Put Your Hands Together For… Empalmes

The cuisine of the Mexican state of Nuevo Leon is… generally fairly meat-forward. Cabrito, or young goat, is a staple, a holdover from the Spanish Jews who founded Nuevo Leon’s capital city, Monterrey. Goat is used in numerous ways there, whether cooked on a stick over an open fire (cabrito al pastor) or in a tomato-based stew (cabrito en salsa), its organ meats cooked in its own blood (fritada de cabrito) or organs and tripe wrapped in intestines and grilled (machitos). Goat is far from the only meat consumed on the Neoleonés table, though–grilled arrachera, or skirt steak, is popular there; as is barbacoa, eaten in tacos; beef jerky, rehydrated in a stew called machados or simply eaten out of hand. Pork is roasted there, its skin made into chicharrones, its flesh swaddled in masa to make tamales.

Today’s sandwich, a snack commonly served in the Valle de Salinas area north of Monterrey, is not, strictly speaking, a meat dish. It consists in the main of a layer of refried beans spread between two tortillas. Is it vegetarian then? Hell, no. The beans are cooked with lard, they are spread on tortillas that have been dipped in or spread with lard, and often have chorizo mixed into them or stewed meats added atop them. The beans are essential; the tortillas are essential; the lard is essential. All else is a flourish.

I have assembled a set of recipes that I used for these empalmes. These recipes are not intended to be authoritative. As usual, I have read a number of (translated) recipes, and watched a number of (untranslated Spanish language) Youtube videos about making empalmes, and taken the pieces that made the most sense to me and Frankensteined them together into a kind of “the good bits” amalgam. For example, this man starts with a base of rehydrated chilies that he purees into a paste, much like the beginnings of a dish called Chile Colorado. Then he cooks the chili paste in lard and uses it to flavor his beans, his meat, etc.

So I began the same way, working in some of the other lessons I’d learned from my research.

Then I went ahead and made Chile Colorado with some of the base I’d prepared.

I also made my beans using the Chile Colorado base

I also made chicharrones in salsa verde to use in Empalmes

This is an excessive number of recipes for a single blog post. I understand this. And yet I have still not broached the topic of the actual sandwich I am making. All this was prep work. In addition to the above, I also hand-shredded some Queso Oaxaca (it pulls apart nicely into strands like string cheese) and I cooked a pound of beef chorizo, which was seasoned aggressively and had a nice vinegary sourness, reminding me of a brief description of the “chorizo ranchero” used in Nuevo Leon that I read in this Empalme recipe.

And speaking of Empalme recipes, one more thing I did with the Chile Colorado base is described in my Empalme recipe:

About that salsa–most descriptions of the dish will call for an orangish salsa made with piquin chilies, cumin, oregano, garlic, and vinegar. It occurred to me that all those things were already in my Chile Colorado base. So to make the salsa, I simply thinned out that paste with some cider vinegar in a blender. It makes a terrific hot sauce, flavorful without being overwhelmingly spicy. But it did not turn out as orange as the piquin salsas I’ve seen while reading about the sandwich. I’m happy with my salsa, but here is a video describing one process for making a piquin salsa.

The Classic: Refried Beans

Empalme, at its most basic, consists of this. Tortillas of nixtamalized corn, dipped in lard–or, if you live in a cold place like I do and your lard is resolutely solid, you can do what I did and spread it on with a knife–sandwiched together and cooked on a grill, or in a griddle. The word “empalme” translates as “splice” or “joining”–the name comes from gluing those tortillas together with that layer of beans.

It is my understanding that a single-decker such as this may be the most common option but is not the end–some people stack multiple layers of beans and lard and tortillas before cooking the empalme up crisp and hot. I am working my way through several of these so I’ll keep it simple for this inaugural empalme outing.

The salsa is often put inside, to flavor the beans more directly, but I enjoyed adding a little to each bite as I went. The beans themselves have a little heat to them, having been cooked with some of the Chile Colorado base in them, and the sauce owes as much of its flavor to vinegar and garlic as it does to dried rehydrated chilies–in a very good way. My main nit to pick is that the beans soften and thin as they heat, making it difficult to get very much inside, and they do not grab onto the tortilla and hold it in place the way cheese would.

An Upgrade: Beans and Cheese

Enter: cheese. I didn’t get a clear consensus for a specific cheese that was invariably used in an empalme. Some recipes used queso fresco, some used cotija, others used a melting cheese like queso quesadilla. I happen to like Oaxacan cheese, so that’s what I used.

The cheese’s contributions went beyond merely helping to glue the tortillas together a little better. It also melted out the sides and caramelized against the griddle, creating tasty crunchy bits around the edges. If I had more space on my skillet, and more confidence in its non-stick properties, I might make one with a full cheese skirt. But it’s indisputable, at least to me, that the empalme with cheese is superior to the one without.

It’s Flavor Time: Chorizo, Beans, and Cheese

Refried beans and chorizo are natural partners. Decades ago, when Mindy and I were visiting some vegan friends in St. Louis, they served us tortilla chips and a dip made of vegan refried beans and vegan chorizo. I was a bit more callous in those days and tried the dip, fully expecting to hate it and say something unfortunate to our generous friends. It was delicious though, and I could only thank them and keep stuffing it in my mouth.

Similarly, many people when preparing empalmes will simply mix some chorizo into the beans before making the simple, bean-spread-only version above. I can’t help but think that would be delicious. But I had plans for these beans, and kept the chorizo separate this time.

This beef chorizo had big flavors, sour and salty and spicy, tamed as much by the beans and cheese as it was complemented by them. Even the spicy, sour, lingering garlic flavor of the hot sauce barely made a dent in the chorizo. If you like big flavors, this is the way to go.

Bringing the Heat: Chile Colorado, Beans, and Cheese

If you laugh in the face of danger and skip right past anything with less than 3 cartoon chili peppers next to its name on a Thai restaurant menu, this warning is not for you. For the rest of us: chile colorado packs some heat. This beef was stewed in, essentially, a paste made from chicken stock and rehydrated chili peppers, and it’s beefy and spicy and garlicky and spicy again, similar to a Texas-style beanless chili if it were cooked until the meat fell apart into shreds. There’s no state-based confusion here–“Colorado” here does not mean the state but is Spanish for “red-colored” and refers to the bright hue of this Mexican stew.

We like big flavors though, especially when they’re going to be mixed in with beans and cheese and tortillas, and the resulting empalmes are spicy but quite bearably so, even to the less spicy tolerant. At least, they were preferred over my own personal favorite filling:

A Matter of Taste: Chicharrones in Salsa Verde, Beans, and Cheese

It’s not for everybody, I guess. I like them plain, fresh and crisp, fatty and a little salty, right out of the package from the Mexican market. I like them in big sloppy burritos, when I’ve maybe had a few drinks and need one good decision to forestall any further bad ones. I like them on huaraches, I like them in quesadillas, I like them in tacos. I am just a fan of chicharrones. They are especially good when they’ve been cooked down a bit in the salsa, enough to have absorbed much of the liquid but they haven’t fully given up their crisp texture yet. That timing is a balancing act though. I’ll take them, as Gollum liked his fish, wet and wriggling.

My salsa verde recipe above for these chicharrones does not contain any chilies, and that was deliberate. I wanted to provide at least one non-spicy option, even though the beans themselves had a good level of heat. And truth be told I was hoping that a chicharrone-averse member of my household might be enticed into trying them. That did not happen. The good news is, there’s a good amount of chicharrones left over, and they’re all for me.

I liked these empalmes. Given the amount of lard that went into cooking both the sandwiches and most of their ingredients, they were a bit on the greasy side. Next time, I might cook them over a grill, so that the fat could drain away. I would make them again though! There are never too many different ways to combine tortillas deliciously with spicy foods!