After doing the review on the MFNM Red Chile Sauce, our appetite was whetted to do something truly special with our two jars of the Green Chile Sauce. We had only one jar of the Red Chile Sauce to use, so we felt impelled to do something twice as good. Recalling how much we enjoyed stewed chicken with green chile, this was going to be our ultimate goal for this recipe-building experience.

Looking at the jar, it’s pretty much the same as the other except with green chiles instead of red, and that the green chiles are fresh and not cooked:

Ingredients: New Mexico green chile, water, tomatoes (tomatoes, tomato juice, salt, calcium chloride, citric acid), fresh lime juice, unbleached flour, granulated garlic, salt, granulated onion, spices, phosphoric acid (all-natural)

Green New Mexico chiles have a very different taste than the red, and some people prefer one over the other. Once we appreciated the difference, we found that both were amazingly good in their own way.

Linda was our designated chile guru with this, and she put together a culinary Frankenstein’s monster of different things to get things going. Here’s what she did for the base, or our version of chicken base to use with the Green Chile sauce:

8 cups water
8 tsp. bouillon
4 tsp. Big Dawg’s Rescue chicken rub/seasoning
4 tsp. CaJohn’s Jalapeno Select Puree
5.5 lbs whole cut chicken

Combine all ingredients and bring to a boil, then lower heat and simmer for 2 hours.

Take chicken out and pull from bones and eliminate fat. Cut meat into bite-size pieces. Half the mixture went to our green chile stew and the other half went into some really tasty caldo de pollo.

So, in 2+ hours you have the basics for our next recipe, the Green Chile Stew:

Green Chile Stew

2 jars MFNM Foods Green Chile Sauce
1 7-ounce can diced green chiles (we used Ro-tel)
half of the Green Chile chicken base (see above)

Simmer together until it reaches desired consistency and texture. Add garnishing to your taste.

You might ask why we used more diced green chiles when we were already using green chile sauce. The taste is derived mostly from the green chile sauce, so the answer is that it gives a little more texture & chunkiness to the final product. We added some tortilla strips and a dollop of sour cream, and the final product looked like this:

A closer look:

I (Joe) got home late as usual, and missed trying this during dinner like everyone else did. Below you can see me in my comfy green scrubs enjoying Linda’s masterful creation after a long day of surgery at the hospital. It was the best meal I’d had in a long time, and the Green Chile sauce was a large part of the reason why.

Taste: We should comment both on the taste of the dish we made as well as with the Green Chile sauce by itself. The sauce itself is pure unadulterated New Mexico green chile with just enough spice to accentuate the flavor. There is a hint of lime, but it is so well proportioned in this sauce that it is such a bonus to the flavor profile. The taste is very green and very fresh, and addictively good. In our recipe, it brings out a little of the native heat of the pepper. We did add a smidgeon of jalapeno to it, but green chiles are about a 3-4/10 on the heat scale already…and it does build a little the more you eat. Chicken is a great choice for the green chile sauce, but don’t feel limited to that. We’re sure it would go easily as well with beef or veggies as well. When we get more of this sauce, we’ll be experimenting more with recipes that favor the characteristic taste of this pepper.

Overall recommendation: We quickly run out of superlatives that we can say about this Green Chile sauce, and for the Red Chile sauce as well. This is as good spooned right out of the jar as it is in any recipe we might try. If you like New Mexico green chiles, then this is as close to fresh off the pepper plant as we’ve tried in a chile sauce. Fresh is the key word. Bottled sauce isn’t supposed to taste this good and this fresh, but MFNM Foods finds a way to get it done. They’ve won a slough of awards for their chile sauces, and if you taste this you’ll realize why it is so well-deserved. Delicious chile taste, medium heat, and wide utility makes this a sauce which should be a staple in your kitchen for a variety of Tex-Mex dishes. Enjoy!

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