I love a good chile relleno. But even in New Mexico, the experience of a truly great relleno is rare. Much of the time it’s all cheese and fryer-grease and does not celebrate the magic of the chile itself. What you want to taste is the chile, with a supporting cast. Not just some greasy cheese bomb.
I have been thinking about this for a long time. Thinking that I could put a little grace note on a few hundred years of tradition. I thought (and actually still think) that I can make the best relleno ever.
Where I grew up, the chile relleno was the measure of the restaurant. Easy to make a good one, brutally difficult to make a great one. I worked in the pizza biz.
Recently I found myself at a farmers market and there on a table presided over by a friendly family were some big, fat poblano peppers, gentle and capacious, just begging to be stuffed. Suddenly I declared, “I will make chile rellenos.” I chose two poblanos and found soft cheese at another stall, and my fate was sealed. I would be cooking beyond my ability.
I started with a definition of goals:
- lighter: the outer coating can’t be heavy with oil; the stuffing must be more dynamic than just a chunk of cheese.
Huh. Sometimes you start making a list only to realize there is only one thing on it. For a long time I have imagined the perfect relleno: a magnificent pepper, stuffed with cheese and whatnot, and fried in a light, crackly, tempura batter.
Then came the air fryer, and the hope of a newer, even more awesome relleno was born. I am not a chef. I am not someone you should take food advice from, unless it’s about over-easy eggs, but I have some things to say about chile rellenos.
I made air-fried chile rellenos with a fun (not)-meat and cheese stuffing, in a tempura batter. It was an adventure, and mistakes were made. Lessons learned, and whatnot. The result was not the best relleno I ever ate (not even close!), but it carried with it the promise of being the best.
First step: roast and peel the peppers. The classic method is to roast them over open flame until the skin blackens, then peel. There’s no open flame in our kitchen, but the air fryer (or a convection oven) is an excellent tool for this job. After a few minutes on maximum heat, I pulled them out and put them in a bowl sealed with cling film to let them sweat for fifteen minutes. The outer peel was ready to jump right off!
While they were sweating, so was I. I didn’t just want cheese in the stuffing. I loves me some cheese, but good food needs balance. My support crew set me up with some Impossible meat — it acts a lot like beef, but is made from plants. I browned that up and seasoned it gently with paprika and a little cayenne. I accidentally nailed the seasoning; the spice was subtle and slow.
The soft cheese we got at the farmer’s market was also excellent. It was time to stuff some peppers!
I probably should not have cut the peppers all the way open like that, even though I saw instructions online that did it that way. Or maybe I just put in too much filling. Is that a thing? Anyway, some big ol’ chunks of cheese and the seasoned meat and it was time to (air) fry.
I had also read that you don’t mix up tempura batter until right before you are ready to use it.
The thing about tempura, apparently, is keeping the gluten from getting all worked up. There are a lot of strategies for this: use flour with less gluten, keep the water cold, and substitute vodka for some of the water.
This is where I made my biggest mistake. The instructions clearly said to whip the egg in the bowl before adding all the other stuff. I did not do that. My sources also said that I should make sure not to overbeat the mixture after the flour was added. Gluten again. I was too shy about getting in there and whipping the egg into the mix after the fact of my mistake, so my “batter” was runny and the egg was not fully integrated.
I dipped my peppers into the mix and not much stuck. A bit did, though, so I laid them incision-up in the air fryer. Meanwhile, my coach went to work on the batter and got it closer to the proper consistency. There was no getting the peppers out and re-dipping, though, so I periodically spooned more batter on top of the peppers as they cooked.
They were… not the greatest chile rellinos ever. The first disappointment was the pepper itself — too sweet! Not much spice at all. They were tasty, but not the vehicles for a savory dish. The blobs of cheese didn’t get as melty as I would have liked. That is probably due to the very large volume of the peppers; it takes a long time to get up to temperature in the middle. The batter… well, you see it up there. I’ll get that better next time.
They were also, by a long, long way, not the worst chile rellinos I have ever had, and quite possibly they were the healthiest. I got close enough to my ideal to validate it, even if I wasn’t actually that close.
The Official Sweetie of Muddled Ramblings and Half-Baked Ideas declared them the best she had ever had. They were also the first she had ever had. My top ranking has held up, however, in comparison to rellinos we got at a restaurant, though our criticism of the professional food diverged.
Tases diverge, and that’s awesome. I once postulated opening a chile-rellino-focussed restaurant that would allow the patron to choose the pepper (hot to mild, different flavors), the filling, and the batter from lists of options. I would choose a hotter pepper than OSMRHBI, but we would both choose a filling with seasoned not-meat to accompany the cheese. BRAIN FLASH! JUST RIGHT NOW AS I WAS TYPING! Use those lovely sweet poblanos for dessert rellinos!
After all these years it still seems like an excellent way to get poor quickly. Even better if someone else runs it and I just get to eat there.
