Zuni White Corn and Chile Stew

As tradition built it

Zuni White Corn and Chile Stew

Zuni-authored, Penn Museum's Expedition magazine. About 2.5 hours total; serves a family of six.

Ingredients

The method as the tradition gives it, with the ingredients named. Quantities follow as we verify them, lead dishes first.

• roughly 3 to 3.5lb meat, for a family of six
• chile mixture
• 3 to 4 cups white corn, per batch, from the companion mutton stew

Method

1. Simmer the meat for 1 hour.
2. Add the chile mixture and continue simmering a further 1.5 hours, 2.5 hours total.
3. In the companion mutton stew, cook 3 to 4 cups of white corn with the meat for roughly 3 hours until the meat is tender.

Notes

This chapter presents these two dishes 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.

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.