Chicken Tinga is one of the easiest and most representative Mexican tacos fillings that you can find. It has a sweet and mild spicy thick sauce that will soon become one of your go-to recipes for Taco Tuesday!
How to make the Chicken Tinga Sauce?
This sweet and mildly spicy red sauce is all made in the blender. It’s the easiest sauce to make and also the ingredients are probably already in your fridge. The only ingredient that may be “exotic” is the jalapeños, but if you are a Mexican food lover probably you will have a few — fresh or canned — in your house.
As I’ve mentioned a million times in this blog, I always use canned jalapeño because in the country I currently live in it’s hard to find fresh jalapeños.
So, if you use fresh jalapeños remember to clean them well and deseed them to avoid a super spicy result.
In case of using canned jalapeños — as I do —, 3-5 pieces would be more than enough. You can see in the picture the exact amount I like to use.
The rest of this sauce is the basic ingredients of Latin food: ripped tomatoes —the ripper, the juicier—, onions, garlic cloves, fresh coriander, and cumin. So much flavor in simple everyday ingredients.
Now, blend all the ingredients + some water (about ⅓ of a cup) and your sauce is ready to cook and add flavor to the already shredded chicken.
To cook the chicken just boil it with a pinch of salt and then shred it.
The last thing is to cook the chicken immersed in the sauce until it reduces to a thicker consistency that can be held by a tortilla.
Can you use the slow cooker for chicken tinga?
Of course.
In fact, using the slow cooker is one of my favorite ways of making this recipe. The only thing is that the sauce can become a little bit watery.
So, after the cooking process, you can transfer the sauce to a pan and reduce it over medium heat for 5 minutes to make it thicker. Also, in the stove version, I add a bit of water when I blend all the ingredients for the sauce, I would avoid this step if you use the slow cooker.
Another thing different from the stove method is that the chicken will cook in the sauce and there is no need to boil it first.
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