A Recipe for Pozole Verde

Green Chicken Goodness

The raw materials of tastiness.

Last week’s article about my disappointing experience with the Chilean dish patasca—a soup of tripe and hominy—reminded me how much I like pozole verde, a soup of chicken and hominy. In fact, I like pozole verde so much that I’ve been making it a couple times a month for the past year, slowing developing my own version, which I thought I’d share with you this week.

I should start with a caveat, I’m not a big recipe follower. I like to read a lot of different versions of the same thing, watch a few YouTube chefs cook the dish, and then try to make my own version of something. It usually works out, usually.

In this case, my goal was the split the difference between something like Rick Bayless’s very elaborate recipe, and some of the more slapdash versions found on YouTube. It’s probably closest to Kenji Lopez-Alt’s version at Good Eats, although I omit his pumpkin seeds and follow a different path on chicken and stock.

For this dish, the two most important things are the quality of the chicken stock and the quality of the salsa verde made from tomatillos and chili peppers. It takes a couple of hours, and has some tedious hand work, but the final product is incredibly tasty.

Here’s my list of ingredients.

1 boneless skinless chicken breast

1 skin-on chicken leg quarter

1 bunch of epazote

1 bunch of cilantro

2 pounds of tomatillos

4 poblano chili peppers

3 jalapeños

4 chilaca chilies, or 4 cubanelle chilies

1 white onion

4 cloves of garlic

1 28 ounce can of white hominy

1 limes

3 tablespoons of oil

1 teaspoon of ground cumin

salt and pepper

For garnish sliced radishes, avocados, shredded cabbage, chopped jalapeños, chopped cilantro, lime wedges and tostadas or corn chips.

Nashville now has a modern Hispanic supermercado, part of a chain out of Atlanta called Talpa. (For fellow Californians, it’s very similar to the Southern California supermarket chain Vallarta.) I love Talpa, they have a restaurant and a coffee bar. It’s where I buy my epazote and canned hominy, usually with a side of tacos from the restaurant.

A chicken in every pot, with epazote.

The first step for pozole verde is to make stock. So, place the chicken breast and leg quarter into a large pot, add a quarter of a white onion, two cloves of garlic, a few sprigs of epazote, and some whole peppercorns, cover with water and bring to a low boil. After a few minutes, skim the foam from the top and simmer uncovered for about an hour and a half.

Next, de-husk and wash the tomatillos, and cut them into halves, removing and discarding the stem and the flesh immediately beneath it. Then de-seed two jalapeños and cut them into strips. (I also remove the white membrane inside the peppers. The membranes are bitter.)

Toss the tomatillos, jalapeño slices, and two peeled and crushed garlic cloves in a bowl with a couple tablespoons of vegetable oil to coat, then add a generous amount of salt and pepper. Turn everything out on to a sheet pan lined with aluminum foil and place under a broiler in the oven, with the rack at the highest level.

Broil at high heat for five minutes, use tongs to flip everything over, and broil for five more minutes. When you’re done, it should look something like this:

Charred but good.

Pour everything on the sheet pan, including the juices, into a large bowl.

De-seed and stem the remaining chili peppers, cut them into halves and place them outside-up onto your sheet pan. Then broil them until they’re well charred. You’ll have to move them around a bit as they cook so that you get maximum coverage.

Into the oven you go.

When the chilies are charred, place the hot peppers in a brown paper bag, close the bag and let them steam for 10 minutes. At the end of that, peel the peppers and and discard the thin skin. This is the tedious handwork part of the recipe.

Now, everything—tomatillos, garlic, jalapeños and charred chili peppers— goes into the blender. Add a half a bunch of roughly chopped cilantro and a couple springs of epazote, and blend it.

Will it blend?

I like my pozole verde to be a little rustic, so I don’t blend it very long. Just enough to break everything down into a thick salsa. When that’s over, add the juice of one lime to your salsa verde. Taste and adjust the salt.

At this point, if you’re really hungry, you can throw out the chicken, grab some chips and go to town on that green salsa. Its flavor is shockingly good.

But, we’re going to finish the dish instead of just eating salsa and chips.

When the stock is done, strain the stock into a large bowl, and shred the chicken. A lot of recipes call for using only legs and thighs, but I like shredded white meat more than shredded dark meat, so I used a boneless, skinless chicken breast.

pollo

Final assembly time. Into the large pot, add two tablespoons of oil and the remaining 3/4’s of a white onion, finely chopped. Cook the onion until soft, then sprinkle on a teaspoon of ground cumin. Let it cook until fragrant, about one minute. At that point, add the salsa verde and simmer for five minutes, until partially reduced. Then add your shredded chicken, homemade chicken stock and a can of drained hominy.

mote blanco - pozole - hominy

Simmer everything for 30 minutes and you’re ready to serve.

Pozole is supposed to be a festive dish, with lots of garnishes on the table so that diners can pick and choose what they like. These are the ones I served the other night: chopped onions, chopped jalapeños, cilantro, lime wedges, sliced avocados and tostados. Other typical garnishes are shredded cabbage or lettuce, sliced radishes and dried Mexican oregano.

And here’s the final bowl of soup, just before I tossed in the garnishes.

M y poor skills as a photographer means this photo doesn’t accurately show how green this is.

The lighting was a little off in this shot, as it doesn’t really show just how green the finished soup was.

This is not a very spicy-hot version. My wife, being Irish-American, has a low tolerance for spicy dishes. If I were to make this more to my taste, I’d toss a couple of Serrano peppers onto the sheet pan to char, and then into the blender.

The taste is amazing, it’s vibrant and vegetal with a little bit of heat, and a good umami savor from the chicken. Toss in the tostadas, and you’ve got a lot of textural variation, too: crunchy corn, chewy hominy, and hot soup. This is a very satisfying meal.

P.S. This recipe makes a lot of soup, two quarts, so invite friends.

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Thanks for reading! I’ll see you again on Monday with something new. Be sure to share An Eccentric Culinary History with your friends. Cheers!