New Mexico Posole Recipe (Pozole Rojo) • Food Folks and Fun (2024)

FAQs

What are the 3 types of pozole? ›

The three main types of pozole are blanco (white), verde (green) and rojo (red). Pozole blanco—"white pozole"—is the preparation without any additional green or red sauce.

There's really no big difference between pozole and posole, except a letter. In Mexico, where the brothy, chile-spiked soup originated, it's often spelled with a "z"; near the border and beyond, it's often spelled with an "s." It just depends where you are, and who taught you to cook it.

The indigenous ancestors used human flesh in the stew. Aztec priests would make human sacrifices to their gods, offering up the heart and using the rest of the flesh for a ceremonial pozole. After the Spanish conquest, Spanish rulers outlawed cannibalism, and so pork was used in replacement of human flesh in pozole.

Pozole Makes a Crowd-Pleasing Meal

This pozole rojo, or "red" pozole, is made with pork shoulder or shanks, red chiles, and lots of hominy corn.

: a thick soup chiefly of Mexico and the U.S. Southwest made with pork, hominy, garlic, and chili.

Both soups are also deeply emblematic of their cultures. The roots of pozole pre-date Spanish colonization, and the dish is said to have had ritual significance for the indigenous people of Mexico. Its principal ingredient, corn, was a sacred crop to the Aztecs and Mayans.

Conclusion. As we've seen in this post, pozole can be a healthy and nutritious addition to your diet. It is a good source of protein, fiber, and essential vitamins and minerals.

Hot broth feels soothing on a sore throat, and it also helps hydrate the body. But pozole can do all that and more. Take the restorative properties of chicken noodle soup and add the spice of chilies, and you get a throat-soothing, hydrating, sinus-clearing, detoxifying miracle food.

If you are using canned hominy, make sure to drain it before adding it to the stew. To cook dried hominy, place 1 cup in a large pot and cover it with cold water. Bring to a boil and add plenty of salt to season it. Reduce heat to maintain a steady simmer, and cook until just tender, about 2 hours.

Pozole was mentioned in the 16th century Florentine Codex by Bernardino de Sahagún. Since maize was a sacred plant for the Aztecs and other inhabitants of Mesoamerica, pozole was made to be consumed on special occasions.

What was the original meat in pozole? ›

Mexican Pozole: A Shocking History

Therefore, the Aztecs and other Mesoamerican peoples cooked Pozole only on special occasions. Originally, Pozole was made from the human meat of prisoners whose hearts had been ripped out in ritual sacrifice.

Sahagún wrote that the Mexicas cooked pozole using the leg of a captured warrior or enslaved people from other tribes, which the Tlatoani, the ruler, savored. The captive was skinned and dismembered for consumption. Their thighs had the juiciest and best-tasting meat, never roasted but boiled.

There are three main types of pozole, each named for the color of the soup: verde, rojo and blanco.

Many would argue that cabbage is the 'correct' way to top Pozole, but I always grew up with iceberg lettuce and to me it is the 'correct' way to eat Pozole. I prefer its texture and flavor in the soup. You prefer it with thinly sliced green cabbage though? Eat it with cabbage!

Hominy is a fantastic food derived from corn kernels that has long been a staple of Mexican cuisine. It's perhaps most famous for complementing pork belly in the traditional Mexican stew pozole (recipe here), but it's far more versatile than cooks outside of Central America tend to give it credit for.

There are three varieties of pozole—green, white, and red—that are made with either chicken or pork shoulder. (Vegetarian preparations swap in beans and vegetable stock.) 1. Pozole verde, or green pozole, features a salsa verde made from tomatillos and green chiles like serranos and jalapeños.

Pozole not only has a rojo and verde version but also a blanco (white) as well. The differences between the three are pretty simple: rojo uses dried chiles, verde uses fresh green chiles, and blanco omits chiles altogether.

The big difference between these two soups is the meat that they use. While pork and chicken are commonly used to make pozole, menudo uses tripe, which is the stomach lining of the cow with a chewy texture very similar to that of sautéed calamari.