

As Yotam Ottolenghi says:

"They’re essentially yesterday’s corn tortillas, broken into pieces, cooked in salsa and sprinkled with cheese, making a great brunch dish that oozes comforting familiarity."

This is his - or rather, I think, his OTK associate, Jake Norman's version - Chilaquiles with charred salsa verde. In the OTK version the sauce is blended to a purée and the eggs are beaten before pouring into the salsa in a frying pan with the fried tortilla chips, cooked, and sprinkled with the inevitable chilli and cheese. You can watch Jake Norman make it in a very quick Instagram video here.

I honestly cannot remember now where I first noticed chilaquiles but I do remember having much the same reaction as I did to the Canadian poutine - why would you want to have crisp and sloppy together, because your crisp chips would go soggy? Well obviously this opinion is not shared - either for poutine or chilaquiles.

Indeed our own Hetty Lui McKinnon, whose version Chilaquiles with baked eggs is shown here is a fan of this mix:

"The fried tortillas start off crispy, but as they thirstily slurp up the spiced salsa verde, they transform into the most delicious sloppy corn chips you’ve ever tasted!"

Whilst Ann Ding who writes about Rosa Cienguegos' Chilaquiles in The Guardian says that

"‘Eating chilaquiles is a race against time – unless you don’t mind a slightly soggy corn chip."

J. Kenji López-Alt, or course, tackles it all in scientific style but begins his recipe for Chilaquiles verde with fried eggs with this:

"There are some words you don't normally associate with good food. Wet. Limp. Soggy. These are not descriptors you generally want to be putting in your mouth. But there are exceptions to every rule, and it just happens that one of the most delicious dishes of all time fits all three of those definitions. Chilaquiles just happen to sound a whole lot better than "wet, limp, soggy nachos."

He does advise however, that:

"First and foremost, you must use freshly-fried tortilla chips. I've yet to find a brand of store-bought chips that have the heft and crunch required to stand up to being simmered in salsa ... Frying the chips just before adding them to the salsa will give you the best possible results."

Those freshly fried tortilla chips are stale tortillas cut into triangles - a small tortilla cut into four - and then deep fried until crisp, before draining on kitchen paper. Some then cook these with your sauce which can either be green or red, and sometimes beans as well, before adding your eggs, either as the Ottolenghi team did by mixing beaten eggs with your chips, or by topping with a fried egg - which I have to say seemed to be the most used option.

There are literally hundreds, probably thousands of recipes out there on the web, and to be honest they all look pretty similar, so I chose four to represent them all: Fried tortilla chips in green salsa with crumbled cheese - Rick Stein; Chilaquiles - Tom Hunt/The Guardian; Chilaquiles with fresh tomatillo salsa - Thomasina Miers/delicious.UK and Coles had a go too.

I only found one major departure from the very quick and thrown together with Deb Perelman of Smitten Kitchen's Chilaquiles brunch casserole in which the whole thing was baked in the oven. Eggs too.

Maybe this was what got me on to all of this. Anyway they seem to be popping up here and there. If you are into Mexican food and have some leftover tortillas, here's what to do with them.

YEARS GONE BY

April 10

2024 - Chicken, not duck, and oranges

2023 - Spam - yes spam

2022 - Nothing

2021 - Quattri gatti (four cats) and bread gnocchi

2020 - Deleted

2019 - Ratatouille

2018 - Nothing

2017 - Nothing