Ree Drummond's Easy Ingredient Add-In For Silky Enchilada Sauce

Enchiladas are the savory, warming, and flavorful dinner that you need to make. There are so many different recipes worth trying, including our hearty loaded beef enchiladas and salsa verde chicken enchiladas. While the proteins, filling, and spices may vary, the one thing they all have in common is that their sauce can be improved with one simple, Ree Drummond-approved ingredient addition: flour.

In a video shared to the Food Network YouTube channel, Drummond shares that, before adding any liquids to her cheese enchilada sauce recipe, she adds flour to the mixture of sautéed onions, bell peppers, and spices (like chipotle powder and cumin). "This helps the sauce get just a little bit of a thicker consistency and makes it not too watery," she says. She mixes in the flour well to eliminate any raw bits, then adds in the liquid. This hack can be, presumably, used for any enchilada sauce recipe, as it's sure to thicken everything up and leave you with a sauce that doesn't make your tortillas too soggy.

Flour is a pretty effective thickener, but it's not the only one that you can use in your recipe. If you're cooking up a gluten-free enchilada recipe, you can use another starch like cornstarch or tapioca starch for your recipe. It's important to note that the properties of different starches vary, so you'll want to do your research before you try to swap a more concentrated starch for flour.

There are many tips you'll want to keep in mind when making enchilada sauce; this is just one of them. Once you've pureed your sauce and return it to the stove, you may want to cook it for a bit longer to help it thicken up, or add a bit of liquid to thin it out. If you need to make it much thicker and don't want to risk overcooking it, you could try adding a cornstarch slurry; this will help it distribute through the sauce.