It may look like guac in the photo, but I promise you it's queso. And yes, that is a Texas-shaped bowl in the background.
I’m not as knowledgeable as some people in the Tex-Mex cuisine cannon, but eight years in Texas did teach me the importance of one thing: queso. (That’s pronounced KAY-so.)
Queso is basically a jazzed-up melted cheese sauce, consisting of Velveeta, tomatoes, onions, jalapeños and maybe crumbly bits of ground beef. You eat it with tortilla chips. And beer. Preferably on game day. Or during happy hour. Ok, you pretty much eat it whenever the mood strikes.
I’d been hankering for some queso since we moved to Mexico, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. Chili’s had it (score!) but then they took it off their menu (lame). Crayton and I suffered through our queso-less lives in silence until a few weekends ago when he said, “You know what sounds really good right now? Queso.” And I said, “Yeah, I agree. Why don’t I make some?”
Until that point, I hadn’t thought about making queso from scratch because it requires Velveeta. Velveeta is sold at Costco, and I couldn’t justify a $10 cab ride solely to buy processed cheese product.
But what if I used real cheese?
At that point, I think I might’ve heard the universe crackle.
I thought avoiding Velveeta was queso blasphemy, but it turns out there are a few real-cheese queso recipes on the Internet. I used a a Homesick Texan recipe as my inspiration, and piled together an assortment of items that I had in my fridge — Mexican manchego because it melted well, huauzontles because they’re vegetables and I like those; tomatoes, a jalapeño, carrots in escabeche.
My Mex-Tex queso was so good that I made it again the following weekend, this time for the Bears vs. Cowboys game. I added chorizo verde (pretty much because it rocks, and it kept the green theme) and I put the queso in our fondue pot to keep it saucy and hot. Alice and Nick, both of whom are Texans, came over. They practically swooned when the saw the pot of cheese.
We scooped it with homemade totopos, carrots, cucumbers. There wasn’t much talking going on.
You don’t need the huauzontles to make this dish a success — a pile of grated cheese will do that on its own.
However, the huauz did add a pleasant grit and chewiness, similar to a spinach-artichoke dip, or a broccoli-cheese soup. And I mean that in the most natural, comforting way possible, not in a chain-restaurant kind of way. I promise you, this stuff is good.
Recipe below.
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