Green Chorizo Queso Fundido Straight From the Skillet

Chef's Overview

Dear Chefs, chorizo verde is the version of chorizo most kitchens outside of Toluca have never met, built on cilantro, poblano, tomatillo and serrano instead of the dried red chile and paprika everybody expects. It fries up a startling green, tastes herbal and sharp rather than smoky, and it is the best thing that has ever happened to a skillet of melted cheese. Queso fundido lives or dies on contrast, because molten cheese by itself is rich to the point of being boring, and green chorizo brings the acid and heat that keeps every bite moving forward. The whole thing takes about thirty minutes, most of which is charring peppers and grating cheese by hand. It comes out of the broiler and goes straight to the middle of the table in the same pan, still bubbling, which is the only correct way to serve it.

The Chorizo That Ruins Red Chorizo For You

Most people meet chorizo once, in its red form, and reasonably assume that is the whole story. Green chorizo comes out of the State of Mexico and takes the same fresh pork sausage in a completely different direction, swapping the dried chiles and achiote for a raw green paste of herbs, chiles and tomatillo. The color is genuinely alarming the first time you fry it, somewhere between pesto and something you would expect to find growing on a log, and then you taste it and the color stops mattering entirely.

What makes it work in a fundido is chemistry more than novelty. Cheese is fat and salt with very little to push against, which is why a plain skillet of melted cheese tastes wonderful for four bites and tiring by the tenth. The tomatillo and serrano in green chorizo bring acid and capsaicin, both of which cut through dairy fat and reset your palate between scoops. We have served this next to a traditional red-chorizo version more than once, and the green pan always empties first.

Ingredients You'll Need

Grinding your own pork is ideal but entirely optional, and good ground pork with a fat content around twenty percent will do everything you need. The cheese matters more than the meat here, so skip anything pre-shredded, because the cellulose and potato starch dusted onto bagged cheese exist specifically to stop it from melting into a single sheet, which is the one thing we are trying to achieve. Oaxaca is the traditional choice and pulls into strands like mozzarella, while Monterey Jack melts more smoothly and is easier to find.

For the Green Chorizo

• 1 lb ground pork, about 20% fat
• 1 poblano, charred and peeled
• 2 serrano chiles, stemmed
• 3 tomatillos, husked and rinsed
• 1 large bunch cilantro, stems included
• 4 garlic cloves
• 2 tbsp white vinegar
• 1 tsp kosher salt
• 1 tsp dried oregano
• 1/2 tsp ground cumin
• 1/4 tsp ground cloves

For the Fundido

• 12 oz Oaxaca cheese, or Monterey Jack
• 4 oz white cheddar, for flavor
• 1/2 white onion, sliced thin
• 1 poblano, charred, peeled and cut into strips
• 2 tbsp Mexican crema, optional
• Cilantro leaves and thinly sliced radish, to finish
• Warm corn tortillas, for serving

Step 1: Char the Poblanos Until They Are Genuinely Black

Set both poblanos directly over a gas flame on high, or under a broiler six inches from the element, turning them every couple of minutes until the skin blisters and goes black across most of the surface. People pull them too early out of politeness toward the pepper, and the result is a skin that refuses to come away cleanly. Drop the charred peppers into a bowl and cover it with a plate for ten minutes, letting the trapped steam separate the skin from the flesh, then slip the blackened skin off with your fingers rather than rinsing it under the tap, which washes away all the smoke you just spent ten minutes building.

Step 2: Clean the Chiles and Tomatillos

Stem the serranos and halve them lengthwise, scraping out the seeds and pale ribs if you want the heat dialed back, since the ribs carry considerably more capsaicin than the seeds do. Husk the tomatillos and rinse off the sticky film underneath, then quarter them. This is small, close, slightly fiddly work where a long blade is genuinely in the way, and our Praline 60 Damascus Petty Knife is the right size for it, giving you the control of a paring knife with enough length to get through a tomatillo in one pass. If you have never worked out where a petty earns its keep, What Are the Best Uses for a Petty Knife at Home covers the jobs it quietly takes over.

Step 3: Blend the Green Paste

Put one charred poblano, the serranos, tomatillos, cilantro, garlic, vinegar, salt, oregano, cumin and cloves into a blender and run it until you have a rough, bright green puree with some texture left in it. Do not chase a perfectly smooth sauce, because a little roughness gives the finished chorizo something to hold onto. Taste it now while you still can, and expect it to be aggressively sharp and salty, since it has a full pound of fatty pork to season once it goes in.

Step 4: Mix the Chorizo and Let It Sit

Fold the green paste into the ground pork with your hands, working quickly and stopping as soon as the color is even, because overworking ground meat turns the texture springy and tight. Cover it and refrigerate for at least thirty minutes, and overnight if you have the foresight, which lets the vinegar and salt work into the pork the way a proper cure would. The color also deepens as it rests, going from pale grass green to something richer and more convincing.

Step 5: Slice the Onion and Poblano Strips

Halve the onion through the root, lay each half flat on the board, and slice it into thin half moons, keeping the root end intact as a handle until the very last cut. The second charred poblano gets cut into strips about a quarter inch wide, which is wide enough to stay recognizable under all that cheese. A tall flat blade suits this kind of straight-down work better than a curved one, and our Ochre 61 Damascus Nakiri Knife keeps every slice the same thickness without the rocking motion that pushes soft pepper skin around the board, which is the behavior explained in Why Nakiri Knives Create the Most Even Vegetable Cuts.

Step 6: Grate the Cheese by Hand

Cut the Oaxaca into planks before you grate it, or pull it apart into strands if it came as a ball, and grate the cheddar on the large holes of a box grater. Cold cheese grates cleanly and warm cheese smears, so keep it in the refrigerator until the moment you need it. Cutting a block of cheese into manageable pieces is the kind of unremarkable daily task that reveals whether your everyday knife is actually comfortable, and the case for a knife built around that rhythm is in How a Santoku Knife Handles Daily Prep Work.

Step 7: Render the Chorizo Hard

Heat a ten-inch cast iron skillet over medium-high and add the chorizo in a single layer, breaking it up only after it has had three or four minutes of undisturbed contact with the pan. You want real browning on the meat and you want the liquid from the green paste to cook off, which takes eight to ten minutes total. If the pan looks wet, keep going, because a soupy chorizo will make the cheese above it split and go greasy. Add the onion for the last two minutes, then scrape everything onto a plate and pour off all but a spoonful of the fat.

Step 8: Layer and Melt Under the Broiler

Turn the broiler to high and set a rack about eight inches down. Put half the cheese into the skillet, scatter the chorizo, onion and poblano strips over it, then cover with the rest of the cheese and slide it under the broiler for three to four minutes. Watch it the entire time, pulling it the moment the surface is bubbling with a few brown spots and the edges are pulling away from the pan. A broiler melts from the top down and gently, whereas a burner heats the pan bottom hard enough to break the cheese and leave a pool of orange fat, which is why this step happens in the oven.

Step 9: Serve It Immediately, in the Pan

Set the skillet on a trivet in the middle of the table with a stack of warm corn tortillas and let people go at it directly. Spoon the crema over the top if you are using it, then scatter cilantro leaves and sliced radish across the surface for cold crunch against all that heat. You have roughly six minutes before the cheese starts to set, so put everything else on the table first and carry this out last, and tell nobody to wait for anything.

The Case for Cooking Something Loud

There is a quiet assumption in a lot of home cooking that the goal is elegance, that the food should be composed and restrained and arrive looking like it was plated by somebody with tweezers. We would argue for the opposite at least once a month. A black skillet of green chorizo and molten cheese set down in the middle of a crowded table does something no plated course can do, which is put everybody's hands in the same pan at the same time. Nobody remembers the tidy dinners. They remember the one where the cheese pulled halfway across the table and somebody burned their mouth because they refused to wait.