These easy chicken enchiladas deliver cheesy, saucy satisfaction
Enchiladas are one of the ultimate throw-together meals. Roll up meat or veggies in corn tortillas with some cheese, bathe the whole assemblage in sauce, add more cheese (always more cheese) on top, bake and eat.
It's a great way to repurpose leftovers into a dish that doesn't feel like an afterthought.
But I don't always want to leave my enchilada enjoyment to chance. Sometimes I want a "destination enchilada."
Sure, you certainly improvise, even if you're not using leftovers. But I set out to find my ideal balance of cheese, sauce, spice and bright flavor. I also wanted to walk the line between making everything from scratch and making the dish relatively quickly and easily.
First, I started with the sauce. A homemade version is great, hands down. If you want to go that route, please do. For this effort, though, I wanted something faster. I wasn't ready to jump immediately for a store-bought sauce, so I started playing around with a semi-homemade one: Sauteed onions, garlic, some salt, a little cumin, and two cans of fire-roasted Rotel brand tomatoes and chilies that I blitzed with an immersion blender. The smokiness added wonderful depth of flavor. Fire-roasted is harder to find than original Rotel, so I tried the latter in the interest of access. Meh. We missed the flavor of the fire-roasted and ended up deciding we needed our sauce to be even saucier anyway.
Rather than trying another from-scratch option, I went the opposite direction and conceded the point to store-bought. ("Store-bought is fine," anyway). If you're following this route, try to get a good-quality sauce. I rolled with Frontera from chef, restaurateur and cookbook author Rick Bayless (fact: I once almost missed a flight at Chicago's O'Hare waiting for a sandwich at his airport Tortas Frontera). It's widely available at such stores as Target, Safeway, Kroger, Whole Foods and Publix. Hatch brand also gets the seal of approval. Because I couldn't resist trying to put at least a little of my own personal stamp on the sauce, I doctored it with hot sauce and lime juice to taste, which really made it shine.
Store-bought sauce also gets a major flavor upgrade when you poach the chicken in it, a tip I picked up from a different enchilada recipe from America's Test Kitchen. Rotisserie chicken from the store would have further streamlined things. Still, the intermingling of flavors between the meat and the sauce is well worth the limited time and effort. The thighs cook in just 15 to 20 minutes, during which you can prep the other parts of the recipe, such as the grated cheese.
Speaking of cheese, my first batch was not cheesy enough for tasters, so I increased the amount by a third. The dominant cheese is mellow, melty Monterey Jack, and I saved half of it for the top. The filling includes cheddar for sharpness, along with cilantro.
The other major improvement over the initial batch had to do with the tortillas. Don't worry, I used corn. They just didn't taste that corny or hold up too well after baking. At the suggestion of my colleagues (who lapped up the soggy ones up anyway), I opted to quickly heat the tortillas in the skillet. The benefits were threefold. First, there was the toasted corn flavor. Second: They were easy to roll without splitting. Third: They were less susceptible to turning soggy. (If the additional skillet step sounds a bit much, you can microwave the tortillas in a damp paper towel to soften them, though you'll miss out on the improved texture and flavor.)
By the time we shot the beautiful photos to accompany the recipe, I'd already made and shared three other batches of enchiladas. You'd think enchilada fatigue would have set in by then. But no. The final, perfected recipe was so delicious, so tempting, that it went in record time.