The Perfect Ench-eee-lada - The Thread

From: Kevin
Robert, I'd love to know more about posole. Do you have a recipe?

Posole is basically a pork and hominy soup with lots of chile. The recipe that we use is from an old cookbook published many years ago by UNM Press and authored by Erna Ferguson with the original title *Mexican Cookbook*! It includes some wonderful New Mexican recipes including two for posole. We use sort of a combination of both recipes which calls for everything from the pig except the oink, as a friend used to say. One recipe calls for cooking pigs feet in a cheesecloth bag - so that you can separate out the bones. The other one calls for cubed pork. Since I doubt that uncooked pigs feet are widely available ??? I'll send the one that calls for pork.

Posole
Printer version of this recipe

2 pounds pork, cubed
2 onions, chopped
garlic optional
1 bay leaf
1 tablespoon fat (obviously an old recipe)
1/2 teaspoon oregano
1 cup red chile pulp (about 12 red chiles) or 4-6 tablespoons chile powder
1 cup nixtamal (hominy)
1 teaspoon salt

Fry onions in fat, add pork and blend. Add nixtamal or hominy, chile and seasoning. Add hot water and simmer until pork is thoroughly tender, about 4 hours. If chile power is used, mix with 1 tablespoon of flour and stir into fat. If canned hominy is used, cook pork first until almost done before adding hominy. Then simmer until done. Serve steaming hot with a variety of garnishes such as chopped scallions, chopped green chiles, chopped onions - use your imagination! It makes a wonderful warm-up after a day of skiing, too!

You can try it with or without the cooked pigs feet. In addition, you can use various other parts of the pig, depending on how much of it you're making. The above recipe will only serve 4 to 6 people if they eat posole like I do.