Chiles en Nogada Is an Australian Autumn Dish, Not a Spring One

Chiles en nogada is the most tightly calendar-bound dish in Mexican cooking. A roasted poblano stuffed with a sweet-savoury picadillo, bathed in a sauce of fresh walnuts, scattered with pomegranate seeds and parsley — green, white and red, the colours of the flag — and eaten in the weeks around Mexican Independence in September. The timing is not decorative. It is when the fresh walnuts and the pomegranates are there.

In Australia those two ingredients arrive at the opposite end of the year. Walnuts are harvested here in autumn, and pomegranates come into Australian shops in autumn as well, roughly March through May. The Mexican date and the Australian harvest have come completely apart, and there is no honest way to close the gap.

So the answer is not to fake it in September with imported cold-stored fruit and packaged walnuts. The answer is to move the dish. Chiles en nogada is an Australian autumn dish. Cook it in March, April or May, when the ingredients that define it are actually in the country and at their best.

Why the fresh walnut matters so much

The nogada is not a walnut sauce in the general sense. It is made from walnuts that have just been harvested and peeled — the papery brown skin rubbed off the kernel, sometimes after soaking in milk, so that what goes into the sauce is pale, sweet and creamy rather than tannic and bitter.

That skin is where the bitterness and the astringency live, and it darkens and intensifies as the nut ages. A walnut that has been in a packet for eight months will give you a beige, slightly bitter sauce. A freshly harvested one, peeled, gives you the ivory-white sauce the dish is named for. This is the entire reason chiles en nogada has a season at all.

Practical Australian notes: Australia grows walnuts commercially and new-season nuts appear in autumn — growers' markets, farm gates and nut specialists are far better sources than a supermarket shelf that turns over slowly. Buy them in shell if you can; the shell keeps the kernel from oxidising. Soak the kernels in milk or warm water and peel the skins with your fingers. It is slow, fiddly work and it is the whole dish, so put someone on it with a glass of something and an hour.

Pomegranates

Pomegranates are grown in Australia and come into season in autumn. Buy them heavy for their size with taut skin. Seeding them under water keeps the juice off your walls. Do not substitute dried cranberries or currants; the point is the burst of cold acidity against a warm, rich sauce, and only the fresh seed gives you that.

The chilli problem

The dish wants poblano — large, mild, thick-walled, with enough structure to be stuffed and enough flavour to matter. Poblano is not a standard line in Australian retail, and this is where the recipe needs the most honest adaptation.

• Look for poblano first. Latin American grocers and some growers' markets do occasionally have them, and a few Australian growers produce them in small volumes. Autumn is a plausible time to find them; ask. Our stores directory is the place to start looking.
• The workable substitute is a long, thick-walled mild chilli with enough wall to hold a filling. Australian retail sells long green chillies of varying heat and shape; choose the largest and fleshiest, and taste a small piece raw before committing, because heat varies enormously between batches of the same-looking chilli here.
• Do not use a capsicum. It is the obvious Australian reach and it gives you a stuffed capsicum, which is a fine dish and not this one. In Australian English, capsicum is the sweet vegetable and chilli is the hot one — a distinction that catches out every translated Mexican recipe.
• Roast, sweat and peel. Blister over a gas flame, under the oven grill or on the barbecue, steam covered for ten minutes, then rub the skin off. Slit down one side, remove seeds, keep the stem on.

The picadillo

The filling is a sweet-savoury mince — pork, or pork and beef — cooked with onion, garlic and tomato, and then the part that surprises people: fruit. Diced apple, pear and peach, plantain, raisins, almonds, and warm spices. Autumn in Australia is exactly when apples and pears are at their peak, which is another argument for the date change. Plantain is available at Latin American, Asian and African grocers; if you cannot find it, a firm just-underripe banana fried in a little butter is an acceptable stand-in.

Use mince with some fat in it. Australian butchers sell very lean mince by default because that is what the market asks for, so ask specifically for something with fat, or buy pork shoulder and have it minced.

The sauce and the serve

Blend the peeled walnuts with fresh cheese or a mild soft cheese, a little cream or milk, a splash of sherry if you like, salt and a touch of sugar or cinnamon depending on which regional version you follow. Keep it thick enough to coat and pourable enough to fall. Do not make it more than a few hours ahead — it discolours.

Serve the chillies at room temperature or barely warm, the nogada cool over the top, pomegranate and flat-leaf parsley scattered, and nothing else on the plate. It is a single-dish meal and it does not want a side.

One more Australian note

If you are following a Mexican recipe, watch the spoon measurements: the Australian tablespoon is 20 ml, four teaspoons, where the recipe almost certainly assumes 15 ml. In a picadillo full of sugar, salt and warm spices, a third extra of each is the difference between balanced and cloying. Measure in teaspoons.

For the rest of the seasonal repertoire and what Australian produce is doing when, see our guides, and our recipe collection for the dishes themselves. If you would rather eat it than peel walnuts for an hour, the restaurant directory is where the ambitious kitchens are listed.