Choosing Enchilada Ingredients

Video Transcript

"Hi! My name is J and I'm talking to you guys today on behalf of expertvillage.com, and I'm going to teach you how to make the red enchilada sauce. In this clip, we're going to talking about how to pick your ingredients at the store for your red enchilada sauce. First of all, with the sweet onion when you go to the produce section you want to look for the sign that actually says sweet onion. There's a lot of different onion. There's yellow onion, white onion, red onion. I prefer sweet onion because it doesn't have such a bitter taste to it. What you want to do is you want to look around and make sure it's firm all the way around, you don't feel any type of hole or bruising. You just want to look for a nice, round, hard consistent ball. As far as your garlic, usually all garlic is good. You just don't want to see any type of molding or anything on the outside. You just want to make sure it's nice and firm. As far as your spices go, I got what brands I have. You can pick whatever brand you want. You can used smoked paprika or you can use any other type paprika. There's a lot of different types and there's a lot of types of chili powder; just whatever you prefer. As far as olive oil, I use extra virgin olive oil. It adds a lot more flavor than regular olive oil does. If you'd like you can use half olive oil and half butter, or you can just use extra virgin olive oil to get the real good flavor. As far as salt, I'm using kosher salt. It's a lot thicker than regular table salt. It think it's tastes better and it's just a lot more course. As far as your pepper goes, you definitely need to use fresh ground black pepper. What I mean by that is you can see the actual pepper corns in my grinder. This is fresh ground black pepper. It's not that powder stuff that you usually use at home. This is the whole pepper corn in there and it grinds up. This way you get the full potential of the pepper corn inside of you sauce. As far as tomato sauce goes, which is the main base of your red enchilada sauce. I get the kind with no salt added. I'm going to add my own salt to it and I'm going to season it how I like. I really don't like it have salt already added it. That's just my personal preference. If you do get the kind that has salt, make sure you don't add too much salt in the seasoning part because it's going to be a little too salty. Same thing with the tomato paste. No salt added that way I can season it myself and I don't have to worry about it being too salty. That is how you can pick your ingredients out at the grocery store for your red enchilada sauce."