Chicken Posole

For convenience sake, I used canned hominy for this chicken posole. I hadn’t eaten hominy since a was a child, so I’ve never prepared it, so Bush’s Golden Hominy won out! I also used Bush’s Pinto Beans to keep the hominy from feeling slighted. The guajillo chiles were a breeze to cook. I used my grandmother’s cast iron skillet and cooked the halved and seeded chiles for about 30 seconds on each side. The exhaust fan helps a lot in the step…but it’s over pretty quickly. (The smell of the chiles was comforting to me—call me crazy, but it smells like chocolate!) While the chiles were soaking in the water, I charred the tomatoes. After they cooled, I cored them and threw them in my Vita-Mix along with the cooled soaked chiles. I added 1/2 cup liquid from the chiles and whirled them up into a smooth sauce. I covered this tightly in a container and refrigerated it. I used basic store brand canned tomatoes that I just squished with my hand. I also used a rotisserie chicken. The smell of these ingredients filled the kitchen with a warm aroma. I simmered this on medium-low for about an hour. I added chopped cilantro and cubed avocado as garnishes. The posole is spicy from the chiles but not hot. It’s a great meal for a rainy winter day. This is definitely a keeper…not hard at all and came together pretty quickly! This would be a great vegetarian soup if veggie stock was used. Maybe a sprinkle of pepper jack cheese would be a great garnish too…and a big slice of cornbread on the side.

Pozole (or posole) always warms my heart. I don’t mind making a long version to get the really great flavor of the hominy that only comes from starting from prepared dried hominy. You start the night before, spend a few minutes to start the beans and hominy soaking, and then the rest of the recipe can be completed the next day. You could also do some of the other steps the day before to make the final cooking go quicker or just make this a weekend project on a day when you’re able to tend to a series of simple components. I roasted a chicken and then removed the meat from the bones, which I used for my chicken stock, in the morning while I was cooking the pozole and the beans. I served the completed posole that evening, and for several days afterwards, trying different garnishes.

Doing some steps in parallel, most of this took the better part of a day, but nothing was super labor intensive. You can shorten this process by buying a roasted chicken (that’ll provide you some extra chicken meat for another project) and using stock from the freezer or purchased and still have a good result. Using a 9-inch cast iron skillet, the chiles started smoking at 30 to 40 seconds initially, and quicker as the pan got a little hotter, so I only did 3 to 4 chile pieces at a time to keep control and avoid scorching. The sauce buzzed up quickly with the charred tomatoes. Don’t toss the extra chile soaking liquid—it’s a handy way to adjust the heat and liquid in the resulting soup if you want it a little hotter.

Although I was a bit curious to find beans included in pozole, they worked very nicely with the chicken. The first serving we garnished with avocado and the pickled radishes (nice bright note) and some tortilla strips. Another day (and pozole is always better the second or third day, I think), I served it with diced tomato, cilantro, and a bit of sour cream plus narrowly sliced tortilla strips (they curl up nicely with you toast them in a cast iron pan if you make them skinny strips). The only real adjustment I think the recipe needs is more heat (either from more chiles or use all the liquid from soaking) and a little more time cooking. Winter soul food.

The cheater’s version of this chicken posole recipe is easy to throw together and was flavorful and comforting. You can stop on your way home from work, pick up a roast chicken, a can of hominy, a can of beans, and some tomatoes. I always keep a selection of dried peppers in our pantry, so I didn’t have any problem getting this made. Soaking the peppers took the longest, but that worked out very well because during the 30 minutes while I waited for those peppers, I prepped everything else. I particularly liked the deep color and richness of the broth. This recipe deserves to be made.

I made the “cheater’s” version of this recipe. It’s hard to know if the dish compares to the original since I didn’t make the full version first and I’m not all that familiar with posole in general, but I thought the cheater version was delicious. My end result was a just-spicy-enough soup with a thin, tomato-based broth and hearty serving of chicken and vegetables that was reminiscent of a Mexican tortilla soup.

I made a few judgement calls. I didn’t have to soak and boil the hominy and beans so I didn’t have any hominy cooking liquid, so instead I kept the liquid from the canned hominy, hoping that might deliver a similar effect. I couldn’t find the dried peppers called for in the recipe. I ended up taking a chipotle pepper in adobo sauce and 1/2 cup water and adding that to the blender instead of the dried peppers and their cooking water. I was preparing this for my family who can’t take too much heat so I thought one pepper was plenty but this could easily be adjusted, adding more peppers depending on how hot you like it. More peppers would, of course, help make the soup thicker, too. At the end of the day, my cheater’s version came together quickly and was tasty. I’d make it again. I used Goya hominy, canned low-sodium chicken broth, and a rotisserie chicken.