About Mexican and Tex-Mex
Mexican cuisine: Fusion
If a recipe contains chile powder, it ain't Mexican.
Despite scoville ratings and statements on menus, chiles are not uniformly picante. So while the poblano usually is only mildly hot, you can run into a poblano that isn't at all picante, or one that is quite picante. The same is true for the habanero, and every other type of chile. Any description of how hot a variety of chile is is a generalization.
The Holy Trinity
AcrossThe ancho is the dried poblano. The ancho has a complex, fruity flavor and is only mildly hot. Outside of the New Mexico or California chile, which are only used in northern Mexico, the ancho is probably the easiest chile to find (odds are your local grocery carries anchos). If you let the poblano fully ripen until it's red and dry it, it becomes the mulatto. I think of the ancho as the contralto of the Holy Trinity.
The pasilla is dark brown, wrinkled, narrow and around six inches long. The pasilla has a dark, earthy, almost mushroom-y flavor, very different from the fruity ancho. Don't confuse the pasilla with the pasilla de
The guajillo is ranges from bright orange to dark red. It is broader than the pasilla, though also about six inches long, and it has a smooth, unwrinkled skin. The guajillo has a sweet, bright flavor reminiscent of tomato, and is fairly hot. The guajillo is a thick-skinned chile, and must always be strained. The guajillo is the heldentenor of the three, with bright, trumpety top notes.
The two chiles most commonly eaten fresh are the jalapeño and the serrano, both available in nearly any supermarket produce section. The poblano is also eaten fresh. The habanero is eaten primarily in
Some chiles are also smoked until dried. The chipotle is the smoked jalpeño. The morita is the smoked serrano. In
By the way, chiles are immensely nutritious, if you care about that sort of thing.
Other ingredients
Tomatillos are available in nearly every supermarket these days. They are not tomatoes, and one cannot be substituted for the other. Tomatillos must be husked and the sticky residue rinsed off. Even raw, they're very soft, and cooking them typically only takes three or four minutes in boiling water. Tomatillos are the basis for salsa verde.
Mexicans use true cinnamon, called canela in Spanish. What we call cinnamon is really the bark of the cassia tree, a close relative of the cinnamon tree. They are different, however. True cinnamon is much less "hot" and sweeter than cassia. These days, canela is pretty easy to find. Canela — true cinnamon — is much less hard than cassia — what we buy as cinnamon, and in the bag, feels soft and pliable.
Vegetables are almost always roasted until black on a griddle, then peeled. Raw or sauteed garlic is almost never used. Garlic is instead roasted on a hot griddle until blackened and soft, and the result is much like oven roasted garlic.
Nearly all Mexican cheeses are dry aged cheeses, like Parmaggiano, or fresh like farmer's cheese, and do not melt. There are soft cheeses made in
Sour cream is unknown in Mexico, where you will instead find crema. Crema is most similar to creme fraiche, although it isn't quite as sour (and not nearly as sour as sour cream). Mix one part sour cream to four parts heavy cream for a passable substitute, if you can't find crema at the store, or one part creme fraiche and one part heavy cream.
Mexican chocolate is not conched like American and European chocolate, so it is comparatively grainy. It also contains cinnamon. Mexican chocolate is widely available, and comes in disks. If you can't find Mexican chocolate, substitute (ounce for ounce) bittersweet chocolate, and add a couple of shakes of cinnamon for each ounce.
And finally . . .
Back in
No, Mexican food is not invariably hot, or at least it's not always murderously hot (although yes, it certainly can be). Mexican food is often slow cooked for long periods of time, and the long, slow cooking takes some (often much) of the heat out. Mexican food is, however, nearly always spicy to some extent, which leads us to the second question: What if I'm sensitive to hot food?
Desensitizing your palate is actually pretty quick and simple. We've desensitized quite a few people, all within a week or two. Just eat spicy food. As you eat it, your palate adjusts, and move one notch spicier. It helps to know that water or beer is useless. If your mouth is on fire, you want a mouthful of beans, rice, or tortilla (which absorb the oil instead of just washing it around in your mouth). Milk works well because the lactose bonds to the chili oil. You even get to the point you enjoy the endorphin rush that accompanies the fiery throat and beads of sweat on your forehead. Really.
A molé is a category, and not a particular dish. Molés are highly complex sauces cooked for hours over very low heat. They do not always or even usually contain chocolate, and when they do, they never taste of chocolate (it should be noted that the Mexicans, from whom we get chocolate, did not use chocolate as a sweet; that was a European innovation).
Finally, all Mexican meals are served with tortillas. Even if there are tortillas in the dishes, heated tortillas are served on the side. Always. Try making your own tortillas sometime; they're delicious, and much different from store-bought tortillas. Enchiladas, however, are always best made from stale tortillas, as they are less likely to fracture.
By the way, flour tortillas are unknown except along the northern border with the United States.