My supermercado, Rogers Park Fruit Market, is a continual inspiration to me. I was in there Wednesday getting the usual stuff and as usual browsing the yummy things I can’t have (fresh fruit, Jamaican meat patties, locally-made rum-raisin ice cream with raisins soaked in real rum in it omg, bakery treats, oh never mind) and saw that their supply of dried guajillo peppers has been replenished. Must be the new crop.
This stew is hearty with beef, sweet potato, and mushrooms. The guajillos add a complex, smoky, fruity heat that you feel in your chest. Pineapple helps the beef tenderize and takes the edge off the peppers.
I’ve never had these peppers fresh. Guajillos secos (dried) come about five or six inches long, tapering, blackened in the drying process, with many seeds that are plenty hot for me thank you.
Prepare the guajillos for cooking:
Using scissors, snip off the stem end. Shake out the seeds. Slit the pepper up the crease and fold it open, and finish getting out the seeds. (After handling the seeds, my fingers are too spicy to let me touch my own tongue, lips, or god forbid nose or eyelids until I have washed up. Be warned.) Pull out the thicker dried whitish strips of membrane from the inside of the pepper as well.
The pepper is now a stiff, flat sheet of rather plasticky outer skin and a seemingly imperceptibly thin layer of inner red flesh.
You can, if you choose, toast your guajillos briefly in a hot frying pan with a little oil, until they puff up a bit. This enriches and deepens the flavor.
When dried guajillos have been soaked, the outer membrane can be stiff, almost like hard plastic, but the inner flesh softens and disintegrates, acting as a sweet, smoky, peppery thickening agent to your stew. Soak your guajillos by simmering them in water to cover for a minute, then let them soak for 15 minutes, then throw them in a blender, then strain out the inevitable too-hard bits.
BEEF STEW WITH GUAJILLOS AND MUSHROOMS
2 lbs. stew beef, cut into bites
2 large yellow onions, sliced thin (4 to 7 cups)
5 dried guajillo peppers, seeded, stemmed, soaked, blended, and strained
1 lb. sliced small portobello or crimini mushrooms
1 lb. sliced white mushrooms or oyster mushrooms
1 medium sweet potato, diced large
1 cup frozen, canned, or (last choice) fresh pineapple, mashed or blended
6 cloves garlic, sliced lengthwise so that they are of uniform size
2 pints stock or water
Slosh of red wine (maybe two or three sloshes)
bacon grease or other oil
Prepare your guajillo pepper mush per above.
Caramelize the onions in bacon grease in a heavy skillet. Set aside with half the stock. Deglaze the skillet with a slosh of stock, scraping up all the burnt crunchy bits, and add that to the onions and stock. Add your guajillo mush.
Rinse and dry the beef, slice it into bites, then salt and pepper it. Add more bacon grease to the pan and heat to sizzling. Sear the beef quickly to seal in the juices. Set aside.
Deglaze the skillet with a slosh of stock, add the mushrooms, sweet potatoes, and garlic, slosh in some red wine, and cook, stirring, until the mushrooms have absorbed most of the liquid. Add back the onion-beef-pepper-mush-stock mixture.
Add the pineapple. Add the rest of the stock. Give the stew a stir to mix it up.
Cover and cook on the stovetop on low for 30 to 45 minutes, or in the oven at 300 F. for an hour.
Extra-tasty with a big dollop of sour cream on top, and maybe a crusty bollito roll to dip into it, and an ice cold beer to drink with it.
You can also make this with pork stew meat.
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When Pog (Person Of Girth) was a child, her rich parents had a Brazilian cook-slash-housekeeper named Gabrielly Harenha. Gabrielly rescues our heroine, once in her teens, and once when Pog is trapped a cell in the Regional Office a.k.a. Hell. Gabrielly might have made this stew for Pog. But this isn’t the recipe that gets Pog (Person Of Girth) out of fat jail down there. Find that recipe and lots more food porn in Coed Demon Sluts: Pog: women’s Adirondack-chair fiction with succubi.
