Zuni White Corn and Chile Stew

As tradition built it

Zuni White Corn and Chile Stew

Serves a family of six.

Ingredients

The tradition's method, with the ingredients named. Quantities follow as we verify them.

Chile stew (k'yawaho:we)

• 1.35 to 1.6kg venison, mutton or beef, cubed
• as needed water, a 2 gallon pot half full
• potatoes, peeled and cubed
• red or green chile
• coriander
• a little garlic powder

Mutton stew with white corn (chuleya:we)

• 720 to 960ml white corn
• 1 shoulder of mutton, or a pack of stew meat, cubed
• water
• cilantro
• red chile powder

Method

Chile stew

1. Set the oven at 300°F (150°C), or keep the top of a wood stove at about the same heat.
2. Cube the meat and fry or boil it. Put it in a 2 gallon pot half full of water and simmer an hour.
3. Add the potatoes.
4. Roast the chile 10 to 15 minutes, let it cool about 10, then peel it, grind it, and mix it with coriander and a little garlic powder.
5. Add the chile to the stew and simmer an hour and a half. Serve with hot oven bread or tortillas.

Mutton stew

6. Put water on to boil. Wash the white corn and rub the skins off on a metate.
7. Add the cubed meat and the corn to the boiling water.
8. Cook about 3 hours, until the meat is tender and the corn starts to open. Indoors, cook it slowly at least 3 to 4 hours.
9. Add cilantro and red chile powder for flavour.
10. Outdoors, it goes into a beehive oven with the hot ashes left in, the door sealed with a flagstone and mud, overnight.

Notes

These two dishes are presented together as the Zuni expression of the wider Southwest hominy-and-chile tradition rather than asserting a fully verified, separately sourced "posole" recipe.

The fuller posole and barbacoa story belongs to Mesoamerica (AM-01, AM-06) and to a future Rio Grande and Desert Southwest volume, both cross-linked rather than re-treated here.

The chile stew is Sangelita Weekoty's and the mutton stew Karla Chavez's, from Zuni High School's Uses of Native Materials in Zuni Pueblo (1989), printed in the Penn Museum's Expedition. Mutton stew is made in quantity for Shalak'o, and small offerings of it go into the fireplace or to the river for the ancestors.

What a modern chef changes

Structured meat, real char, a cleaner broth

Method

1. Cook the meat sous vide first, low and slow to a precise, still-structured doneness.
2. Finish the meat in the chile mixture for only the last twenty minutes or so of its own two and a half hour simmer, so the long braise still builds the sauce's depth without turning the meat itself to shreds.
3. Roast and peel the chiles for the stew's base over the Big Green Egg's direct heat rather than a stovetop flame, a real, controllable way of building char depth.
4. Pass the finished white corn broth through a chinois before the meat and corn go back in, for a cleaner base that lets the corn's own long-simmered starch, not sediment, carry the body of the dish.