Chicken Enchiladas With Tortillas That Do Not Dissolve

Sunday evening, leftover chicken, and four people who will not be excited about it in its current form. This chicken enchiladas recipe is forty-five minutes and it solves that entirely.

The thing that ruins enchiladas is skipping the tortilla step.

A corn tortilla straight from the packet is a sponge. Under twenty-five minutes of hot sauce it stops being a tortilla and becomes the texture of wet paper. Fifteen seconds a side in oil seals the surface, and that one step is the whole difference between a tray you are pleased with and a tray you eat anyway.

How to make it

1. Heat the oven to 190C fan.
2. Soften the onion in one tablespoon of the oil with a good pinch of salt, then add the garlic and chipotle and cook a minute until it smells sweet rather than raw.
3. Add the tomatoes, simmer ten minutes until it thickens enough to coat a spoon, then blend or leave it rustic. Taste and salt it properly.
4. Warm each tortilla for about fifteen seconds a side in the rest of the oil in a hot pan, stacking them as you go. They should be pliable and lightly blistered, not crisp.
5. Stir a few spoonfuls of the sauce through the shredded chicken so the filling is not dry.
6. Spread a thin layer of sauce in the dish, fill and roll each tortilla, and pack them seam down in a single layer.
7. Pour over the remaining sauce, scatter the cheese, and bake twenty-five minutes until bubbling and browned at the edges.
8. Rest five minutes, then finish with coriander.

Notes

Cooked leftovers keep three to four days refrigerated, per USDA FSIS.

This genuinely improves on day two, which is not true of much. The sauce settles into the tortillas overnight, the chipotle rounds out, and the whole thing firms up enough to cut into proper squares rather than sliding apart on the spatula.

It freezes well assembled and unbaked for up to three months. Bake from frozen at 180C fan, covered with foil, for about an hour, then uncovered for ten minutes to brown the top. Freezing it baked also works but the tortillas soften further.

Use a dish that fits the eight rolls snugly in one layer. Too large a dish spreads the sauce thin, and thin sauce over a wide area burns at the edges before the middle is hot.

The most common disappointment is blandness in the middle of a tray that tasted fine in the pan. Season the sauce until it is slightly too assertive on its own, because eight tortillas and two hundred grams of cheese will pull it back a long way.

Roll them seam side down and pack them against each other deliberately. Enchiladas that are not touching unroll as the tortilla relaxes in the heat, and by the time the cheese has browned you have a tray of open tubes with the filling escaping into the sauce. Snug is structural rather than tidy.

Keep back a little of the sauce and warm it separately to spoon over at the table. The top of a baked tray is always more concentrated than the middle, and a spoonful of loose sauce evens out the portions that came from the corners.

Swaps that actually work

The chipotle is the point. It is the smoke and the depth, and it is what makes this taste like enchiladas rather than chicken baked in tomato sauce. If you swap it, swap it for another smoked chilli such as ancho or a smoked paprika with real heat behind it, not for sweet paprika.

The chicken can be anything, or nothing. Leftover roast, poached breast and shop bought rotisserie all work identically. Black beans with roasted squash makes a genuinely good vegetarian version that does not read as a compromise.

Flour tortillas work and are considerably more forgiving, because they do not disintegrate the same way. They also go softer and less distinct, and the one real advantage is that you can skip the frying step entirely.

Cheddar is not remotely traditional and is completely fine. Anything that melts properly will do the job.

The swap that costs you the dish is a thin sauce. If it has not thickened enough to coat the back of a spoon before it goes in, keep simmering, because nothing in the oven makes it thicker and everything makes it wetter.

If it goes wrong

The tortillas dissolved. They went in untreated. Fifteen seconds a side in oil next time, and do not skip it however late it is.

It is watery. The sauce was too thin going in, or the chicken was wet from poaching. Reduce the sauce further and drain the chicken before it goes in.

The edges burned before the middle was hot. The dish was too large and the layer too shallow. Pack them snugly in a smaller dish.

It is flat. Almost always salt, and almost always in the sauce rather than on the finished tray. Taste and correct the sauce before anything is assembled.

What to serve with it

The default is rice and a spoonful of soured cream, and there is nothing wrong with the default.

The better version of the default is a sharp raw slaw made from white cabbage, lime and salt, with nothing else in it at all. The tray is rich and uniformly soft, and it badly needs something with an edge and some crunch sitting next to it.

The thing in the fridge that lifts it is pickled jalapeños, or quick pickled red onion made twenty minutes earlier while the tray bakes.

It is an excellent next day lunch, cold or reheated, and it travels better than most baked dishes.

Why this one earns its place

It takes one cooked chicken and turns it into a meal that feeds four people who will not identify it as leftovers, which is a genuinely rare and useful property in a recipe.

It is also the sort of dish that makes forty-five minutes on a Sunday evening pay for itself twice over, because Monday and Tuesday both get easier. Make the tray, eat a third of it, and you have bought yourself two lunches without doing any additional work.

If stretching one shop across more meals is the goal, meal prep for the week is the system version of what this recipe does once. For keeping the ingredient list genuinely cheap without the result tasting cheap, budget grocery list app. And weekly meal planning is how a tray like this stops being a one-off and becomes something you plan around.

More like this: all Mexican recipes in Crave Corner.