Enchiladas Placeras (Enchiladas Served in the Central Plaza)

From The Art of Mexican Cooking - p.19.

Enchiladas as described by Diana Kennedy look much different than the Tex-Mex fare I've seen all my life. My idea of an enchilada is cheese and perhaps meat rolled up in a corn tortilla, covered with more cheese and your sauce of choice (which may also be made of cheese), heated and served. The end result is cheesy, chewy, and saucy. Not generally my go-to entree, when there are so many awesome and inventive tacos to be found on any Tex-Mex menu.

These enchiladas employ a different technique: no baking, just assembling the components (sauce, filling, and tortillas) while piping hot, and serving immediately. This recipe for Enchiladas Placeras is labor-intensive, though this time I cheated by buying pre-made corn tortillas. The meat and sauce were built from scratch, and resulted in an awesomely fresh and flavorful entree, a great-smelling apartment, and a satisfying meal.

Salud!

The Meat: Salpicon de Res (Shredded Meat Cooked with Tomatoes, Chiles, and Cilantro)

The recipe calls for a skirt or flank steak, cut into 2-inch pieces, and simmered with onion, cilantro, garlic and salt for about 35 minutes.

After simmering, the meat is chopped roughly, and fried with onion, garlic, chopped tomatoes, chiles serranos en escabeche (pickled serranos) and cilantro.

Mmmmmmm....

The sauce: Salsa de Jitomate (Cooked Tomato Sauce)

Tomatoes are simmered quickly with fresh serranos, then blended with garlic and a little water. Simple. Then, the sauce is cooked in oil over high heat, which incorporates the flavors and thickens it up. The time-consuming part of the sauce is all the chopping you have to do before it hits the blender. The blending and cooking take no time at all.

Add salt, taste, repeat.

Once you've completed your meat and sauce, which should be kept hot, lightly cook your corn tortillas in safflower oil (or lard, if you prefer) about 5 seconds each side. Stack them up, then dip tortillas individually into the hot sauce. Spoon meat onto tortilla, roll, sauce, and top with a bit of chopped white onion and grated queso anejo or Romano cheese. Here is my end result:

In total, it took me about 2 hours to complete my Enchiladas Placeras. Highlights for me were the flavor and heartiness of the meat filling, the clean-tasting, spicy, thin sauce, and the fact that there was so little cheese, which made the other elements stand out. 

Buen apetito!

-Little Chef TX