Ground Beef Enchilada Skillet

You’re going to fall in love with this cheesy beef enchilada skillet. You get all the goodness of ground beef enchiladas with a verde enchilada sauce but have added veggies to make this a high volume meal with tons of filling protein and fiber. It’s one of my favorite one pan recipes, and I can’t wait to teach you how to make it!

How to Make an Enchilada Skillet with Ground Beef

Whether you call it an enchilada casserole, skillet, or one pan enchilada, at its core you just need a cooked protein like ground beef, turkey, or chicken with enchilada sauce, chopped tortillas, and cheese. My version adds a few veggies, but you can make all kinds of tweaks to your enchilada skillet.

Veggie Selection for Enchilada Skillets and Casseroles

Zucchini is a great vegetable for adding volume to meals. A medium, 7-ounce zucchini squash has around 30 calories, 6 grams of carbs, 2 grams of fiber, and 500mg of potassium. That means you’ll be adding nearly a pound of food to your enchilada skillet for only 60 calories!

And that’s not even mentioning the other low calorie, high volume poblano pepper that’s in the mix here. Like I mentioned in my ground beef potato soup recipe, poblanos are on the milder end of the heat spectrum. You could add more heat with something like the jalapeño in my street corn salad recipe.

Both of these high volume veggies leave plenty of room for the fresh corn and all its delicious starchiness. If you’re making this beef enchilada skillet out of season, I recommend using frozen corn (fire roasted like my turkey enchiladas casserole if possible) first and a drained corn from a can as a final option.

Cooking Ground Beef and Vegetables in One Pan

If possible, I like to avoid transferring cooked veggies or beef out of pans and pots to take turns. Cooking everything in one pan requires fewer dishes and saves time.

That said, you can definitely overcrowd pans. If you’re looking for a ton of browning on ground beef like in my firecracker beef recipe, for example, you want a hot, dry, and uncrowded pan. But in this enchilada skillet, you don’t need much browning.

So just add the veggies to the pan, let them pick up a bit of color, and push to one side of the pan. They’ll continue cooking while the beef browns on one side then you can break the beef apart and mix everything together to finish cooking the beef.

As long as you keep an eye on the bottom of the veggies to prevent anything from picking up too much color (burning), you’ll be golden.

Enchilada Sauce and Tortillas

The recipe calls for green chile enchilada sauce, but you’re welcome to use red, green, or any type of enchilada sauce you prefer.

I used a pre-made sauce from Frontera, but you can make your own green or red enchilada sauce. The creamy jalapeño sauce from my bison tacos recipe would be great as well.

You’ll only need a cup so make sure you have some other uses before you make a big batch. Though I guess you could put this recipe on repeat for a few weeks. Actually, yeah, I’d recommend doing just that.

You can use any type of tortilla for enchilada casserole, but I highly recommend corn for this version. The flavor just goes perfectly with everything else going on.

Also, you’ll want to pick up enough green enchilada sauce to make my vegetarian enchilada casserole and Tex-Mex breakfast skillet as well.

For a Cheesy Enchilada Skillet

To keep things on the lower calorie side, the recipe only calls for two ounces of shredded cheese. As you can see in the finished photo of the beef enchilada skillet below, it’s not an overly cheesy ordeal. But it certainly can be.

If you have calories to spare and want to load up on extra cheese, more power to you. I’d say four to six ounces would be the upper limit, though. We’re not making queso flameado here!

Side note: For a cheese loaded affair, check out my Tex Mex skillet enchiladas.

You can use all kinds of cheese, but I’d stick with higher moisture melting cheeses like pepper jack, Monterey jack, Colby jack, or Oaxaca cheese. Save the cotija and manchego for garnishing.

Speaking of garnish, I like to add some diced avocado and chopped cilantro in addition to cotija cheese when serving this enchilada skillet. A little guacamole and sour cream (or low calorie hack fat free Greek yogurt) also work great. And if you needed some side dishes to fill the table, check out these refried black beans or Mexican cauliflower rice.

Okie doke, that’s all you need to know. You’ll find a printable recipe card below. I hope you enjoy this ground beef enchilada casserole! If you do, recipe reviews are always appreciated.