Whether you want to make enchiladas or experiment with other flavors, green chili sour cream can add extra flavor to your regular old sour cream.
After all, the sauce can make or break your recipe, so you want to ensure you have a great flavor that everyone will love.
With the help of our guide, you won’t have any challenges making green chili sour cream at home. While not everyone may enjoy green chili, you can always adjust the flavor by understanding the type of green chilis you use in your recipe.
Outside of the chilis, you’ll find every ingredient you have will be easy to find at your local grocery store. But first, let’s talk about what you need to make your green chili sour cream sauce.
What Is Green Chili Sour Cream?
Admittedly, this isn’t a variation of sour cream. However, it is made using green chilis and sour cream. Green chili sour cream is a type of sauce that you can use to add more flavor to your recipes if you prefer something with more spice.
It’s a great sauce for different recipes, but for ease of use, we’ll call it green chili sour cream.
You can use green chili sour cream with a wide variety of recipes, including enchiladas, casseroles, or even gravy, for other meals.
What Is The Base Of The Green Chili Sour Cream Sauce?
In the past, many people used condensed soup in their casseroles and as a sauce base. However, condensed soup isn’t one of the healthiest options available.
While it would save time, that doesn’t mean it was the best option, but as we become wiser about what we eat, we’ve found there are better ways to make the base of your soup.
We’ve noticed that there are so many more additives in condensed soup than when you make your own recipe. If you’ve got allergies, you may not even notice what harmful ingredients can be in them.
Even if you don’t have allergies, we can’t recommend condensed soup based on the amount of sodium and fat in a single can.
Sure, there’s nothing wrong with adding your own condensed soup to a sauce every once in a while, but there are healthier alternatives.
That’s why we recommend you make a roux base for your sauce, and it’s also the base of this green chili sour cream. However, what is a roux? Well, a roux is a combination of flour and butter in equal volumes.
If you enjoy thick sauces, then using a roux as a base is best.
Tools And Equipment For Green Chili Sour Cream
When you make any recipe, you should ensure you have all the tools and equipment you need to make your sauce. You don’t want to get the ingredients and discover that you don’t have all of the necessary tools to make your dish to its full potential.
To make your green chili sour cream, we recommend using a saucier over using a saucepan. While a saucepan will do, a saucier is better suited to making this dish.
For example, saucepans are much better for simmering liquids. At the same time, a saucier is better when you want to reduce your liquids.
You should have a cutting board, knife, cheese grater, kitchen scale, measuring cups, and spoons for essential tools.
These should already be in your house, so you won’t have to worry about purchasing them, but if you do have to, they can be bought from most stores.
While you can also use a normal whisk, we also recommend using a Saucinator whisk for the best results. These are the most efficient for when you want to make sauces, gravies, and batters too.
What Ingredients Do You Need For Green Chili Sour Cream?
You don’t need many ingredients for your green chili sour cream recipe. In fact, you should have most of your ingredients available to you at home.
However, we will go into more detail about the types of green chilies you should include in your recipe. To make this recipe, you’ll need the following:
Four oz. Green Chilis
1 Cup of Sour Cream
½ a Cup of Cheese
1 Clove of Minced Garlic
½ a Cup of Diced Onions
1 ½ oz. Butter
1 ½ oz. All-Purpose Flour
2 Cups of Chicken Broth
Salt and Pepper
We recommend using Monterey Jack cheese or cheddar cheese for this recipe. However, we’re also happy for you to experiment with different cheeses. However, for the first time you make this recipe, try to stick to these two options.
You should use Monterey Jack cheese as a spicier cheese is a better choice for this recipe. Green chili sour cream recipes are better with Mexican dishes, so you don’t want to have too mild cheese.
The spicier the cheese, the better. However, if you struggle with spices or know someone who struggles with their flavors, we recommend cheddar cheese.
Try not to use too mild a cheese, or there may be a risk of altering the flavor of your green chili peppers too much.
What Kind Of Chili Pepper Should I Use?
There’s a reason we haven’t specified any particular chili pepper, and that’s because everyone has different levels of spiciness they can handle. However, we do have a few recommendations depending on the type of pepper you prefer.
Let’s say you’re a fan of mild green peppers. We would recommend you use the Anaheim pepper, which is the most popular ingredient you would find in a can of green peppers.
For those who prefer spice, you can try a Jalapeño pepper instead, as the sauce itself will dilute the spice levels of the pepper. This is the best option if you want to enjoy fresh pepper.
However, if you want a green pepper with a smoky flavor, we would recommend using a roasted Poblano pepper. Using one of these, you can chop it into pieces and add a single tablespoon to your sauce.
Always choose a pepper that you enjoy, as you don’t want to choose peppers that you wouldn’t enjoy otherwise.
How Do You Measure The Heat Of Your Chili Peppers?
If you’re not used to chilis, it can be difficult to know how to measure them. After all, there are so many different types of peppers. There are sweet peppers and spicy peppers.
However, not all are measured in the same way. You don’t need to worry about the heat of sweet pepper, but the peppers we’re looking at all contain capsaicin.
Capsaicin is a substance that the pepper’s membrane produces, and it’s what makes them so spicy. We’ve been using the Scoville heat scale for over a century to identify how spicy a pepper is.
But how did they measure this scale? Each pepper extract was diluted with water until each taster revealed they weren’t spicy anymore. Depending on how much water was needed to dilute pepper, then it would appear higher on the Scoville heat scale.
Of course, we don’t use this method anymore. Nowadays, scientists have access to liquid chromatography, which is a more effective method.
For one thing, we don’t have to rely on tasters, who could still be affected by taster’s fatigue. Now, they can measure how many parts per million of alkaloids exist in each variety of pepper.
So, let’s take a closer look at the green chili peppers and how they rank on the Scoville scale. Our mild choice is the Anaheim pepper, they measure between 500 and 2,500 units on the Scoville scale.
Jalapeño peppers measure between 2,000 and 8,000 units on the Scoville scale, which might seem hot, but they aren’t. Instead, your mildest Jalapeño is still milder than your hottest Anaheim pepper.
Likewise, you wouldn’t expect a Poblano pepper to be that hot, as it is the midway point between Anaheim and Jalapeño at a measurement between 1,000 and 2,000.
Green Chili Sour Cream — A Step-by-Step Guide
Now that you know what you need to make your green chili sour cream, it’s time to delve into how to make it.
The good news is that this recipe should only take you a little under 15 minutes to make, so you don’t need to worry about spending too much time on your recipe.
Step 1
For the first step, you’ll need your saucier and your butter. Get your butter and melt it in your saucier on a medium-low heat setting.
Step 2
Once your butter has melted, throw your chopped onion and minced garlic into the saucier. Then, allow them to cook for two or three minutes.
Step 3
Now that the onion and garlic are cooked, you should whisk your flour into your saucier. Once the butter and flour combine, you’ll have the foundations for your roux.
Once you have the foundations, you should keep your roux on medium-low heat until it either turns a light tan color or five minutes have passed.
Step 4
Once your roux is cooked, you should pour ¼ cup of chicken broth into the roux. Then, whisk it all together until it turns into a paste.
Step 5
When it turns into a paste, you should slowly add what’s left of your chicken broth. Keep whisking it until it’s smooth before you add more, and keep doing this until you have no broth left.
Step 6
Now that you’ve added all your chicken broth add the sour cream and green chilis into your recipe and mix them in. You should keep mixing them until your mixture has a smooth and creamy texture.
Step 7
You should use this step to begin the seasoning process. Add some salt and pepper to suit your taste. You can taste and adjust your seasonings until you’ve finally achieved your desired taste.
Step 8
Sprinkle ½ a cup of shredded cheese into your mixture, and keep mixing the cheese in until your sauce has a smooth consistency.
Step 9
Now that your sauce is complete, serve it with a dish of your choice. We recommend serving it over a casserole or some enchiladas to best enjoy it.
Final Thoughts
We hope you find this guide helpful and that you have no issues making your own green chili sour cream sauce. This is a versatile recipe that you can use for many different occasions and is great to have on hand when you need to improvise a new recipe.
If you want to get more inspiration for your next meal, consider checking out some of our other great articles.
Have you ever made something so delicious that you wished you could savor it forever?
Only to find that the recipe has now mysteriously vanished from your phone and the entirety of the internet. Yep, there’s not much more painful than that.
Hi, my name is Mark Williams and I have been infatuated with cooking since I was young. I would beg my mother to pull a chair up to the counter so I could watch what she was doing.
