Reducing Sauce For Enchiladas

Video Transcript

"Hi guys! My name is J and I'm talking to you guys on behalf of expertvillage.com. Now what we're doing is reducing our red enchilada sauce. As you can see it's still pretty liquidy. You want the sauce to be kind of thick. That's why this whole time I've been cooking the chicken and beef and sautéing the vegetables. I've been reducing this down. I brought it up to a boil and I stuck it on a simmer. You can see all this steam coming up. What that is water getting out of the sauce and it's concentrating the sauce to be a thicker base. What you want to do is you want to keep on stirring until all this evaporation goes up. You just want to keep on going, keep on going, and all these flavors are going down into the sauce. If you want to thicken it just a little bit more, which I think I'm going to do, is I'm going to get more of this tomato paste. I'm going to stick one more teaspoon in there. I've already tasted this and I think since I'm using so much of this tomato paste that has no salt, it definitely needs more salt. What I'm going to do is I'm going to add more salt. What you want to do is taste, taste, taste. You want to keep on tasting, but in the very beginning when you start cooking you don't want to add so much seasoning to it because it can change while the time passes. What I did is I tasted and I think it needs more stuff. I think it needs more pepper. I think it needs more chili powder. We're going to add just a touch. We're going to add a little bit more cumin. Just a small touch; not too much. A lot less than what you added in the beginning. And a little more paprika. If you want to add cayenne pepper to make it a little hotter or habanero powder or Serrano peppers, you can add anything you want in here to make it spicy if you like spicy food. For me, I'm just going to eat it like this and I'm going to eat a jalapeno with my enchiladas. That's where the spiciness is going to come from. But if you want you can go ahead and add what you want. Once you reseasoned all this, you want to bring this up back to a boil actually. I stuck my heat back on 7. Bring it up to a boil so I can hurry up and cook this. Once it get to a boil, you want to bring it back down to a low heat and you want to reduce it down. You want to keep on reducing it until it becomes pretty thick. You'll tell the difference. You can see the difference between something that’s very liquidy like that and something that's thick that just going to stick to the back of your spoon. It's something you can easily tell the difference and I'll show you what it looks like when it's done."