Chicken-Chili Tamale Pie | Everyday Dorie

Layering a chicken chili with a cornbread topping, that’s the essence of a chicken-chili tamale pie. This is my first. It’s very much like the way you’d make a chicken chili pot pie.

The tamale pie is one of those one-pot casseroles which you can easily serve with tortilla chips, a salad, rice or veggies. In our house, we like green vegetables as sides. So, on the first day, we served the tamale pie with green beans. On the next day, we had it together with a salad.

The recipe comes from Everyday Dorie by Dorie Greenspan. It may sound like a casual dish, but the ingredient list runs the length of a page in the book. Working through the recipe, I can say this dish requires the labor of love.

Dorie recalls when she was a novice, she used a boxed mix for the topping. I can’t imagine Dorie making the likes of a Jiffy corn casserole and calls it a day. Hey, we all have to start somewhere. For all I can remember, I couldn’t even put the two together when I first started cooking.

Coming back to the recipe, making cornbread is the easy and quick part. There is nothing more involved than pouring the wet ingredients into a large bowl of dry ingredients, and combining them with a spatula. (The wet ingredients are: milk, eggs, oil, and honey. The dry ingredients are: cornmeal, flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and a dash of chili powder). For additional color and texture, fold in the chopped bell pepper and jalapaño. Mix until the cornbread batter is smooth. Then put the batter over the chili (coming next) and bake. Reflecting on the current phase of my cooking, I rely heavily on a digital scale for mixing batters. What’s the difference than using a boxed mix? Both are aids — for novice.

Making the chili, especially one with complex flavor, takes time and effort. I barely set aside enough time for flavor development. Try to think of it: the homebound days in May 2020 may be more appropriate to make a tamale pie than a day in May 2021. Or maybe not, since there is a long list of ingredients and some unusual ones you need to go shopping for: sweet potato, canned chipotle in adobo sauce, cooked chicken and fresh cilantro.

The list of ingredients may be long, but it’s not unexpected for a chili recipe. The sweet potato may stand out to be the odd one. To start, make the chili by sweating the aromatics: onion, garlic, red bell pepper and jalapeño, in a skillet. Add the spices (cumin, chipotle) when the onion and pepper are softened. Then follow by the staples like diced tomatoes and black beans and their juices. Next come the chipotle in adobo sauce and some honey. I know Dorie calls for the whole can of chipotle. That’s far too spicy for me and I reduce it in half. Finally, the cooked chicken joins the party for 10 minutes to allow the flavor to permeate the chili.

Oddly enough, the cooked chunks of sweet potato are stirred in. At this point, the pot of chili should look bubbly around the edges. Otherwise, add some chicken stock if it looks dry.

The chunky pieces of sweet potato and bites of the chicken chili go hand in hand. You look for that sweetness with the heat in the chili. It imparts a balance of flavor. In fact, I like how everything comes together in the dish. There is nothing odd about the sweet potato after all. A novice quandary!