Quesadillas

“quesadillas can take practically any filling you are drawn to”. Rick Bayliss

Back in the days of COVID when Jamie was Keeping on cooking and carrying on, in his home kitchen - well an annexe to it I think, his wife Jools videoed him making quesadillas for lunch for the family. You can watch that long ago video here.

Now I'm not big into Mexican food, which is probably failure of my kitchen repertoire, and so I had not heard of quesadillas, and was quite impressed. It seemed simple, and perfectly fitted, the concept of cooking with whatever you had in the fridge. The end result looked very much like this - these are the same ones I think, but prettied up for the website. Actually the ones he made on the day looked very much the same but on a rougher piece of wood, and there was no guacamole to go with it. I was a little bit taken with it, and thought I would have a go at some point. But of course I haven't.

I think the reason might have been that I didn't think I was up to flipping the tortilla like Jamie, which can be summarised in Nigel's words - "Turn the tortilla over and cook the other side." So few words, with such a possibility of disaster inside them. A demonstration of how not to write a recipe. Really you have to explain how.

Jamie had a quite large tortilla in his pan - one on the base, filling in the middle, another on top - not sealed at the sides. When it was cooked on the underside he picked up the pan, put his hand out flat underneath, turned the pan over so that it dropped on to his hand, flipped his hand and dropped it into the pan. He's a chef - he's got big hands - it looked easy. But can you imagine? I can just see the whole thing collapsing. Of course you could put a plate in the pan and then flip and flip back and admittedly he did have a caption saying you can use a spatula, but with a large one like that I reckon even that would be tricky. And do note - don't do this if you are frying in oil. You will burn yourself.

I now know that fundamentally he was doing it wrong. According to J. Kenji López-Alt of Serious Eats, what you do is only put filling on one half of your tortilla, fold it over and seal, then put into your pan. Repeat with another one. Pretty easy to flip with a spatula and his tortillas were smaller too. I suspect the hand method is best left to show-off chefs and keepers of street food stalls in Mexico. The other technicque to note here was that you had to keep the quesadilla moving whilst you cooked - either by shaking the pan or moving it round with your hands. Like you do with flatbreads.

Whilst I am on J. Kenji López-Alt one of whose three recipes is shown here, I might take you through his three his five rules for making what he describes as kickass tortillas - Fold, don't sandwich being one of them. So what are the others?

Mix the fillings with the cheese

Jamie was keen to emphasise this too, as were others, with Kenji describing it as the 'cosmic oneness theory of quesadillas' - i.e "so that everything forms a single cohesive filling when the quesadilla cooks."

Felicity Cloake does a really good summary of all the various approaches with her Perfect Quesadillas which includes a very lengthy bit about which cheese to use, although from looking at various others, it seemed to me that it was almost down to a matter of taste, although stringy was good. Jamie - in the throes of COVID lockdown just used cheddar. However in spite of Felicity's lengthy discourse on what cheese, she didn't have much to say on proportions. And neither did many others - enough to bind everything together really. 60/40 - filling to cheese?

Keep the fillings bright

To which I would add, not too substantial. This picture is of Nagi Maehashi's Quesadilla!!! which looks just a bit wrong to me. This is street food, finger food, but I think you would need a knife and fork for these. Or as Felicity says:

"quesadillas should not be spilling over with molten cheese and sausage (or, indeed, macaroni cheese and Cheetos); rather, they should be fairly flat or they’ll be hard to eat." Felicity Cloake

There is just too much filling in Nagi's. She is not alone, however - there are heaps of recipes out there that end up looking much the same.

Kenji explains what he means by 'bright':

"I always like to incorporate some sort of bright, fresh, hot, or crunchy element to offset the creamy richness of the cheese. Think pickled peppers or smoky chipotles in adobo, sweet corn or minced jalapeños." J. Kenji López-Alt

Or, in Jamie's case - grated carrot and chopped peppers. But anything goes really and you will find heaps of recipes out there. Nagi spiced hers up with a 'Master Mexican spice mix' but others just go for chillis, pickles, herbs of various kinds and so on. Empty fridge Jamie just threw in some parsley.

Use plenty of oil and keep it moving

Kenji fries his in oil, but the general opinion about this, as expressed by Felicity is that:

"we find them too crispy for our taste: a quesadilla ought to have a slightly crunchy outside, but these are almost more like stuffed tortilla chips."

Indeed elsewhere in her article where she ponders on making your own tortillas, she quotes a 'Mexican Mancunian' as saying: “you can make them a little bit thicker than the ready-made tortillas, so they get crunchy on the outside, while [staying] a bit soft inside – yum!” It's a bit of a faff though to make your own.

Nagi, on the other hand seems to like crispy and has a recipe for Crispy oven-baked quesadillas which she maintains is particularly useful if you are cooking for a crowd. They look pretty nice, not very healthy and like something else altogether really.

Salt the exterior - after flipping

So says Kenji for his last rule by which he means, that once you have flipped your quesadilla you sprinkle on a little salt which will melt from the heat of the quesadilla.

Jamie has one last bit of advice. "Do not eat straightaway - it's like molten lava in there."

Good advice. He also has other little tips along the way. Watch his video if you fancy having a go. Just swap Kenji's method of folding and sealing rather than flipping a whole open-sided tortilla, which would probably end up on the floor or all over you if you try it. Practise makes perfect I know but if there is a better way why not do that?

They don't take long, and they would be good for feeding kids of all ages. As Jools said as she was filming Jamie on her phone, they are particularly good for kids, because they probably don't know what good vegetables they are eating.

YEARS GONE BY

January 5

2024 - Nothing

2023 - Healthy?

2022 - Two for the op shop?

2021 - The last of Christmas - brussels sprouts

2020 - Diets, social media, food prejudices - an article

2019 - French leftover ham

2018 - Extra protein - do you need it?

2017 - Pickled onions