Southwestern Recipes
90 recipes found
Sopapillas
Crispy, golden-brown pillows that are sweet or savory, sopapillas are a traditional New Mexican fried dough made with only five ingredients: flour, baking powder, sugar, salt and shortening. The dish is rooted in the American Southwest, where Hispanic, Spanish and Native American cultures converge. Sopapillas, also spelled sopaipillas, can be stuffed with braised meat, New Mexican chiles or cheese and served as a meal or snack, or the entire pastry can be drizzled with honey for dessert, as it is here. To ensure maximum puffiness, roll the dough out thinly, and the oil should be very hot. Sopapillas are best served right after frying.
Chile Con Queso
This deliciously messy chile con queso from the chef John Lewis pays homage to the version he grew up eating at Chope’s Town Bar & Cafe in La Mesa, N.M. Chope’s closely guarded queso comprises thin, roasted Hatch green chile salsa topped with melted cheese and served with fresh flour tortillas for pinching. Mr. Lewis tinkered for years to get this simple assemblage right, which he serves at his restaurant, Rancho Lewis, in Charleston, S.C. Heat the Hatch chiles in their liquid with a few umami-rich shakes of bouillon powder. Don’t boil; you’re after a loose, stewlike consistency. Stir in lime juice to brighten the flavors, top with cheese and broil until melted. Serve with hot flour tortillas. If chile juice drips down your arm, you’re doing it right.
Sopapilla Cheesecake Bars
In this simple cheesecake, the luscious filling is held together between two layers of flaky pastry, generously dusted with cinnamon sugar. The recipe is a Southwestern tradition, taking inspiration from sopapillas, pieces of dough dropped in hot oil until they puff into little pillows with origins that go back to Latin America and regions of the United States that were once part of Mexico. Maria Kitsopoulos, a cellist with The New York Philharmonic, created her recipe for the cheesecake with extra cinnamon (and less sugar) based on a version by the blogger Deborah Harroun.
New Mexico Breakfast Burritos
The breakfast burrito is to New Mexico what the bagel is to New York, or the loco moco is to Hawaii; they are an important part of the state's culture. While you can find variations of the burrito in New Mexico and beyond, the non-negotiables are flour tortillas, scrambled eggs and New Mexico green chiles, a red chile sauce or both. (This variation is called “Christmas”). While wrapping eggs and other fillings in a tortilla likely goes back thousands of years, the breakfast burrito earned its place in New Mexican cuisine in the 1970s, when it was served handheld at the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta, and smothered with cheese and sauce at Tia Sophia’s, a restaurant in Santa Fe. To fit bacon, sausage, carne adovada or another protein, use less potato.
Martha Rose Shulman's Chicken Fajitas
The ingredient that makes this marinade both spicy and sweet is adobo sauce from canned chiles in adobo, a useful sauce that I had not thought to use in marinades until I was introduced to the idea by the cookbook author and television host Pati Jinich. The sauce has enough heat, so I don’t use the canned chipotles, though you could add one if you wanted. I hold back a couple of tablespoons of the marinade and use it to finish the vegetables and deglaze the pan.
Basic Texas Meat Loaf
Chili-Stuffed Steak
Calamari Rings With Green Chili Mayonnaise
Stephen Pyles's Tomatillo-Jalapeno Chutney
Pumpkin, Southwestern Style
Wild Boar Fried Texas Style
Texas-Style Chili
Calling a dish "Texas Chili,” especially if you’re not a native of that state, is clearly asking for trouble. But this recipe, refined over years of potlucks and Super Bowl parties, is too good to keep under wraps. Its depth of flavor, from different chile types, makes this recipe stand out. It also has whole spices, unsweetened chocolate and dark beer that meld seamlessly into a brick-red sauce that naps the succulent meat. The meat can be cut into large chunks, or, more traditionally, thin slices, especially if you are using a tougher cut than chuck. Sirloin also makes good chili. If you have masa harina, the corn flour used to make tortillas, that will make the gravy even thicker, but it is not necessary. Like many vigorously spiced dishes, this one tastes even better a day or two after it is made and will hold its flavor well for at least a week.
Chicken Enchiladas With Salsa Verde
Don’t let the one-hour prep time on these enchiladas scare you. Use some leftover roast chicken, or buy a roast chicken at the market on the way home, and you’ll save at least 20 minutes, making the dish a terrific weeknight feed, alongside a green salad. (At El Real Tex-Mex restaurant, in Houston, the great Tex-Mex scholar and restaurateur Robb Walsh serves his version with lightly smoked chicken, which if you can find or make is superb.) The salsa verde is dead simple to make and the rest is assembly — a task that grows markedly easier each time you do it.
Chicken Tortilla Soup
This version of tortilla soup arises from a dish served at the Rose Garden restaurant in Anthony, Texas. We’ve streamlined the original recipe, using chicken legs as the base of the stock, pulling off the meat when it’s tender, and adding couple of beef bones to give the broth extra depth. Laila Santana, whose mother, Dalila Garcia, owns the Rose Garden, told us the recipe lends itself to improvisation. That it does, so feel free to tweak it to your tastes.
El Minuto’s Cheese Crisps
In Tucson, Ariz., a late night out is often punctuated by a stop at a local Mexican restaurant for cheese crisp. Linda Ronstadt grew up eating the version at El Minuto, which was across the street from the building where her brother worked as the chief of police. She included the recipe in her hybrid memoir-cookbook “Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands” (Heyday, 2022). The ingredients are ridiculously simple but it is essential to search out an approximation of the large, nearly translucent flour tortillas that are a mainstay of Sonoran cooking. The trick is to let the tortillas cool and harden before topping them with cheese and sending them under the broiler. Chopped green chiles are a nice way to add some character to the snack, but a good hot sauce will do.
Pan-Roasted Corn and Tomato Salad
You can take a corn and tomato salad in a number of directions, but at the end of the day it shouldn’t be much more than a dish you can make perfectly only in mid- to late summer, and one that showcases its primary ingredients. My version here marries corn and tomatoes with chile, avocado, cilantro and lime. It is just plain good. At the end, you’ve got meaty smokiness from bacon; that incredible sweetness of corn; the fruity acidity of tomato; the tender, smooth fattiness of avocado, and the sharpness of chile. It’s a summer winner, one that you shouldn’t even try after the first frost.
Shrimp Fajitas With Peppers and Zucchini
Shrimp fajitas are quickly thrown together. The shrimp are tossed in a mix of lime juice and zest, adobo sauce from a can of chipotles, olive oil, cumin and garlic, and don’t need to be marinated for longer than 30 minutes. I use just enough adobo sauce in the marinade to obtain its spicy and slightly sweet essence without overpowering the shrimp.
Quealy’s Queso
Chili con queso is a standard party dip in South Texas, where the chef Quealy Watson lives and works: melted cheese with chopped green chiles, generally, to be served with chips. Watson gives the dish an Asian spin, using the Southeast Asian chile paste known as sambal oelek in place of the green chiles. The Velveeta cheese he calls for is not for everyone, but it is powerfully easy to work with — you couldn’t break it if you tried. Heavy cream helps thin out the queso a little, and the chile paste gives it a fascinating fire.
West Cave Cellar Punch
Yes, this festive, Southwestern-inflected punch created by Alba Huerta requires some ingredients that may be unfamiliar — sotol, pomelo and panela among them — and a bit of a fuss. But for a special occasion like a big holiday party, it’s absolutely worth it —and the beauty of punch is that once it has been made, guests can help themselves, and the host stands a chance of having as much fun as they are.
Roasted Ripe Tomato Salsa
With two types of tomatoes – standard Jersey and plum – this salsa takes full advantage of summer's bounty. Herbes de Provence and shallots stand in for the traditional seasonings of cilantro and onions, which means it skews slightly, and delightfully, French. We like it with grilled fish or chicken.
Savory Burmese Slaw
Fermented tea leaves are one of Myanmar’s favorite national ingredients, and for a 2015 article in The Times, the San Antonio chef Quealy Watson used them to provide a jolt of big flavor to a crunchy slaw that goes well with barbecued or grilled meats. You can find fermented tea leaves in some Asian markets and online, occasionally sold as Burmese tea salad dressing.
Classic Chili Con Carne
This is a classic recipe from Robb Walsh, a Texas food historian and a restaurateur: no beans. In the Texas spirit, it does, however, call for three pounds of meat — boneless chuck, buffalo or venison. There is also some bacon for good measure. This is a hearty meal, great for a cold day when the best thing to do is to stay in and watch that other Texas religion, football.
Chicken-Fried Steak With Queso Gravy
Here’s an Americanized taste of the schnitzel brought to Texas by German immigrants in the 19th century, with a Tex-Mexified twist. Instead of serving the fried steaks with a peppery cream gravy, I’ve followed the teachings of Lisa Fain, who writes the "Homesick Texan" blog and is the author of "Queso! Regional Recipes for the World's Favorite Chile-Cheese Dip," and applied a queso gravy instead – the cheese cut with milk, infused with onion, jalapeño and cumin, and stabilized with a little cornstarch. It’s rich eating, to be sure, but as a result I’ve cut the portion size of the meat down to a mere quarter-pound per person. I like some pico de gallo on top, so there are some raw vegetables above the cheese, and mashed potatoes on the side because that’s how chicken-fried steak is served in Texas, whatever’s on top of the meat.
