Chicken Tinga

Written by on in chicken, crockpot, Latin, sauces, spicy
We make this really easy recipe often enough that it’s worth posting. It’s chicken in a simple sauce, often served on a tostada with refried beans and whatever tasty toppings you want (esp. avocado and cotija cheese). A local restaurant near us has this style of chicken as one of their standard meat options, and it’s supposedly their specialty. I personally think this recipe produces something very, very close to the same.

The adobo peppers tend to be a bit spicy for some eaters – one way to moderate this is to alter how much of the sauce you mix with the shredded chicken. I also suggest making a double version of this recipe and reserving some sauce – that way, next time you want to make it, you just throw sauce on chicken and you’re done.

You can use raw chicken, or you can use the sauce to cleverly use leftover poultry from other meals (this actually might make turkey edible).

The recipe below is adapted from the recipe here, in turn adapted from the Minimalist Cookbook.

Ingredients

3-4 raw chicken breasts/thighs

1 medium onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1-2 chipotle peppers in adobo sauce (to taste, they are spicy for the spice adverse)
1 tsp oregano
1/2 tsp cumin
1 can tomatoes – fire roasted is extra tasty if it doesn’t have weird stuff in it
1/4 c. water or chicken stock if you aren’t using raw chicken
Salt
Pepper

Preparation

1) Optional if pressed for time: Saute onions in olive oil until starting to get brown on the edges, add garlic near the end then spices for a minute. If pressed for time, throw all of the above directly into the crock pot, it’ll still be tasty.
2) Put everything in the crock pot. Cook 4-6 hours. If you wanna be fancy and you’ll be at home, put chicken breasts in towards the very end.
3) Remove the chicken. Blast the sauce with an immersion blender. 
4) Shred chicken, add sauce to taste – again, you can moderate spiciness by how much sauce you add.
5) Freeze any remaining sauce for later, or use as a sauce at the table.
6) Serve as tacos, tostada toppings, whatever.

 Notes

This calls for about half a can of the peppers so you reserve the remainder in a baggie in the freezer. Or you can just double the recipe and have extra sauce in the freezer. I find the latter to be more useful.

In tacos with extra sauce and fixins