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Slow Cooker Enchilada Sauce {Recipe}

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This smoky Slow Cooker Enchilada Sauce is so full of flavor (and such a snap to make!!) that you may never buy canned sauce again.

My recipe for Slow Cooker Enchilada Sauce – a subtly complex blend of savory, spicy, sweet, and smoky – all comes together in just 15 minutes of hands-on prep time.

My recipe for Slow Cooker Enchilada Sauce - a subtly complex blend of savory, spicy, sweet, and smoky - all comes together in just 15 minutes of hands-on prep time. | The Good Hearted Woman

I don’t know about you, but I am not a fan of canned enchilada sauce. Sure, it’s convenient, and… yeah, I can’t think of anything else I like about it.  Anyway, a few weeks ago, I made some amazing Pan-Fried Blackened Rockfish with this killer dry rub recipe. When it was all said and done, I had a fist full of various ground chili peppers leftover, which got me thinking about how I could use all those savory sweet spices in other dishes.  Needless to say, homemade enchilada sauce was the first thing that came to mind.

It took a little experimenting, but I finally came up with a combination that wallops the pants off every enchilada sauce I’ve ever tasted. Now I’m not claiming it’s better than your abuela‘s sauce (a girl could get herself in a lot of trouble doing that!), but it’ll beat anything you can buy off the shelf by a mile.

Really, I cannot believe how good this stuff turned out, and it will only take you about 15 minutes to throw together. After that, the slow cooker does all the work.

My recipe for Slow Cooker Enchilada Sauce - a subtly complex blend of savory, spicy, sweet, and smoky - all comes together in just 15 minutes of hands-on prep time. | The Good Hearted Woman

Where to find ground chili pepper: You can find ground pasilla pepper and ground New Mexico chili pepper in the Mexican/Hispanic foods aisle of most grocery stores (in my area, Winco, Freddy’s, and Safeway all stock them) or in your local Hispanic Mercado (i.e., Su Casa Imports, El Mercado, etc). I found the ground chipotle X Gluten FreeX MexicanX Mexican & Tex-MexX SaucesX Slow CookerX VeganX Vegetariapepper in the bulk section at Winco. All of the dried ground peppers are very inexpensive, and a little goes a long way. You can also find all everything you need at your local spice shop, if you happen to have one.

My recipe for Slow Cooker Enchilada Sauce - a subtly complex blend of savory, spicy, sweet, and smoky - all comes together in just 15 minutes of hands-on prep time. | The Good Hearted Woman
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Slow Cooker Enchilada Sauce

A mild enchilada sauce with a smoky, slightly sweet finish. You will never use canned sauce again.
Course Condiment
Cuisine Mexican
Prep Time 15 minutes
Cook Time 2 hours
Total Time 2 hours 15 minutes
Author Renée B. ♥ The Good Hearted Woman

Ingredients

  • 1 tablespoon butter or coconut oil
  • 1 medium onion chopped
  • 2 cloves garlic minced
  • 2 cups vegetable stock or 1 14-ounce can
  • 1 14- ounce can crushed tomatoes
  • 1 12- ounce can tomato paste
  • 1 8- ounce can tomato sauce
  • 1 tablespoons ground pasilla pepper**
  • 2 teaspoons ground New Mexico chili pepper**
  • 1 teaspoon ground chipotle pepper**
  • 1 teaspoon dried oregano
  • 1 teaspoon cumin
  • 1 tablespoon packed brown sugar
  • 1 teaspoon Kosher salt
  • 2 tablespoons lemon juice

Instructions

  1. Heat butter or coconut oil in a medium skillet over medium heat. Add chopped onion and saute until it turns golden brown. Add minced garlic and saute 30 seconds more.
  2. Put sauteed onion and garlic mixture along with all the remaining ingredients into a slow cooker and cook on high for 2 hours or low for 4-6 hours. Sauce is ready to use immediately.
  3. OPTIONAL STEP: If you prefer your enchilada sauce smooth, simply use an immersion blender to puree it right in the slow cooker. (You can also just pour everything into a stand blender.)

Recipe Notes

**Substitution: Omit all 3 dried ground peppers, and add 2 tablespoons of regular chili powder. The flavor will be slightly less complex, but delicious just the same.

*This recipe freezes well, but it can also be canned in a pressure canner. Use 10 lbs. for 50 minutes for pints and 60 minutes for quarts.

Tip: For easier clean-up, spray your slow cooker with non-stick cooking spray before adding any of the ingredients.

My recipe for Slow Cooker Enchilada Sauce - a subtly complex blend of savory, spicy, sweet, and smoky - all comes together in just 15 minutes of hands-on prep time. | The Good Hearted Woman

If you’re wondering about my personalized wooden spoon – my BFF Cheryl gave a set of them to me for Christmas last year. Cheryl is THE BEST gift giver!!

Now that you have the sauce, why not throw together a batch of Homemade Flour Tortillas and make a meal!

Slow Cooker Enchilada Sauce | The Good Hearted Woman
The Best Ever Slow Cooker Enchilada Sauce | The Good Hearted Woman

Homemade Flour Tortillas

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Homemade Flour Tortillas | The Good Hearted WomanIt’s been nearly twenty years since I had homemade tortillas for the first time, and the memory is as fresh as if it had happened yesterday.  I watched fascinated as our cousin Leah, the daughter of long-time missionaries born and raised in Mexico, rolled out one tortilla after another, flour motes dancing with each turn of her pin.  In well-practiced rhythm, she rolled, flipped, turned, and fried each one with machine-like consistency, quickly building a stack of warm, floury flat-breads tall enough to feed our small army of children.  Soft, flavorful and tender, Leah’s tortillas made nearly every tortilla I’d eaten up until then taste like flattened papier-mâché.  Watching her work was a moment of pure grace, and I remember feeling immense gratitude for her efforts.

If you have never made homemade tortillas, it’s high time that you do.   And once you do, you will never go back to store-bought.  (OK, maybe you will sometimes, for the convenience, but after these, those store-bought tortillas will never taste the same again.)  But here’s the biggest secret of all: homemade flour tortillas are surprisingly fast and easy to make!

My flour tortilla recipe is an adaptation of “Flour Tortillas Diaz.”  I love that it doesn’t call for lard or shortening, and the tortillas it makes are soft and pliable even after they have been sitting for some time.

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Homemade Flour Tortillas

Course Bread
Prep Time 40 minutes
Cook Time 20 minutes
Total Time 1 hour
Author Renée B. ♥ The Good Hearted Woman

Ingredients

  • 4 cups flour
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons Kosher salt
  • 1 tablespoon baking powder
  • 1/4 cup olive oil
  • 1 1/2 cups warm water not HOT

Instructions

  1. Mix together flour, salt and baking powder. Drizzle in the olive oil and mix with your hands.

  2. Mix in a little water at a time with your hands until you have a soft dough. (The dough should be soft but not sticky. You can always add more flour if you need to.) Knead the dough for about 5 minutes, adding flour as needed if the dough gets sticky.

  3. Form the dough into a ball and wrap in plastic or cover with a towel. Let rest for about 20 minutes. (This allows to gluten to rest.)
  4. Divide dough into 2” balls (about the size of a golf ball). Flatten a dough ball with your palm and dust each side with flour, then roll into a 5-6” circle. Turn and flip each tortilla a few times as you roll them out. [See note]
  5. Heat a frying pan or griddle over medium heat. Do not grease or spray with cooking spray. Place a tortilla in the pan and cook until it bubbles a little – around 20-30 seconds. Flip it and cook the other side 20-30 seconds.
  6. Place cooked tortillas in a tortilla warmer, or inside a folded kitchen towel. The steam from the hot tortillas softens them.

Recipe Notes

It takes about the same amount of time to roll out a tortilla as it does for to fry one, so after you roll the first few, it is easy to get into a rhythm of cooking one and rolling the next at the same time.

Want to make an awesome tortilla warmer like the one in the picture above? Check out my tutorial here!

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