Green Chile Stew & Biscochitos

Easy to make at home, New Mexican recipes hit savory, sweet spots

I couldn’t wait to make this recipe for Green Chile Chicken and Chicos Stew that I learned at the Santa Fe School of Cooking.

If you read my recent posts from our road trip to New Mexico (you can see them here and here), you learned that I fell in love with the fabulous cuisine we consumed in Santa Fe and Taos—especially the dishes flavored with the state’s signature red and green chiles. 🌶️ I was so enamored of the food that I signed up for a demonstration class at the Santa Fe School of Cooking.¹

Chef Noe Cano of the Santa Fe School of Cooking. A plate of gorditas sits to the right. In front are the grills used to roast peppers over the gas burners.

In case you’ve never taken a demonstration class, the chef does all the cooking while you watch, sniff and salivate. Along the way, you pick up a few tips, enjoy a fine meal, and walk away with a sheaf of recipes. Usually I prefer hands-on courses and have taken several excellent ones both virtually and in person (a favorite venue is The Gourmandise School in Santa Monica). Watching Noe Cano, the school’s personable chef de cuisine, turned out to be a gratifying learning experience. He walked us through five traditional New Mexican recipes, offering wisdom drawn from his 24 years with the school, his previous experience as a chef in Vail, Colorado, and his roots in Veracruz, Mexico .

Part of the meal we enjoyed: beef carnitas topped with cabbage salad on a gordita, along with roasted corn with lime-cilantro butter.

Recipes included a chicken chile stew with chicos—a roasted, dried corn; gorditas, fried pieces of dough made of flour, masa harina and lard; beef carnitas made of sirloin steak strips stir-fried with poblano chiles and onions; a green cabbage salad flavored with pickled jalapeños, cilantro and lime juice; roasted corn with melted lime and cilantro-infused butter; and, for dessert, biscochitos (sometimes spelled bizcochitos), the anise-flavored sugar cookie, named New Mexico’s state cookie in 1989.

Since we’re soup people at my house, the Green Chile Chicken and Chicos Stew was immediately appealing—and seemed perfect for the season (even though temperature soared into the 80s in LA this week!). The recipe is below, followed by some notes.

Green Chile Chicken and Chicos Stew

(From Santa Fe School of Cooking’s Celebrating the Foods of New Mexico Cookbook)

Serves 6-8

¼ cup vegetable oil
1 medium yellow onion, cut into small dice
2 teaspoons dried Mexican oregano
3 to 4 large cloves garlic, finely minced
2 cups chicos, soaked overnight
6 cups low-sodium chicken stock
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 ½ cups chopped roasted New Mexico green chiles (or you can sub Anaheims, poblanos or another chile)
1 roasted chicken, skinned and deboned, meat shredded by hand
¾ cup chopped cilantro leaves, for garnish
1 lime, cut into wedges for garnish

1. Heat oil in a large soup pot, add onions and dried oregano. Sauté until onions become translucent, add the garlic and sauté another minute until fragrant. Add the shredded chicken, stir to combine, and warm through.

2. Add the soaked chicos and cook for another 2 to 3 minutes. Add stock, salt and pepper and simmer until chicos are tender, about 45 minutes.²

3. Add roasted green chile and heat through. Adjust flavors to taste. Serve in warm bowls garnished with cilantro and lime wedges.

Notes:

• Chicos, one of the ingredients of this dish, are made through an rather arduous process of roasting and drying cobs of corn for a long time in a special oven at a very high temperature. The resulting corn, after soaking and cooking, has a delightful chewy texture.

• I bought a small container of chicos at the school, but I couldn’t source them where I live in Southern California, so I decided to supplement with Trader Joe’s roasted corn. 🌽 Chef Cano said potatoes are often subbed for the corn in this stew, but that fresh or frozen corn would also work

The I bought a small container of chicos at the school, Here they are near the red pepper salt and pepper shakers I couldn’t resist buying.

• I used poblanos, a fairly mild green chile readily available here in Southern California, instead of the New Mexican chiles, plus a green bell pepper and one jalapeño for a little extra heat. I roasted the peppers on an outdoor gas grill until they were blackened on the outside, then peeled and chopped them.

• Although you can use low-sodium chicken stock, as specified in the recipe, Chef Cano suggests making your own broth. I know from experience that this makes a much more flavorful stew or soup.

• Making chicken broth: After shredding the meat from a rotisserie chicken, I combined the carcass with a second frozen one, mixed with chopped celery and carrots (3 or 4 each); a coarsely chopped onion; 3-4 cloves of peeled garlic, plus 3-4 quarts of water (I subbed a carton of low-sodium chicken broth for some of the water). I simmered the mixture for at least 2 hours, leaving the top off at the end to allow the liquid to reduce. I then strained the broth and took off as much fat as possible. (If you’re not in a hurry, refrigerating the broth overnight makes removing the fat a lot easier.)

• I loved the simplicity of this stew/soup, but subbing potatoes or hominy for the chicos or adding carrots, celery, leeks or another vegetable would add another dimension.

• Some Cotija cheese, a generous sprinkle of cilantro and a spritz of lime really brings out the flavor of this great bowl of comfort!

And for dessert? No contest—Biscochitos!

Almost everywhere we stayed in New Mexico, we were welcomed with this famous anise-flavored sugar cookie. And almost everywhere, including at the Santa Fe School of Cooking, it was made with lard. As a nod to my Jewish upbringing, I don’t eat many pork products, so lard isn’t really something I’ve ever used in my baking, though there are some—including a close relation—who claim that lard in the only thing to use in a pie crust.

The recipe from the cooking school specifies “1 pound (2 cups) lard—no substitutions.” Chef Cano said that lard is an essential ingredient in many New Mexican baked goods. The recipe from the official state cookie website is approximately the same (see recipe here), except that the school’s version increases the salt from 1/4 teaspoon to 1 teaspoon and the amount of brandy from 1/4 cup to 1/2 cup.

I followed a different recipe from the Itsy-Bitsy Kitchen blog that subbed half unsalted butter and half shortening for the lard Although you could still use lard in this recipe, I opted to use a favorite vegan shortening, Miyoko’s Cultured Vegan Butter, which includes an unsalted variety. Although Chef Cano said that cookies that used butter might come out too hard, I thought these were delicious—and next time I may try using 100% butter to test the chef’s theory.

The anise seeds³ give the cookies a slight hint of licorice, but dredged in cinnamon sugar (make sure to do the dredging while the cookies are still hot from the oven or the sugar won’t stick, but do so gently or your carefully shaped cookies will turn into cookie dust!), they seem like the perfect treat to serve during the winter holidays, perhaps with a cup of eggnog or Mexican hot chocolate!

Buen provecho!

1. Santa Fe School of Cooking offers a range of in-person and online classes, plus a variety of holiday recipes worth checking out, including instructions on how to build an adobe gingerbread house. It has a wonderful virtual store, but, as a small, family-owned business in pandemic times, shipping prices may come as a bit of a shock. Try to visit in person if you can!

2. You can sub fresh or frozen corn for chicos, no soaking required.

3. I believe you could use ground anise seed if you can’t find whole, but I would probably reduce the amount by half since—unless you really love a pronounced licorice flavor!