Clinic: Blue Cheese Enchiladas

[Jenise]

Okay, in a tasting note in the wine forum, Jim Jones described "blue cheese enchiladas in a light jalapeno sauce". In Tokyo, no less. They were paired with a gruner veltliner.

This is the kind of food that I would order in a restaurant (with a chef I trust) just to find out how in the heck he/she put that together. I would be ultra excited to find out how so many appealing but disparate elements were brought together, and I would expect to be delighted with the result and have an idea that I would want to work with at home.

I'm thinking that the blue cheese filling would need a mellower, good melting cheese as a foundation, like monterey jack or a creamy young cheddar. I'm not sure whether I'd add onions or not, or even a third element, though I'd absolutely keep it vegetarian. Then there's the sauce: we need something to host the jalapeno. Tomatillo? Cilantro and cream? Something else?

What would you fine cooks do if challenged to create this dish? [/img]

[Robin Garr]

What would you fine cooks do if challenged to create this dish?

Hmm, I don't find it entirely appealing, Jenise, but off the top, I'm thinking that you're on target about needing something to carry the blue cheese ... either a blend with <i>queso bianco</i> for ethnic purity, or maybe something like a bechamel with blue melted in (a blue-cheese Mornay?) for more refinement.

I'm kind of stumped on how I'd handle the jalapeños, but might look up a recipe for chile verde and consider pulling out just the verde part while holding the pork.

If you devein and deseed them, of course, they can be considerably mellower. Roasted tomatillo and ground pepitas might be a good base pairing. A young St. Agur or gorgonzola dulce might be a good blending partner with something bland. I'm unfamiliar with Mexican blues.

But honestly, this seems like a contrived dish from a chef who's trying to be much too clever.

[Jenise]

Stuart, contrived? Really? I know it's nontraditional, but it just struck me as outside the box and nicely so. Perhaps because I'm a corn tortilla fanatic, I love, at least on paper, the idea of elevating the humble enchilada into fashionable fusion territory.

Ground pepitas in the tomatillo sauce? I like that idea. I immediately thought of the blue cheese in the middle, but Robin, your notion of putting it in the sauce is also interesting and something I hadn't thought of. Cheese enchiladas are by far my preference over meat, so I guess I reflexively WANTED the cheese inside.

Cheese enchiladas have no bigger fan than me. This one just sort of clanked in my taste-mind.

I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind's taste buds around it as well. But I think it would be worth a try if you could get a good, moderate level of blue cheese flavor. Seems to me that a milder roasted green chili might work better than jalapenos, or maybe with just a little jalapeno. Pepitas or some other nutty item sounds good, too.


Mike

[Jenise]

Mike and Stu--I'm definitely going to play with this. Can't resist. It sort of hits me where a goat cheese and potato ravioli once did--potato in a ravioli? Couldn't have been less intuitive to me, but it was lovely. I can imagine that this could be too, if you glammed it up just right and achieved balance with the sauce.

I would think that most blue cheese would be too strongly flavored to be the only stuffing in an enchilada.

But if you were not totally dtermined to make it a "cheese enchilada"..stuffing the corn tortilla w/ strips of rare grilled fajita or steak along with the blue cheese might be interesting. Topping it off with dried red chile based sauce and a bit of sour cream perhaps?

Richard

potato in a ravioli? Couldn't have been less intuitive to me

In a world with pierogi, samosa, dosa, and knishes?

[Jenise]

I understand your incredulity, but yeah. At the time I'm referring to encountering the potato ravioli, I had never even seen a pirogi. Nor had I, nor have I still, ever had a potato knish. Samosas and dosas yes, but the texture combination of both is crisp-soft. The soft-fine soft-grainy combination of pasta and potato was completely foreign--and not, at first mention, particularly attractive--to me.

Don't feel bad, at the time we met, my wife had never tasted anything called "pasta." The closest she had come was Spaghetti-Os in a can.

[Jenise]

That is so hard to believe. I grew up in whitebread, Republican Whittier, California where the closest thing there to an ethnic neighborhood was Pico Rivera, and that was a whole town! So you can forget things like Jewish and Eastern European foods--they weren't part of our world, not even in the homes of friends. But even we had real pasta.

Where did Linda grow up, the North Pole?

Close. Wyoming, then Alaska.

Mike and Stu--I'm definitely going to play with this. Can't resist. It sort of hits me where a goat cheese and potato ravioli once did--potato in a ravioli? Couldn't have been less intuitive to me, but it was lovely. I can imagine that this could be too, if you glammed it up just right and achieved balance with the sauce.

If I get a chance this weekend, I might try something along those lines. I've not made enchiladas in about 20 years, so I guess I'm due....


Mike

I'm camping this weekend, so it might be interesting to try al fresco.