How to Cook Perfect and Delicious Enchiladas (With Secret Ingredient)

Get La Cocina de Bertha, every recipe in this kitchen written down (372 pages): https://berthascookbook.com Mija, come in and wash your hands. Today we make enchiladas together, the red ones my mother put on the table every Sunday. If yours crack when you roll them, or come out of the oven like a wet casserole, it was never you. Nobody showed you the real way, slowly, from the beginning. And there is one ingredient in my mother's enchiladas that is not in any recipe you have watched. It is not a spice. It costs nothing. I put it in your hand in the middle of the video. ⭐ ENCHILADAS ROJAS (serves 4, about 1 hour, book page 295) • 12 corn tortillas (read the secret below before you buy them) • 6 guajillo chiles and 2 ancho chiles, stemmed and seeded • 2 cups hot water • 2 garlic cloves, 1/4 white onion • 1/2 teaspoon dried Mexican oregano, 1 pinch cumin • 3/4 teaspoon salt, plus to taste • Oil for the skillet • 2 cups shredded poached chicken, or 1 1/2 cups crumbled queso fresco • To finish: crema, queso fresco, sliced onion, shredded lettuce ⭐ THE METHOD 1. Toast the chiles a few SECONDS per side on a hot dry comal, pressed flat, off at the first smell of warm fruit. A scorched chile is bitter forever. 2. Soak them in the hot water, held under with a small plate, 20 minutes. Taste the soaking water. Pleasant: keep it. Bitter: use plain water. 3. Blend the chiles with garlic, onion, oregano, cumin, salt, and about 1 1/4 cups of the soaking water, a full minute. STRAIN it, pressing with a spoon. The silk step. 4. FRY the strained sauce in 1 tablespoon of oil about 4 minutes, until it darkens to brick and coats a spoon. Keep it warm in a wide shallow dish. 5. Set up the line: sauce, skillet, filling, plates. 6. Dip each tortilla in the red sauce FIRST, then lay it in a thin film of hot oil a few seconds per side. The sauce fries onto the tortilla and becomes part of it (page 296). It spatters. Use tongs. Calmer road: oil first, then sauce. Both roads are old (page 181). 7. Fill with chicken or cheese, roll, seam down, three to a plate. A little more warm sauce, then crema, queso fresco, onion, lettuce. 8. Serve NOW. Real enchiladas are made and eaten, not baked. Thirty minutes of oven turns rolled tortillas to pudding. ⭐ THE SECRET INGREDIENT (spoiler, so watch first) Page 180, first line of the ingredient list: 12 DAY-OLD corn tortillas. A fresh tortilla is full of moisture, so it drinks the sauce and falls apart. A day-old tortilla has dried just enough: it takes the sauce on its surface, holds when you roll it, and keeps a little bite. Enchiladas were invented to rescue old tortillas. Only have a fresh package? Lay them out on the counter, uncovered, for an hour while you make the sauce. THE HONEST WORDS (because I will not oversell you): • Cracked when rolling → the oil was not hot enough, or the tortilla never touched it. • Greasy → same problem from the other side. Cool oil soaks in, hot oil seals. • Bitter sauce → a chile scorched, or the soaking water was bitter and you kept it. • Raw-tasting sauce → not fried long enough. Two more minutes fixes it. • Your hands will be red to the wrist. That is the job, and the sign of it done right. THE CAN: on most cans the first ingredient is water, then a thickener, then salt, with the chile far down the list as a powder. There are nights the can is dinner. After today I do not think you will buy it again. WHO PROFITS: a restaurant plate of three is about $14. Eight dried chiles are about $2, the tortillas were already in your kitchen, and the chicken was left over. About $5 feeds four. THE HABIT: make a DOUBLE batch of the red sauce and freeze half flat in a bag. With sauce in the freezer and old tortillas on the counter, enchiladas are a Tuesday. And stop throwing away the last tortillas in the bag. And the red stains on the pan, the spoon, and your good shirt? That is the other half of my life: 🧼 Clean The Mexican Way → [link to cleaning channel] Make these this week. If you only change two things: use yesterday's tortillas, and do not put them in the oven. Then tell me in the comments whether you laughed when you heard the secret. Tell me the truth: were you throwing the old tortillas away? Tell me your county. And tell me what YOUR family swears is the secret ingredient.