Mild Enchilada Sauce Recipe
This easy mild enchilada sauce recipe is one of my most favorite original recipes.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
I love Mexican and Latin style foods and I love making them for my family. But my kids, being typical American kids, didn’t like sauces with any kind of spice at all. And it’s not easy to find a pre-made enchilada sauce that isn’t at all spicy but is still really flavorful. It seems like you either get spicy, or you get bland.
So I came up with my own enchilada sauce recipe. This is a kid friendly, family friendly, easy enchilada sauce recipe that the whole family will love.
It’s basically a flavored and spiced gravy - so if you know how to make a gravy, this will be super easy for you. It makes a big batch, and I often even double this, because it keeps well and it freezes easily.
This one is a long post because I’ve combined a few recipes into one. Below the Enchilada Sauce Recipe I’ve also include my recipes for how I make enchilada shredded chicken, and how I use that chicken and the enchilada sauce in my easy enchilada casserole.
Once I gave up on buying enchilada sauce for a while, I needed to come up with my own. After looking at a bunch of different recipes online, I decided to come up with my own version of a simple sauce that suits us just perfectly.
It's really flavorful and gives a nice southwest style flavor to dishes, but it's not spicy at all. I love to use this for enchiladas, or more often just an enchilada casserole, but it's also great for simmering chicken or other meat in, to shred up and use for tacos, burritos, salads, etc.
I make no claims about this being any kind of authentic - 'real' enchiladas would definitely have a sauce made of chilis. But we're not in Mexico and I'm not Mexican, so this is just my American girl version of this style of dish.
I also love that this doesn't require any special or unique ingredients - I can whip up a pot of this sauce very quickly with just ingredients that I pretty much always have in my pantry.
It seems like a lot of spices, and it is.
But what we're doing here is making up for the lack of spice from peppers by adding a lot of other flavor. And, as with all of my recipes, this one is super flexible. The quantities of spices are just a guideline, and honestly most of the time I don't even really measure.
Recipe: Lisa's Homemade and NOT Spicy Enchilada Sauce
(Keep scrolling after this for the Enchilada Casserole Recipe)
Now that you have homemade enchilada sauce - you can make the most delicious shredded enchilada chicken!
In your slow cooker, or a pot on the stove: add pieces of raw chicken and enough enchilada sauce to cover. Let this simmer for several hours on medium/high, or all day on low, until chicken is cooked and falling apart.
Shred with a fork and you are ready to use in recipe. I love this in tacos, on taco salad, in quesadillas...
or scroll down for my famous easy enchilada casserole recipe.
Now you can make enchiladas!
I rarely make real enchiladas - all that rolling is just too time consuming for my lifestyle.
What we make here is an enchilada casserole.
It's basically everything you would put in enchiladas, but layered in a casserole instead of rolled up.