Enchilada Sauce
5 dried chiles, stemmed and cut into large pieces. (You can keep seeds in if you would like)
2 & 1/2 tablespoons chili powder
2 teaspoons ground cumin powder
1/2 cup water
1 white onion, chopped
5 garlic cloves, minced
1 tablespoon salt
2 tsp sugar
5 pounds plum tomatoes, coarsely chopped
1) Prepare your water bath canner and get it ready as this recipe can go fast!
2) In a large dutch oven, on medium heat, toast the chiles, chili powder, and cumin. Stir frequently to avoid burning. Do this for only 30 seconds. Stir in Water, onion, garlic and salt. Cook until the onions are soft.
3) Stir in the sugar and tomatoes. Bring to a simmer and cook for about 25 minutes. Stirring often to avoid burning.
4) Working in batches, carefully process hot tomato mixture in a blender until smooth. Return sauce to pot and bring to a boil. Then remove from heat.
5) Ladle sauce into the jars, leaving a 1/2” headspace. Wipe jar rims and place lid on top.
6) Process in your canner for about 40 minutes for pint jars. Once 40 minutes is finished. Pull from canner and allow to cool on the counter for 24 hours.
This recipe is amazing. We had canned like 5 jars last year. For some reason we never used it but then summer came and we ran through those in a matter of a few meals. So we had to restock this in our canning needs. We ended up doing I believe 5 batches worth of this recipe. I highly recommend trying this one out for your family!!
Now I personally used just a big stock pot to cook this all in since I was doing multiple batches at once. I couldn’t fit more than one round in my dutch oven so I went with a big stock pot. To which it worked just fine! No issues for this at all. It may have taken a little longer to have the tomatoes soften but that’s to be expected especially with how many tomatoes I was working with. Also the blending stage, I am fortunate enough to have an immersion blender so I just used that instead of doing batches in my standard blender. Both routes worked perfectly.
We have used this recipe to make enchiladas I believe one time. The rest of the time we were just adding it to our meals. Like a taco bowl but we added the sauce to add flavor to it. So you can add this to any sort of casserole or Mexican type food. For ourselves we will hopefully make some more enchiladas with this sauce!!!