Category: Maíces de México

Cold Drinks That Tell a Story :: Typical Regional Beverages in Mexico

If you've shopped at any of Mexico's thousands of tianguis (street markets), municipal markets, or fairs, you may have wondered what certain vendors were ladling out of their frosty glass jugs. Those are aguas frescas, made in every fresh fruit flavor you can imagine. In general, these fruit waters are made from purified water and are safe to drink. The aguas frescas in the photo are at Aguas de Casilda, Mercado Benito Juárez, in the city of Oaxaca. This large, beautiful stand is an icon in Oaxaca.

In addition to aguas frescas, there are numerous fresh or fermented drinks along Mexico's way. At various hole-in-the-wall supper restaurants, pineapple tepache is the order of the day, served fizzing with a pinch of bicarbonate of soda. And on the outskirts of one small town as you drive toward Guadalajara, a sign hangs from a guamúchil tree. It reads "Aquí Se Vende Pajarete" (Pajarete Sold Here) and advertises yet another unusual beverage.

Along many highways and byways, you'll regularly see someone selling aguamiel and pulque, the ancient drink of the Aztecs, offered from large jars positioned on a tiny table. By the same token, pulque, both unflavored and curado (flavored with fruit, vegetables, or nuts) is a favorite in bars called pulquerías.

Tuba

Tuba vendor, Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco.

If you've wandered along the magical beaches bordering Mexico's western coastlines, you may have noticed a man with a yoke-like pole across his shoulders, a red painted gourd suspended from the pole by a rope. His cry is "Tuba! Tubaaaaaaaaaaa!" and his hands are full of plastic cups.

In Mexico, tuba is primarily a coastal drink. Several years ago I was surprised to see a tuba vendor at a tianguis in Guadalajara. Later I started seeing the same man selling tuba in Tlaquepaque, and at the Thursday and Sunday artisans' tianguis in Tonalá. If you happen to be in the area, look for him—he's easy to spot, with his bright-red gourd of tuba suspended from a pole across his shoulders.

A glassful of tuba, served with freshly chopped apple, salted peanuts, and ice.

Coconut palm sap is fermented to make the clear, white, sweet wine called tuba. To collect the sap, workers climb the palm tree in the morning and evening and bruise the coconut flower stalk until it starts to ooze its liquid. The stalk is tied with bamboo strips into a special bamboo container to catch the sap. Crushed tanbark from the mangrove tree is dropped into the container to give the sap a reddish color and to hasten its fermentation. As many as three flowers from one coconut tree can be made to yield sap. Each flower produces tuba for two months, after which it dries out and is cut from the tree.

The liquid actually begins to ferment while still in the bamboo container on the tree, but the alcohol content increases considerably with longer fermentation. Tuba quenches the thirst, is good for indigestion, and makes conversation flow easily.

Tejuino

Since long-ago times, cooling tejuino has refreshed Mexico. It's made from the same corn masa (dough) that's used for tortillas and tamales. The prepared masa is mixed with water and piloncillo (cone-shaped Mexican brown sugar) and boiled until the liquid is quite thick. It's then allowed to ferment slightly—but just slightly. I've never known anyone to get so much as a buzz from sipping a cupful of cold tejuino.

Tejuino vendor, Tlaquepaque, Jalisco.

Once the tejuino is thickened and fermented, it's mixed as needed with freshly squeezed jugo de limón (key lime juice), a pinch of salt, water, ice, and a big scoop of lemon sherbet. Just about everywhere in Mexico, it's sold in plastic glasses—small, medium, and large—or in a plastic bag with the top knotted around a drinking straw.

Some people say that tejuino is an acquired taste. I acquired the taste for it the very first time I tried it and often crave it on hot afternoons. There is nothing more refreshing. Fortunately, there was a tejuino vendor just a block from my house in Guadalajara, so I could buy a glassful when the spirit moved me. Cup after cup of freshly prepared tejuino is ladled out to customers every day. Although tejuino is only a slightly sweet drink, the masa base makes tejuino very filling. A small glass is usually very satisfying.

Tejate

Tejate, a cold and foamy nixtamal-ized corn and chocolate drink, is particular to Oaxaca, especially found in the city's markets and in the small towns all around the area. Tejate is very refreshing on a hot day at the market–in this case, at the weekly market in Zaachila, Oaxaca. Compare the size of the jícara (the red enameled bowl afloat in the tejate) to the size of this very large clay vessel.

Tepache

I've found tepache in several cenadurías (restaurants open for supper only, usually from 7:30 PM until midnight) in Mexico, as well as at street stands and, occasionally, market stands. Tepache is simple to make and the ingredients are readily available whether you live North or South of the Border. You might like to try this at home.

Tepache (teh-PAH-cheh)
1 whole pineapple (about 3 pounds)
3 quarts water
1 pound piloncillo or brown sugar
1 cinnamon stick, approximately 3" long
3 cloves

Wash the skin of the pineapple well. Cut off the stem end and discard. Leave the skin on the pineapple and cut the entire fruit into large pieces.

Place the pieces of pineapple in a large container and add two quarts of water, the piloncillo or brown sugar, the cinnamon, and the cloves. Cover and allow to rest in a warm place for approximately 48 hours. The longer you allow the liquid and fruit to rest, the more it will ferment. If you let it sit for longer than 48 hours, taste it periodically to make sure it is not overly fermented, as it will go bad.

Strain the liquid—the tepache—and add the last quart of water.

If you prefer, do not add the last quart of water. Instead, add one cup of beer and allow to rest for another 12 hours.

Strain again and, if you have used the beer, add three cups of water.

Serve cold with ice cubes.

Tepache vendor, Zihuatanejo. You can ask for it plain, or preparado. Preparado includes chamoy (a spicy, sweet, and sour flavor), jugo de limón (fresh-squeezed key lime juice) and some extra chile for spiciness.

At any cenaduría, you can ask for your tepache with a pinch of bicarbonate of soda. You can also add it at home, just before you're ready to drink a glassful. The addition makes the tepache fizz and bubble, and it's said to be extremely good for the digestion. An elderly neighbor of mine swears by it as a heartburn remedy.

Pajarete

In the Mexican countryside, tequila drinking starts as soon as the sun comes up. If you drive Mexican highways early any morning—early, please, when the air is still chilly and cool gray bruma (light fog) clings to the flanks of the mountains of the Central Highlands—look for a small hand painted sign. "Aquí Se Vende Pajarete" (pah-hah-REH-teh) is all it says. The sign may hang from a tree, it may be tacked to a fencepost, and you won't see any indication of a cart or stand.

Aquí se vende pajarete: Pajarete sold here!

Away from the road, behind the trees, past the bushes, just over there by that old wrecked pickup truck, a dairy farmer milks his cows. As he milks the patient cows and they snuffle their hot breath into the misty morning, groups of men (sombrero-wearing men who are real men) gather around the cow lot, each man with his large clay mug. Into each mug go a stiff shot of either charanda (a sugar cane alcohol), mezcal, or tequila, a bit of sugar and some cinnamon-laden Mexican chocolate grated from a round tablet. The mug is then filled with warm milk, freshly squeezed directly into the mug–straight from the cow. More a body-temperature drink than a cold drink, that's pajarete: breakfast of champions.

I don't expect you to whip up most of these six popular drinks in your home kitchen, but I thought you'd love knowing about some of Mexico's really unusual cold drinks.

There are many more interesting and unusual drinks in Mexico, everything from A (acachú, a drink that sounds like a sneeze, made near Puebla from the capulín (wild cherry) to Z (zotol, made in Chihuahua from the sap of wild yucca). Wherever you are in Mexico, you'll find something fascinating to quench your thirst, make you feel more at home in the culture, and give you a story to tell.

A toast to each of you: Salud, dinero, y amor, y tiempo para gozarlos. Health, money, and love, and time to enjoy them.

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6 de June de 2020
Corn: A Prehistoric Gift from Mexico to Feed the World

At first glance, these appear to be flowers–but look closely: they're actually cross-sections of different varieties, sizes and colors of maíces nativos (native corn), grown continuously in Mexico for thousands of years, right up to the present time. They're so beautiful–and delicious! Photo courtesy Tortilla de Maíz Mexicana.

A few years ago, CONACULTA (Mexico's ministry of culture) invited Maestro Rafael Mier and Mexico Cooks! to speak about the preservation of traditional tortillas and about the milpa (millennia-old sustainable agricultural method still used in Mexico) at the Second Annual Festival Universo de la Milpa, held this year in Santa María Coapan, Puebla. Santa María Coapan, a part of the municipality of Tehuacán, is at the epicenter of the documented-to-date 11,000 year history of corn.

Left to right in the photo: Maestra Teresa de la Luz Hilario, Regidora de Educación y Cultura de Santa María Coapan; Maestro Rafael Mier of Tortilla de Maíz Mexicana; Mexico Cooks!; (speaking) the humanitarian and life-long human rights abogada del pueblo (advocate for the people) Concepción Hernández Méndez; and at far right, Lic. Roberto G. Quintero Nava, Director General de Culturas Populares of Puebla, CONACULTA. It was an honor to be part of this event and to meet its outstanding participants in this center of Mexican corn production. Photo courtesy Rafael Mier.

In tiny Coxcatlán, Puebla (just down the highway on the road south out of Tehuacán), a main attraction is the monument to corn. The legend at the base of the recently refurbished monument reads, "Coxcatlán, Cuna del Maíz (Cradle of Corn)". All photos copyright Mexico Cooks! unless otherwise noted.

From the small town of Coxcatlán, our driver took us about five kilometers further, south toward the Oaxaca border; there's a turnoff onto a dirt road at the Tehuacán-Cuicatlán Biosphere Reserve. The September 24, 2016 Mexico Cooks! article offers some fascinating general information about the biosphere.

If you didn't know to turn onto that poorly marked, narrow, and winding dirt road, you'd just keep whizzing along the highway, saying, "Nothing to see here, just a lot of big cactus and scrub trees. The Oaxaca border is only 30 kilometers away, let's hurry so we get there before dark." But this humble dirt road twists through a portion of an internationally important site marking the origin and development of agriculture in Mesoamerica and the world. Archeological research here has provided key information regarding the domestication of various species such as corn (Zea mays sp.), chile (Capsicum annuum), amaranth (Amaranthus sp.), avocado (Persea americana), squash (Cucurbita sp.), bean (Phaseolus sp.), and numerous other plants that are with us still in the modern era. This biosphere is home to just under 3000 kinds of native flora plus the largest collection of columnar cacti in the world. In addition, the biosphere contains approximately 600 species of vertebrate animals. Let's not hurry–let's spend some time here.

Archeologist Richard S. MacNeish (April 29, 1918-January 16, 2001). In 1965, Dr. MacNeish and a group of his colleagues first uncovered the agricultural treasures in the Tehuacán-Cuicatlán biosphere. Their excavation resulted in some of the most significant agricultural finds in the world. A statue in his memory is prominent today in Tehuacán. Dr. MacNeish, one of the most outstanding archaeologists of the Americas, developed innovative field methods that allowed him and his teams of co-archaeologists, anthropologists, sociologists, agronomists, and others to use science rather than educated guesswork to locate potentially important sites for excavation. Other than his discoveries in this biosphere, which are crucial to our understanding of Mesoamerican agriculture and settlement, his greatest legacy is probably his influence on and encouragement of students, other archaeologists, and the multitude of scientific professionals with whom he worked. Photo of Dr. MacNeish courtesy LibraryThing.

My good friend and colleague Rafael Mier, founder of Tortilla de Maíz Mexicana (by all means join the Facebook group), had talked a good while with me about his desire to visit the site where, over 50 years ago, Dr. MacNeish documented the remains of ancient corn. The more we talked about going to the cave, the more my heart raced: We were going to visit one of the places in Mexico where corn was born. Where corn was born. I felt that the trip would be much more than a Sunday drive in the country: it felt like a pilgrimage, to the most basic food destination in Mexico. To the origin of everything.

The extremely ancient peoples of what is now Mexico domesticated a native wild-growing plant called teocintle, which over the course of many years became what we know today as corn. Teocintle–the photo above is a seed head of the plant, harvested in 2015 in the State of Mexico and framed in sterling silver–is a grass similar to rice in that the grains grow and mature as a cluster of individuals, on a stalk. A mazorca (seed head) of teocintle has no center structure; no cob, if you will. One of the primary features that distinguishes corn from teocintle is the cob. Scientists tracked the domestication of teocintle from the wild grain to its semi-domesticated state, and from semi-domestication to the incredible variety of native Mexican corns that we know today. The actual teocintle seed head in the photo measures approximately three inches long. What you see in my hand is the million-times-over great-grandfather, the ancient ancestor of corn.

The mouth of la Cuna del Maíz Mexicano (the cradle of Mexican corn). I grew up in the southern United States, where I knew a few caves. I had expected to see a cave along the lines of Wyandotte Caves in Indiana, or Mammoth Cave in Kentucky: huge, multi-room caverns in which a person can walk along seeing rivers, stalagmites, stalactites, and other underground cave formations. Not here; this cave is simply what you see in the photograph, a sheltering karst-formation in the limestone, a pre-historic bubble. Standing in this spot gave me chills, and simply thinking about it while looking at the photograph now makes a shiver run up my spine. Out here in the vastness of this ancient natural world, in some ways so similar to the primitive world into which corn was born, one forgets about the crowded city, one forgets about modern problems, and one returns both mentally and spiritually to another time and to a connection with those Stone Age people who gave us the gift of corn, the true staff of life in much of today's world.

This shelter, according to years-long archeological research by Dr. MacNeish and others, was used as a camp, as a shelter during the rainy season for as many as 25 to 30 people, and as a post-harvest storage place for corn and other native vegetables (corn, beans, chiles, etc). Families, bands of families, and tribes living in or traveling through the Coxcatlán area used this type shelter for 10,000 years or more, primarily during the time in Mesoamerica that is analogous to the Archaic archeological period: approximately 5000 to 3400 BCE. Dr. MacNeish's extensive research showed more than 42 separate occupations, 28 habitation zones, and seven cultural phases in this cave.

At the Museo del Maíz (Corn Museum) in Tehuacán, there is a small display of the original dehydrated corn cobs and utensils found in the cave in the biosphere. This tiny cob measures less than one inch long.

These dehydrated cobs, also found in the cave, are quite a bit larger and probably somewhat younger than the tiny one in the photo above. They measure between 2 and 3 inches long. Some ancient fingers plucked this corn from its stalk, some long-ago woman–she must have been a woman–removed the kernels from the cobs and prepared food. How similar the growing methods, how similar what they ate, those people who created corn from a wild plant. Corn, beans, chiles, squash, amaranth, avocado: all served up in some way for millennia-past meals, and all available in Mexico's markets today. What foods do you eat that nourished your Stone Age forebears? How precious it is to know and taste the flavors of eleven thousand years worth of comidas (Mexico's main meal of the day)!

In addition to the important finding of dehydrated corn cob specimens (nearly 25,000 samples) and other kinds of vegetables in the substrata of the Tehuacán cave, Dr. MacNeish and subsequent archeologists found a large number of ancient tools such as chipped-flint darts used for hunting, grinding stones, and coas (pointed sticks used for planting). The investigators also found approximately 100 samples of human feces, which were examined to document the human diet of those long-ago days. Thanks to carbon dating, a method of determining the age of organic objects which was developed in the 1940s, scientists were and continue to be able to assign dates to ancient artifacts.

Part of a mural found in ruins dating to 650-900 AD in Cacaxtla, Tlaxcala. Click on the photograph to enlarge it; you'll see that what initially appear to be ears of corn are in fact a part of Mexico's creation myth: humankind is born of corn, and corn is born of humankind. Corn, which humankind created in the domestication process, cannot in fact exist without a human helping hand to husk it, take the dried kernels from the cob, and plant those kernels for subsequent harvest. Aside from wheat and rice, corn is the single-most planted grain in the world; there are countries and regions where humans could not exist without corn.

This tiny mazorca (dried ear of corn) is maíz palomero: (popcorn, scientific name Zaya mays everta), native to Mexico, the only kind of corn in the world that pops. Maíz palomero is believed by many scientists to have been the first corn. Today, this original corn is tragically all but extinct in Mexico. My colleague Maestro Rafael Mier, who lives in Mexico City, wanted to plant it; he contacted a number of possible sources without locating any seed at all. He ultimately called a seed bank in another Mexican state to see if they had some. They did, and they took seeds out of their freezer bank so that he could sow them on his property. His goal is to begin the reversal of the extinction of this original Mexican corn. This wee ear of popcorn, the standard size for this variety, is just about four inches long. Look how beautiful it is, with its crystalline white and golden triangular kernels.

Mexico still grows and cooks with 59 different varieties of native corns, corns that are essential to the regions in which they grow. A type of native corn that grows well in the state of Tamaulipas, for example, will probably not produce as well in Oaxaca. Nor will a native corn that is easily produced in the state of Guerrero grow well in the state of Coahuila. Climates differ, altitudes differ, soils differ: all impact Mexico's native corns. If you click on the poster to enlarge it, you'll see how very, very different Mexico's 59 corn varieties are from one another. Click on any photo to enlarge it for a better view. Photo courtesy CIMMYT.

These elotes (ears of freshly harvested young corn) are native to the state of Michoacán.

These large fresh ears are elotes from the State of México, for sale earlier this summer at Mexico City's Mercado de Jamaica.

A basket of multi-colored mazorcas (dried ears of corn) grown in the state of Tlaxcala, the smallest state in the República.

Mexico knows itself as 'the people of the corn'. Mexico knows that sin maíz no hay país–without corn, there is no country. Right now, Mexico is at a crisis point, the point of preserving its heritage of corn–or allowing that heritage to be lost to the transnational producers of uniform, high-yielding, genetically modified corn that is not Mexico's corn. I take my stand on the side of the 11,000 year history that defines us.

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9 de May de 2020
Popcorn, The Original Mexican Corn :: Maíz Palomero, El Maíz Original de México

From the un-popped kernel to the fully popped microwave-able snack treat, popcorn's evolution is many millennia old. Popcorn was the first corn in Mexico, domesticated at least 5000 years before the common era. In other words, the cultivation of popcorn is at least 7,000 years old–and probably closer to 11,000 years old!

The non-profit organization Tortilla de Maíz Mexicana, founded by my dear friend Rafael Mier, celebrated its first birthday on November 17, 2016. In the single year of its existence, the group has gathered together more than 153,000 followers on Facebook. Every one of these followers, people from all over Mexico, from Guatemala, and from other countries in Central and South America, is nervous about the decline of the tortilla, the possible loss of Mexico's native corns as well as those where they live, and the near-extinction of popcorn: Mexico's original corn. Here's the link to the group; please join! Tortilla de Maíz Mexicana

Update: just prior to publication of this article, membership in the Facebook group Tortilla de Maíz Mexicana jumped to approximately 450,000 members! There is plenty of room for more, join up!

Two of the first beautiful ears of maíz palomero toluqueño (popcorn from Toluca, Mexico) that the preservation team harvested in late September, 2016.

This basket is filled to overflowing with maíz palomero (Mexican popcorn), seed sourced and sown in the State of Mexico by my colleague maestro Rafael Mier and his team of assistants: harvested on September 25, 2016, a day to remember. The thrill of being just a tiny part of this project makes my heart skip a beat!

One ear of maíz palomero rests in the palm of my hand. The photo gives you a good idea of the size of these ears; compared to the size of USA-grown hybrid ears, these are tiny. USA growers have hybridized popcorn to give a large ear that yields more popcorn in a smaller planting area. Popcorn, however, has been hybridized, not genetically modified. There is NO GMO popcorn. Think otherwise? Google is your friend!

Obtaining the popcorn seed was the result of an exhaustive investigation in which he traveled to different small towns around Toluca (in years gone by, a tremendous source of Mexican popcorn) to obtain the grain. To Mier's great surprise, almost no one had kept any seed from former plantings. Popcorn truly was on the verge of extinction. Mier explained, "The United States is the leader in popcorn production, the popcorn business in that country has dedicated itself hugely to the grain’s development. Mexico could have the power. We are only lacking programs that push a viable cultivation of the varieties that are in Toluca, Chihuahua, and Jalisco. With those, we could satisfy the national demand.”

Here's Mexico Cooks! as a very tiny part of the very first harvest of Mexican-grown popcorn in the grand project of saving this original Mexican corn from extinction. I was so, so excited to peel back the green husks of this ear of popcorn, harvested just moments earlier, and see the tiny ears grown from 50-year-old seed. Yes! CIMMYT (International Maize and White Improvement), an international seed bank with research facilities near Mexico City, gave Maestro Rafael enough banked, refrigerated seed to plant several small parcelas (sections of land) with popcorn.

These tiny dehydrated olotes (corn cobs)–each measures two to three inches long–were discovered in 1965 in the cave near Coxcatlán, Puebla, and are on daily exhibit at the Tehuacán (Puebla) Museo del Maíz (Corn Museum). For more information about this cave and its agricultural and archeological importance, please see Mexico Cooks!' article dated October 1, 2016. These corn cobs are carbon-dated to approximately 5,000 B.C.E. All photos copyright Mexico Cooks! unless otherwise noted.

One huge pot filled with popcorn, a direct descendent of Mexico's very first corn: maíz palomero (popcorn). Today, many thousands of years after Mexico's great-great-a thousand times-great-grandparents domesticated maíz palomero, 95% of all popcorn grows north of the Mexican border. Popcorn has crossed the border into the United States of America and become one of the USA's most popular exports. Photo courtesy Lori Lange.

Popcorn is a simple food that we associate with snacking and with moments of entertainment. Who doesn’t want some buttered, salted popcorn at the movies, or while enjoying a day at the fair? Long ago in what is now Mexico, popcorn was already a treat: they were called “corn flowers” and according to the 16th century chronicles of Fray Bernadino de Sahagún, popcorn was sold in what is now Mexico’s plazas and was used as necklaces and in rituals. People did eat it, of course, but its consumption was not recreation-based.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbBgT62f3W4&w=560&h=315]
In this beautiful and evocative video, Maestro Rafael explains what has happened to Mexico's maíz palomero and what he and others, including myself, are doing to save Mexican popcorn from extinction. Even if you don't understand Spanish, you'll be able to watch the process of planting and harvest. Video courtesy Rafael Mier.

Despite the fact that Mexico is the country of origin of all corns, including popcorn, less than 2% of the popcorn eaten in Mexico today is grown here. The enormous majority comes from the United States of America, with a much smaller amount imported from Argentina. “In Mexico, over time we’ve lost the planting of this corn,” comments Rafael Mier. “Sowing popcorn is difficult work now because our native seed is all but extinct,” he says. He and his team are working every day to reverse Mexican popcorn's slide into extinction. Photo: invitation to the November 17, 2016 public presentation of the popcorn project.

The best way to get involved in this project is to join the Facebook group Tortilla de Maíz Mexicana. If you'd rather not use Facebook, subscribe to Mexico Cooks!. How? Look at the right-hand side of this page: you'll see a box titled, Share Mexico Cooks with Your Friends. In that box, there's a link called, "Subscribe to this blog's feed". Click on that, then follow the simple instructions. Mexico Cooks! will arrive in your email inbox every Saturday morning at about ten o'clock.

We look forward to having you as part of the Mexican popcorn and tortilla team! During 2020, Mexico Cooks!' 14th consecutive year on line, you'll see more about what has happened with this initiative since its beginning.

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2 de May de 2020
Tamales! More Tamales! Everybody Wants Tamales! Qué Le Doy?

Tamales in the tamalera (the steamer) at Tamalería (tamales stand) Méndez, on the street at the corner of Av. Baja California and Av. Insurgentes, Colonia Condesa, Distrito Federal. You can see that the tamalera is divided into three sections. Each section can hold a different kind of tamal (that's the word for ONE of a group of tamales). In this case, the tamales at the bottom left of the photo are Oaxaqueños (Oaxaca-style). On the right of the divider are tamales rojos (with a red chile sauce) and tamales de mole (both with pork meat). The third section of the tamalera holds just-out-of-sight tamales verdes (with chicken, in green chile sauce) and tamales con rajas y queso (with cheese and strips of chile poblano).

Older than an Aztec pyramid and fresh as this morning’s breakfast, a pot of newly-steamed tamales whets Mexico City’s appetite like nothing else in town. Dating to pre-Hispanic times—most historians say tamales date to the time before the Christian era—the tamales of New Spain (now Mexico) were first documented in the Florentine Codex, a mid-16th century research project crafted by Spanish Franciscan monk Fray Bernadino Sahagún.

Traditionally, tamales are made by hand, not by machine. At first, they seem to be exhaustingly labor-intensive and difficult. Just as with most wonderful food, once you learn the techniques and tricks of making the various styles, they're not so hard to prepare–and they are so worth the time and effort! In the photo above, Carmen Titita Ramírez Degollado, owner of Mexico City's Restaurante El Bajío, prepares masa cocida (cooked corn dough) for her special tamales pulacles from Papantla, Veracruz.

The ancients of the New World believed that humankind was created from corn. Just as in pre-history, much of Mexico’s traditional and still current cuisine is based on corn, and corn-based recipes are still creating humankind. A daily ration of corn tortillas, tacos, and tamales keeps us going strong in the Distrito Federal, Mexico’s capital city of more than twenty million corn-craving stomachs. Tamales are created from dried corn reconstituted with builder’s lime and water. The corn is then ground and beaten with lard or other fat into a thick, smooth masa (dough). Filled with sauce and a bit of meat or vegetable, most tamales are wrapped in dried corn husks or banana leaves and steamed, to fill Mexico City’s corn hunger and keep her hustling.

Tamal-to-be at El Bajío: cut the banana leaf to the size and shape of the tamal you're making, then lightly toast each leaf to soften it for folding. On the banana leaf, place a layer of masa, a strip of hoja santa (acuyo) leaf, and a big spoonful or two of cooked, shredded chicken in a sauce of chile guajillo, onion, and garlic.

Mexico’s capital city makes it easy to buy tamales any time the craving hits you. Every day of the week, nearly five million riders pack the Metro (the city’s subway system) and are disgorged into approximately 200 Metro stations. At any given Metro stop, a passenger is likely to find a tamales vendor. Her huge stainless steel tamalera (tamales steamer) hisses heartily over a low flame until the tamales are sold out. Each steamer can hold as many as two hundred tamales, and the vendor may preside over two or three or more of these vats.

Titita folds the tamal so that the banana leaf completely wraps the masa and filling.

Hungry students on the way to and from classes, office workers with no time to eat breakfast at home, construction workers looking for a mid-morning pick-me-up: all line up at their favorite vendor’s spot on the sidewalk closest to a Metro exit. Near the vibrant Chilpancingo Metro station at the corner of Av. Insurgentes and Av. Baja California, Sra. María de los Ángeles Chávez Hernández sells tamales out of two huge pots. “Qué le doy?” (‘What’ll you have?’) she raps out without ceremony to every hungry arrival. The choices: rojo (with pork and spicy red chile); verde (with chicken and even spicier green chile); rajas con queso (strips of chile poblano with melting white cheese); mole (a thick spicy sauce with a hint of chocolate); some Oaxaca-style tamales wrapped in banana leaves; and dulce (sweet, usually either pineapple or strawberry). The stand sells about 200 tamales a day. Sra. Chávez’s father, Ángel Méndez Rocha, has been selling tamales on this corner for more than 60 years. Even at age 80, he alternates weeks at the stand with his brother, selling tamales by the hundreds.

The masa and filling are centered in the banana leaf. Titita is simultaneously pressing the masa toward the middle of the leaf and folding each end of the banana leaf toward the middle.

The pair of tamales in the center of the photo are filled with chicken and chile guajillo sauce. The tamal closest to the bottom corner of the photo is made with black beans crushed with dried avocado leaves. Avocado leaves give a delicious anise flavor and fragrance to the beans. These tamales are ready to be steamed in the tamalera.

The tamal de chile guajillo, fresh out of the tamalera and unwrapped on my plate.

A specialty breakfast, unique to Mexico City, is the guajolota: a steaming hot tamal, divested of its corn husks and plopped into a split bolillo, a dense bread roll. Folks from outside Mexico City think this combo is crazy, but one of these hefty and delicious carbohydrate bombs will easily keep your stomach filled until mid-afternoon, when Mexico eats its main meal of the day. When I asked Sra. Chávez Hernández about the name of the sandwich, she laughed. “Nobody knows why this sandwich is called guajolota—the word means female turkey. But everybody wants one!”

If you'd rather take your tamales home to eat them, Sra. Chávez of Tamalería Méndez or her employee, Sra. Lucina Montel, will gladly wrap them in paper and send them along in a bag.

For steaming tamales, the bottom portion of a tamalera is filled with water. Add a coin to the water and put the tamales vertically into the steamer, atop the perforated base that rests just above the water. When the water boils, the coin will rattle. When the rattle slows or stops, add more water.

Tamales can be a massive guajolota to eat on the street or the most delicate, upscale meal in a restaurant. These, prepared by chef Gerardo Vázquez Lugo of Restaurante Nicos, are a degustación (tasting) at the Escuela de Oficios Gastronómicos operated by online magazine Culinaria Mexicana, where chef Vázquez offered a workshop teaching the history, ingredients, and preparation of tamales. From left to right, the four tamales are: carnitas de pato en salsa de cítricos y chile chipotle (shredded duck confit in a citrus and chile chipotle sauce), tamal de tzotolbichay (with the herb chaya), tamal de mole negro (black mole),and tamal de frijol (beans).

Chef Gerardo Vázquez Lugo of Mexico City's Restaurante Nicos.

In addition to being daily sustenance, tamales are a fiesta, a party. In Mexico City and every other part of Mexico, Christmas isn’t Christmas without tamales for the late-night family feasting on Christmas Eve. Gather the women of the family together, grab the neighbors, and the preparation of tamales becomes a party called a tamalada. Mexico City chef Margarita Carrillo tells us, “Mexican grandmothers from time immemorial say that the first ingredient for great tamales is a good sense of humor. Tamales like it when you sing while you prepare them, they love to hear a little friendly gossip while you work, and if you make tamales in the good company of your family and friends, they’re sure to turn out just the way you want them: with fluffy, richly flavored corn dough on the outside and a delicious filling on the inside.”

A small and elegant tamal de chocolate for dessert, prepared by Restaurante Nicos for the tamales workshop.

Señora Elia Rodríguez Bravo, specialty cook at the original Restaurante El Bajío, strains masa cocida for tamales. She gently shook a wooden spoon at me as she proclaimed, “You can’t make tamales without putting your hands in the masa (corn dough). Your hand knows what it feels. Your hand will tell you when the masa is beaten smooth, when the tamales are well-formed in their leaves, and when they have steamed long enough to be ready to eat. Your hand knows!”

Señora María de los Ángeles Chávez Hernández (left) and her longtime employee Señora Lucina Montel (right) sell tamales at the street booth Tamalería Méndez seven days a week. They and Sra. Chávez's staff prepare hundreds of tamales every night, for sale the next day.

Let's go on a Mexico City tamales tour! Let Mexico Cooks! know when you're ready, and we'll be on our way.

Looking for a tailored-to-your-interests specialized tour in Mexico? Click here: Tours.

11 de January de 2020
Mexico’s Versatile Tianguis :: THE Place to Shop to Find Almost Anything You Need at Our Outdoor Markets

Lydia Gregory, a dear friend visiting from Phoenix, Arizona, tries a tuna (nopal cactus fruit) at the Tianguis Obrero Mundial, Colonia Narvarte, Mexico City. Tunas are delicious–and so is my friendship with Lydia! She loved it, but she couldn't smile because her mouth was full of tuna! We had such a great time.

Nearly twelve years ago, in August 2007, Mexico Cooks! featured every sort of produce, dairy product, and meat sold at a local tianguis (street market) near Guadalajara, Jalisco. For the entire month of August 2008, you read about seasonal availability of fruits and vegetables at the dozens of regularly scheduled tianguis (it's the same word in singular and plural: one tianguis, two or more tianguis, pronounced tee-AHN-geese) in Morelia, Michoacán. Mexico Cooks! would rather shop at a hot, crowded tianguis than at an air conditioned supermarket, would rather shop for supremely fresh foods at a tianguis than give a second glance to anything frozen, boxed, or canned that's offered for sale elsewhere.

A signmaker with a sense of humor stuck this tag on his fresh Roma tomatoes: "Like you saw on TV". These were offered at 14 pesos the kilo (about 45 cents US the pound).

The tianguis, wherever in Mexico it's held, is a basic part of the culture of modern Mexico. Its name comes from the Náuhatl word tianquiztli, market. Although Nahuatl markets are centuries old, the present-day form of the tianguis is fairly recent, originating during the 1970-76 Mexican presidency of Luis Echeverría Alvarez. The author of the tianguis project in Mexico was José Iturriaga, Echeverría's former finance minister.

These tender new elotes (early native corn) are piled up in a huge pot, ready to be steamed. When they're ready to eat, they'll be sold piping hot with a slather of mayonnaise, a heavy layer of freshly grated cheese, a squeeze or two of jugo de limón (the tiny fruit known in the USA as key lime), salt, and, to your taste, a sprinkle or more of powdered chile. Eat it while you walk the tianguis aisles–this is one of the most popular and delicious snacks in Mexico.

Cooked in a sweet syrup, whole calabaza de castilla (squash, left), camote (sweet potato, right), and higos (figs, rear) are available at the tianguis by the kilo or portion of a kilo. They're to be eaten for breakfast or supper.

Although Iturriaga was himself a wealthy, educated, and cultured man, he worried about the ability of Mexico's poor to feed their families. He was especially concerned about the availability of nutritious fresh foods sold at reasonable prices. The tianguis, otherwise known as a mercado sobre ruedas (market on wheels), was his idea. The government took charge of giving Mexico's working-class housewives and other food shoppers stupendous quality at the lowest possible prices.

Rambutan, available in season at tianguis all over Mexico. This exotic fruit, first hairy cousin to the lychee, is grown commercially in Chiapas, one of Mexico's southernmost states.

Beautiful cebollitas de cambray (knob onions), ready for serving with carne asada (grilled meat, usually accompanied by grilled whole onions like these.

Meats are available at a tianguis, too. At the left, these are long strands of longaniza (a spicy, fresh sausage similar to chorizo) and at the right, equally long strands of Oaxaca-style chorizo. My favorite is the Oaxaca-style chorizo.

Still operated by local government, today's tianguis only sometimes reach Iturriaga's ideal. Often the produce can be second-rate, the meats and seafood far less than fresh, and the market's hygiene questionable–while prices are often as high or higher than the días de plaza (sale days) in upscale supermarkets.

Prepared food, for eating on-site or for carryout, is available at all of the tianguis I've been to in Mexico–a lot! Here you see a taco of heavenly pork carnitas with chopped fresh cilantro and onion and some salsa roja.

Higos–figs, at the peak of maturity and ripeness–enjoy a relatively long season here in Mexico. We recently paid 100 pesos for two kilos of beautifully ripe figs and prepared half a dozen jars of you-don't-want-to-know-how-good fig conserve. Later this winter, spread on a toasted and buttered bolillo (small loaf of fresh-baked bread) from our tianguis, served over ice cream, or simply licked off the finger, the conserve will be an intense memory of summer.

Mexico Cooks! is a regular customer at one of the better tianguis in Mexico City. Our tianguis, set up early Wednesday mornings, is quite near our house. Our normal purchases include tortillas, bread, seafood, excellent pork ranging from maciza (fresh pork leg) to tocino (bacon), marvelously fresh chicken (whole or whichever part you want), all of our fruits and vegetables, cheeses and cream, grains, and flowers for the house. We don't eat much beef, but if we did, we'd buy it at the tianguis.

Tiny plátanos dominico (finger bananas, about 2.5 inches long) are just one of the banana varieties we usually see at the tianguis.

This is American-style yellow sweet corn, now grown in the Mexican states of Guanajuato and Querétaro. It's nothing like the native corns grown for millennia all over Mexico, but it's becoming very popular. I photographed this mound of corn at the tianguis in Pátzcuaro, Michoacán.

Prices at the Wednesday tianguis in our neighborhood, while not substantially lower than those at the supermarket, are still not higher than we care to pay. We usually budget about 700 pesos (about $50 USD) to buy what we need at the tianguis for a week's meals, including pork and sometimes shrimp. We budget another 400 pesos for purchases at the supermarket.

Mangos stacked high at a tianguis. This large variety is known as either Paraíso or Petacón.

On a recent Wednesday–when the refrigerator was bare of produce, as we had been out of the country for more than a week–these were our purchases:

6 large fresh white onions
1 huge cantaloupe
4 Petacón mangos
6 red-ripe Roma tomatoes
1/2 lb mushrooms
1/2 large white cabbage
8 Red Delicious apples
1 large avocado
2 large bananas
1 large papaya
1 lb fresh green beans
1 large head of broccoli
8 ounces crema de mesa (table cream, similar to crême fraiche)
1 kilo freshly ground-to-order beef
Total cost: 500 pesos–the equivalent of about $25.00 USD.

Common kitchen utensils of all kinds are also offered at a tianguis. These are escobetillas, used for scrubbing pots and pans. They're made from the root portion of a plant.

Times and needs change. Urban Mexico views the tianguis as both a terrible bother (who would want one on their street, with its attendant noise and mess that lasts till the market day is done!) and a joy (but where else can we get produce this fresh!). Mexico Cooks! knows people who disdain shopping at a tianguis, and we know people who will not shop anywhere else. You already know which side of that fence I stand on. Come with me some week and see what you think.

Looking for a tailored-to-your-interests specialized tour in Mexico? Click here: Tours.

27 de July de 2019
Pozole Estilo Jalisco, in Memory of doña María Medina

Doña María López viuda de Medina, Tijuana, Baja California. In front of her house, 1983. We met at Mass in early 1981 and became fast friends over a pot of her home-made pozole.  Doña is an honorific for an older, respected woman–don is the masculine counterpart.

Traditionally, pozole starts with the head of a pig. The head is always smiling as it hangs on your butcher's hook, waiting to go in the pot. If you can't get a pig head from your butcher, use pork shoulder, pork butt, really meaty pork neck bones, or a combination of all three.

In early 1981, I tasted pozole for the first time. My soon-to-be-dear friend, doña María Medina (RIP), who owned a five-stool working-man's food counter restaurant in Tijuana, invited me to her tiny kitchen to dine. Doña María was originally from Jalisco and was shocked that I'd been in Mexico for all of three or four months and had never eaten the thick, rich, pork, chile and corn soup that I soon learned was pozole. I was such a neophyte that until she asked me if I'd eaten it, I'd actually never heard of pozole, but I couldn't let doña María know that. Because I knew doña María, I knew I was in for a treat, even though I had no idea what it was going to be. We set a date for me to eat pozole at home with her.

The day arrived. Doña María escorted me into her kitchen and sat me down at her table for two. Large pottery bowls were at our places, ready for the dishing-up. Meat, already sliced, lay on the counter next to a huge aluminum pot. Next to the pot she had laid out bowls of thinly sliced radishes, onion diced small, shredded cabbage, whole dried Mexican orégano, and powdered chile de árbol. She put several slices of meat into each of our bowls, ladled what seemed to me a bathtub of rich-smelling, steaming soup on top, and garnished each bowlful with the condiments. Smiling proudly, she put the bowls on the table. I thought she was ready to sit down with me, but no.

Instead, she looked at my bowl. "Te falta carne." (You don't have enough meat.) She put my bowl on the counter again and picked up an extra-extra long two-tined fork. Down into the soup pot it went, and up it came again. To my horror, impaled on the fork was a huge pig head. My eyes were the size of big white Mexican onions. She sliced meat from the cheek and piled it into my bowl. "Ahora sí, provecho!" ("Now then, bon appetit!") She sat down, and we dug in.

It's nearly thirty years and a lot of pozole later, but I still can't get the image of that first pig head out of my mind. If you've toured with me in a market in Mexico, you've already heard that story.

Readers who are familiar with the southwestern United States might be confused by the Spanish word pozole. In New Mexico and other parts of the southwest, the word is spelled "posole" and is the word used for the corn prepared for the soup. Here in Mexico, the words for the corn are the Náhuatl words cacahuatzintle and/or nixtamal, while the soup itself is called pozole (with a 'z').

My good friend Rolly Brook (RIP) has once again given me permission to use some of his excellent photos to illustrate the preparation of pozole. He photographed his friend Doña Martha (RIP) as she prepared this marvelous soup.

Rolly and doña Martha lived in Lerdo, in the northern Mexican state of Durango. Her pozole is slightly different from that of the central state of Jalisco, above all in its condiments, but the basic recipes are sisters.

Doña Martha puts the cleaned pig head into the pot with the spices and flavorings. The prepared cacahuatzintle and the chiles go into the pot last.

Dried red corn kernels for making Jalisco-style pozole rojo.

Traditional Pozole from Jalisco State

Ingredients

1 cleaned pig head. Leave the teeth and eyes in the head. Ask the butcher to clean it for you. At home, you simply have to wash the pig head well in cold water.

12-15 liters of water for cooking the broth, etc.

3 kilos (about 7.5 lbs) espinazo (pork backbone), shoulder, or butt, or a combination of the three meats.

1 kilo (about 2.2 lbs) nixtamal-ized cacahuatzintle (dried field corn, preferably red for Jalisco-style pozole), or an equal amount of corn for pozole, already prepared and preferably red. You'll find prepared corn in the refrigerator section of many Latin grocers. In a pinch you can use canned hominy, but it's not the same. It's much too soft and bland.

10-12 chiles guajillo
6 chiles ancho
One large whole white onion, peeled
An entire large head of garlic, peeled
Cumin seeds, not too many as you don't want cumin to overwhelm the flavors of the pozole
Bay leaves
Sprigs of fresh orégano
Sprigs of thyme
A clove or two
A splash of vinegar
Sea salt to taste

Garnishes
Finely shredded cabbage
Thinly sliced radishes
Minced white onion
Avocados, to be sliced and added to the pozole by each diner
Limón criollo (key lime) to squeeze into the pozole
Salsa roja muy picante (really hot red sauce, preferably home made)
Mexican orégano to crumble into the pozole
Sea salt to taste

Serve with tostadas.

Preparation
Two days ahead of serving, begin to prepare the dried corn for the pozole. This process results in nixtamal.

Clean the dried corn kernels by picking through them and removing any stray corn husk pieces, rocks or other field rubble from them. Rinse the kernels well and drain.

Put the water in a large pot over a high flame. Add a tablespoon or two of calcium hydroxide (builder's lime) to the water.

Put the corn into the water/calcium hydroxide mixture and bring to a simmer. Allow to cook for about 45 minutes. Do not boil, boiling will ruin the corn. Remove from the pot from the heat and allow cool overnight in its liquid.

When the corn is cool, rinse it well under running water and rub it in a heavy towel (or in your bare hands) to remove the skin from the kernels. The cooked kernels should be white or pale yellow.

OPTIONAL: Use your thumb nails or a small sharp knife to remove the hard pedicel (the little piece of the corn kernel that holds the kernel to the cob) from the narrow end of each kernel. This step is hideously time-consuming and mind-numbingly boring, but removing the pedicel allows the kernels to "flower", or open up. Many cooks in Mexico have stopped doing this part, but you might want to try it at least once. I did this the first time I made pozole, in spite of the fact that my housekeeper said, "You're not really doing that!" and laughed at me the whole time I struggled at the job.

Put the cleaned kernels back in the pot and cover with water to about 3" above the kernels. Cook over medium heat until the kernels flower, about three hours. Do not stir the corn while it cooks, but you might want to skim the top of the water from time to time.

Once the corn kernels are tender, add salt to taste. Many cooks don't add salt until the kernels are soft, saying that they will toughen.

Reserve the now-nixtamal-ized cacahuatzintle for later use in the pozole.

Grind all the spices except the chiles, the garlic, and the onion until they are fine powder. Put the pig head into a large pot and add water to cover. Add the fresh garlic, the ground spices and the whole onion. Reserve the chiles and the corn for pozole for later use.

Trim the espinazo and pork butt or shoulder into large pieces. Add this meat to the pot along with the whole onion. Simmer the meats for approximately an hour and a half.

Prepare the dried guajillo chiles by slitting them open and removing the stems and the seeds. The guajillo is not spicy at all, but adds wonderful flavor and color to pozole broth.

Simmer the chiles while the pork meats cook. The chiles need to cook for an hour or slightly more. When the chiles are soft, put them in a blender and purée them with some of their cooking liquid until they are very, very smooth.

Doña Martha eases the nixtamal into the pot.

When the meats are tender, remove the head, the espinazo, and the other meats from the pot and reserve. Add the prepared corn kernels and the puréed chiles to the pot and continue to simmer over low heat for another hour.

While we wait for the meats to cook, here's a list of the parts of the pig that people really like in their pozole:
—Oreja, slices of ear
—Cachete, slices of cheek
—Trompo, slices of snout
—Lengua, slices of tongue
—Ojo, the eyeballs

You can have your pozole with maciza (just the meaty pork butt or spine) or surtido (a selection of all the meats on this list plus some maciza).

This is not a fish. My favorite butcher removed an eye from a pig head and laid it on a piece of maciza (raw pork shoulder). He's a big jokester, and you know me–I'm a little weird.

While the pot of nixtamal-ized corn simmers, slice the meat off the head–the cheeks are particularly delicious!–and slice the rest of the meats into serving-size pieces. Reserve the eyeballs for your guest of honor.

The finished product! Serve with a pile of crunchy- tostadas on the side.

Just before serving, put a big ladle-full or more of corn kernels and broth into individual large pozole bowls. Add several slices of meat to each bowl, on top of the corn kernels. At table, each eater adds his or her own condiments according to taste. I like mine with crumbled orégano, a soup spoon of minced onion, a big squeeze of limón, a fistful of sliced radishes, some sea salt, a lot of shredded cabbage, a couple of slices of avocado, and a spoonful or two of salsa roja–in other words, a little of everything!

Espérate, te falta carne! Ahora sí, provecho! (Wait, you need more meat! Okay, now, enjoy!)

Looking for a tailored-to-your-interests specialized tour in Mexico? Click here: Tours.

27 de April de 2019
Touring with Mexico Cooks :: An Unforgettable Experience, Stories That Live in Your Mind and Heart

This little boy's mother and I thought he would be terrified by the pig heads hung up in one of the pork stands at a Mexico City market. On the contrary, he was fascinated! Two seconds after I took the picture, he leaned over and kissed the snout. We all laughed, even the vendors.

One of the great pleasures of my life is the number of tours Mexico Cooks! gives to lots of excited tourists. Small, specialized tours are a joy to organize: the participants generally have common interests, a thirst for knowledge, and a hunger for–well, for Mexico Cooks!' tour specialty: food and its preparation. Touring a food destination (a street market in Michoacán, an enclosed market in Guadalajara, a crawl through some Mexico City street stands, or meals in a series of upscale restaurants) is about far more than a brief look at a fruit, a vegetable, or a basket of freshly made tortillas.

A Pátzcuaro, Michoacán, street vendor holds out a partially unwrapped tamal de trigo (wheat tamal). It's sweetened with piloncillo (Mexican raw sugar) and a few plump raisins, wrapped in corn husks, and steamed. Taste? It's all but identical to a bran muffin, and every tour participant enjoyed a pinch of it.

A tour planned to your specifications can lead you to places you didn't know you wanted to go, but that you would not have missed for the world. Here, a tour participant talks with the man who makes these enormous adobe bricks. He let her try to pick up the laden wheelbarrow. She could barely get its legs off the ground! He laughed, raised the handles, and whizzed away with his load.

Several times in recent years, small groups wanted to tour traditional bakeries in Mexico City. The photo shows one tiny corner of the enormous Pastelería La Ideal in the Centro Histórico. Just looking at the photo brings the sweet fragrances back to mind. And never mind the taste of the delicious pastries!

Ramon and Annabelle Canova wanted an introduction to how ordinary people live and shop in Guadalajara. We spent a highly entertaining morning at the Tianguis del Sol, a three-times-a-week outdoor market in Zapopan, a suburb of Guadalajara. Our first stop was for breakfast, then we shopped for unusual produce, fresh spices, and other goodies that the Canovas don't often see in their home town. Annabelle said she felt right at home because so much of the style and flavor of this market was similar to what she experienced in the markets near her home town in the Philippines.

We went for comida (main meal of the day) to the original location of Guadalajara's Karne Garibaldi. The restaurant does one thing–carne en su jugo (meat in its juice)–and does it exceptionally well. The food is plentiful, delicious, and affordable. The place is always packed, and usually has a line to get in!

Ramon wanted to try tejuino, a regional specialty in the Guadalajara area. Mixed when you order it, the refreshing, lightly fermented drink is thickened with masa de maíz (corn dough) and served with a pinch of salt and a small scoop of lemon ice.

Pillars of nopal cactus paddles, taller than a man, at Mercado de la Merced, Mexico City. La Merced is the largest retail market in Mexico, if not in all of Latin America. It's the ultimate market experience and just a partial tour takes the best part of a morning. Comfortable walking shoes are a necessity–let's go!

A more intimate, up-close-and-personal Mexico City market tour takes us through the Mercado San Juan. The San Juan is renowned for its gourmet selection of meats, fish and shellfish, cheeses, and wild mushrooms–among a million other things you might not expect to find.

Pepitorias are a sweet specialty of Mexico's capital city. Crunchy and colorful obleas (wafers) enclose sticky syrup and squash seeds. Mexico Cooks!' tour groups usually try these at the Bazar Sábado in San Ángel.

Lovely and fascinating people and events are around almost any Mexican corner. The annual Festival Internacional de Música de Morelia opens every year with several blocks of carpets made of flowers. Residents of Patamban, Michoacán work all night to create the carpets for the festival. This piano is made entirely of plant material. Enlarge any picture for a closer view.

Entire flowers, fuzzy pods, and flower petals are used to create the carpets' ephemeral beauty and design; these carpets last two days at most.

In November 2012, one of Mexico Cooks!' tours was dazzled by a special Morelia concert given by Tania Libertad. With Tania is Rosalba Morales Bartolo, a fabulous traditional cook from San Jerónimo Purenchécuaro, Michoacán, who, in the name of the state, presented the artist with various handcrafted items–including the lovely coral necklace and rebozo (shawl) that Tania is wearing.

No matter where we start our tour and no matter what we plan together for your itinerary, a Mexico Cooks! tour always includes a terrific surprise or two, special memories to take home, and the thirst for more of Mexico. Marvey Chapman had a wonderful time! By all means come and enjoy a tour!

Looking for a tailored-to-your-interests specialized tour in Mexico? Click here: Tours.

16 de March de 2019
The Native Corns of Mexico :: Prehistoric Ancestors in Danger of Disappearance

In 2016, my dear friend and colleague Maestro Rafael Mier were invited to give conferences in the Mexican state of Puebla. After our conferences, we visited the Biosphere Tehuacán-Cuicatlán, important to the world for numerous reasons. Mexico Cooks! wrote then about the discovery of corn, the reason most important to Mstro. Rafael and to me–a reason important to you, as well.

At first glance, these appear to be flowers–but look closely: they're actually cross-sections of different varieties, sizes and colors of maíces nativos (native corn), grown continuously in Mexico for many thousands of years, right up to the present time. They're so beautiful–and delicious! Photo courtesy Tortilla de Maíz Mexicana.

A few weeks ago, CONACULTA (Mexico's ministry of culture) invited Maestro Rafael Mier and Mexico Cooks! to speak about the preservation of traditional tortillas and about the milpa (millennia-old sustainable agricultural method still used in Mexico) at the Second Annual Festival Universo de la Milpa, held this year in Santa María Coapan, Puebla. Santa María Coapan, a part of the municipality of Tehuacán, is at the epicenter of the documented-to-date 11,000 year history of corn.

Left to right in the photo: Maestra Teresa de la Luz Hilario, Regidora de Educación y Cultura de Santa María Coapan; Maestro Rafael Mier of Tortilla de Maíz Mexicana; Mexico Cooks!; (speaking) the humanitarian and life-long human rights abogada del pueblo (advocate for the people) Concepción Hernández Méndez; and at far right, Lic. Roberto G. Quintero Nava, Director General de Culturas Populares of Puebla, CONACULTA. It was an honor to be part of this event and to meet its outstanding participants in this center of Mexican corn production. Photo courtesy Rafael Mier.

In tiny Coxcatlán, Puebla (just down the highway on the road south out of Tehuacán), a main attraction is the monument to corn. The legend at the base of the recently refurbished monument reads, "Coxcatlán, Cuna del Maíz (Cradle of Corn)". All photos copyright Mexico Cooks! unless otherwise noted.

From the small town of Coxcatlán, our driver took us about five kilometers further, south toward the Oaxaca border; there's a turnoff onto a dirt road at the Tehuacán-Cuicatlán Biosphere Reserve. The September 24, 2016 Mexico Cooks! article offers some fascinating general information about the biosphere.

If you didn't know to turn onto that poorly marked, narrow, and winding dirt road, you'd just keep whizzing along the highway, saying, "Nothing to see here, just a lot of big cactus and scrub trees. The Oaxaca border is only 30 kilometers away, let's hurry so we get there before dark." But this humble dirt road twists through a portion of an internationally important site marking the origin and development of agriculture in Mesoamerica and the world. Archeological research here has provided key information regarding the domestication of various species such as corn (Zea mays sp.), chile (Capsicum annuum), amaranth (Amaranthus sp.), avocado (Persea americana), squash (Cucurbita sp.), bean (Phaseolus sp.), and numerous other plants that are with us still in the modern era. This biosphere is home to just under 3000 kinds of native flora plus the largest collection of columnar cacti in the world. In addition, the biosphere contains approximately 600 species of vertebrate animals. Let's not hurry–let's spend some time here.

Archeologist Richard S. MacNeish (April 29, 1918-January 16, 2001). In 1965, Dr. MacNeish and a group of his colleagues first uncovered the agricultural treasures in the Tehuacán-Cuicatlán biosphere. Their excavation resulted in some of the most significant agricultural finds in the world. A statue in his memory is prominent today in Tehuacán. Dr. MacNeish, one of the most outstanding archaeologists of the Americas, developed innovative field methods that allowed him and his teams of co-archaeologists, anthropologists, sociologists, agronomists, and others to use science rather than educated guesswork to locate potentially important sites for excavation. Other than his discoveries in this biosphere, which are crucial to our understanding of Mesoamerican agriculture and settlement, his greatest legacy is probably his influence on and encouragement of students, other archaeologists, and the multitude of scientific professionals with whom he worked. Photo of Dr. MacNeish courtesy LibraryThing.

My good friend and colleague Rafael Mier, founder of Tortilla de Maíz Mexicana (by all means join the Facebook group), had talked a good while with me about his desire to visit the site where, over 50 years ago, Dr. MacNeish documented the remains of ancient corn. The more we talked about going to the cave, the more my heart raced: We were going to visit one of the places in Mexico where corn was born. Where corn was born. I felt that the trip would be much more than a Sunday drive in the country: it felt like a pilgrimage, to the most basic food destination in Mexico. To the origin of everything.

The extremely ancient peoples of what is now Mexico domesticated a native wild-growing plant called teocintle, which over the course of many years became what we know today as corn. Teocintle–the photo above is a seed head of the plant, harvested in 2015 in the State of Mexico and framed in sterling silver–is a grass similar to rice in that the grains grow and mature as a cluster of individuals, on a stalk. A mazorca (seed head) of teocintle has no center structure; no cob, if you will. One of the primary features that distinguishes corn from teocintle is the cob. Scientists tracked the domestication of teocintle from the wild grain to its semi-domesticated state, and from semi-domestication to the incredible variety of native Mexican corns that we know today. The actual teocintle seed head in the photo measures approximately three inches long. What you see in my hand is the million-times-over great-grandfather, the ancient ancestor of corn.

The mouth of la Cuna del Maíz Mexicano (the cradle of Mexican corn). I grew up in the southern United States, where I knew a few caves. I had expected to see a cave along the lines of Wyandotte Caves in Indiana, or Mammoth Cave in Kentucky: huge, multi-room caverns in which a person can walk along seeing rivers, stalagmites, stalactites, and other underground cave formations. Not here; this cave is simply what you see in the photograph, a sheltering karst-formation in the limestone, a pre-historic bubble. Standing in this spot gave me chills, and simply thinking about it while looking at the photograph now makes a shiver run up my spine. Out here in the vastness of this ancient natural world, in some ways so similar to the primitive world into which corn was born, one forgets about the crowded city, one forgets about modern problems, and one returns both mentally and spiritually to another time and to a connection with those Stone Age people who gave us the gift of corn, the true staff of life in much of today's world.

This shelter, according to years-long archeological research by Dr. MacNeish and others, was used as a camp, as a shelter during the rainy season for as many as 25 to 30 people, and as a post-harvest storage place for corn and other native vegetables (corn, beans, chiles, etc). Families, bands of families, and tribes living in or traveling through the Coxcatlán area used this type shelter for 10,000 years or more, primarily during the time in Mesoamerica that is analogous to the Archaic archeological period: approximately 5000 to 3400 BCE. Dr. MacNeish's extensive research showed more than 42 separate occupations, 28 habitation zones, and seven cultural phases in this cave.

At the Museo del Maíz (Corn Museum) in Tehuacán, there is a small display of the original dehydrated corn cobs as well as some utensils found in the cave in the biosphere. This tiny cob measures less than one inch long.

These dehydrated cobs, also found in the cave, are quite a bit larger and probably somewhat younger than the tiny one in the photo above. They measure between 2 and 3 inches long. Some ancient fingers plucked this corn from its stalk, some long-ago woman–she must have been a woman–removed the kernels from the cobs and prepared food. How similar the growing methods, how similar what they ate, those people who created corn from a wild plant. Corn, beans, chiles, squash, amaranth, avocado: all served up in some way for millennia-past meals, and all available in Mexico's markets today. What foods do you eat that nourished your Stone Age forebears? How precious it is to know and taste the flavors of 7 to 10 thousand years worth of comidas (Mexico's main meal of the day)!

In addition to the important finding of dehydrated corn cob specimens (nearly 25,000 samples) and other kinds of vegetables in the substrata of the Tehuacán cave, Dr. MacNeish and subsequent archeologists found a large number of ancient tools such as chipped-flint darts used for hunting, grinding stones, and coas (pointed sticks used for planting). The investigators also found approximately 100 samples of human feces, which were examined to document the human diet of those long-ago days. Thanks to carbon dating, a method of determining the age of organic objects which was developed in the 1940s, scientists were and continue to be able to assign dates to ancient artifacts.

Part of a mural found in ruins dating to 650-900 AD in Cacaxtla, Tlaxcala. Click on the photograph to enlarge it; you'll see that what initially appear to be ears of corn are in fact a part of Mexico's creation myth: humankind is born of corn, and corn is born of humankind. Corn, which humankind created in the domestication process, cannot in fact exist without a human helping hand to husk it, take the dried kernels from the cob, and plant those kernels for subsequent harvest. Above even wheat and rice, corn is the single-most planted grain in the world; there are countries and regions where humans could not exist without corn.

This tiny mazorca (dried ear of corn) is maíz palomero: (popcorn, scientific name Zaya mays everta), native to Mexico, the only kind of corn in the world that pops. Maíz palomero is believed by many scientists to have been the first corn. Today, this original corn is tragically all but extinct in Mexico. My colleague Maestro Rafael Mier, who lives in Mexico City, wanted to plant it; he contacted a number of possible sources without locating any seed at all. He ultimately called a seed bank in a nearby Mexican state to see if they had some. They did, and they took seeds out of their freezer bank so that he could sow them on his property. His goal is to begin the reversal of the extinction of this original Mexican corn. This wee ear of popcorn, the standard size for this variety, is just about four inches long. Look how beautiful it is, with its crystalline white and golden triangular kernels.

Mexico still grows and cooks with 59 different varieties of native corns, corns that are essential to the regions in which they grow. A type of native corn that grows well in the state of Tamaulipas, for example, will probably not produce as well in Oaxaca. Nor will a native corn that is easily produced in the west-central state of Guerrero grow well in the north-eastern Mexico state of Coahuila. Climates differ, altitudes differ, soils differ: all impact Mexico's native corns. If you click on the poster to enlarge it, you'll see how very, very different Mexico's 59 corn varieties are from one another. Click on any photo to enlarge it for a better view. Photo courtesy CIMMYT.

These multi-colored mazorcas are native to the Mexican state of Tlaxcala, the smallest state in the República.

These elotes (ears of freshly harvested young corn) are native to the state of Michoacán.

These large fresh ears are elotes of maíz cacahuatzintle, from the State of México, for sale earlier this summer at Mexico City's Mercado de Jamaica. This type corn is processed naturally so it can be used to make pozole, a pork (or chicken) soup with deliciously spicy broth.

A bowl of pozole on a chilly night at the Mercado Medellín, Mexico City, a few Decembers ago.

And finally, these mazorcas are native to the far-southern state of Chiapas.

Mexico knows itself as 'the people of the corn'. Mexico knows that sin maíz no hay país–without corn, there is no country. Right now, Mexico is at a crisis point, the point of preserving its heritage of corn–or allowing that heritage to be lost to the transnational producers of uniform, high-yielding, genetically modified corn that is not Mexico's corn. The Chinese characters in the photo mean crisis, defined as both danger and opportunity. Which word will Mexico choose to safeguard its heritage and frame its future? I take my stand on the side of the 11,000 year history that defines us.

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19 de January de 2019
Everything But the Squeal :: Mexico Eats Pork, Nose to Tail

Cochinita pibil from the Yucatán (seasoned pork, slow-cooked and then shredded), a specialty of Ricardo Muñoz Zurita's Restaurante Azul/Condesa. Served in a banana leaf with a topping of pickled red onion, it's delicious.

Mexico is one of the largest producers and consumers of pork in the world, second only to China. In spite of the 'swine flu' crisis several years ago, Mexico continues to eat pork at a record-breaking pace and, every year, to export millions of tons of pork to other countries. (FIRA)

From the growers' farms to a rastro (slaughterhouse) is a speedy ride along one of Mexico's super-highways. A truck like this one, loaded with pigs, is an everyday sight throughout Mexico. Photo courtesy ROTOV.

Mexico is not nearly as squeamish as the United States in seeing where its carne de cerdo (pork meat) comes from. In fact, a stroll through just about any city market or tianguis (street market) will give ample evidence that meat–including pork meat–comes from an animal, not from a sterile, platic-wrapped styrofoam meat tray at a supermarket.

Every part of the pig is used in Mexico's kitchens. The head is ordinarily used to make pozole, a rich stew of pork meat, reconstituted dried corn, spices, and condiments.

No pork existed in Mexico until after the Spanish conquest; in fact, no domestic animals other than the xoloitzcuintle dog were used for food. The sources of animal protein were fish, frogs, and other water creatures, wild Muscovy-type ducks, the javalí (wild boar), about 200 varieties of edible insects, doves and the turkey, all native to what is now Mexico.

Mexico has been cooking head-to-tail since long before that notion came into international vogue.  Pig tails are used here for roasting–look for recipes for rabo de cerdo asado (roast pig tail). In addition, when a butcher is preparing pork carnitas, tails, ears, snouts, tongues, and indeed, everything but the squeal goes into the cazo (enormous cooking cauldron used to boil carnitas in lard).

A carnitas taco from Quiroga, Michoacán.

No matter that just below these jolly mariachi pigs at Mexico City's Mercado de Jamaica, their once-live counterparts lie ready for the butcher's knife. These fellows play on!

Chicharrón (fried pig skin) is prepared fresh every day by butchers whose specialty is pork. Nothing goes to waste. In fact, about 75% of the pig skins used to make chicharrón are imported to Mexico from the United States, where the market for pig skin is relatively small.

Just about any Mexican butcher worth his stripes can custom-cut whatever portion of the pig you need for meal preparation. In case you're not 100% familiar with the names of Mexican cuts, here are two pork cut charts, first in English and then in Spanish for comparison.

Pork cuts chart in English. Click to enlarge the image for better viewing.

Pork cuts chart in Spanish. Even in Spanish, many cuts have different names depending on which country names them. Again, click to enlarge the image for a better view.

These suckling pigs were butchered at 6 weeks to 3 months old. Known in Mexico as lechón, roast suckling pig is a delicacy by any name. Many restaurants in Mexico specialize in its preparation.

One of the most common and popular (and really delicious) kinds of street taco is tacos al pastor (shepherd style tacos). This preparation comes from Mexico City. Marinate thinly sliced pork meat in a sauce made of chiles guajillo, vinegar, and tomato. Next, layer the slices on a vertical spit so that they form the shape of a spinning top. At the top of the meat, place a pineapple without skin. Light the fire in the grate behind the spit and allow a portion of the meat to cook until slightly caramelized on the edges and tender within. Slice into very thin pieces, using them to fill a tortilla warmed on the flattop. With your sharp knife, flick a small section of the pineapple into the taco. Add the salsa you prefer, some minced onion and cilantro, and ahhhhh…the taste of Mexico!

Pozole can be red, white, or green. In this case, it's green, a specialty of the state of Guerrero. This pozole is made with pork, the broth is thickened with ground pepitas (pumpkin seeds), and you'll find a wonderful amount of maíz para pozole (nixtamal-ized dried corn) in every spoonful. That's not broccoli in the broth–it's a big chunk of avocado! On the side of the bowl at center is a piece of chicharrón (fried pork skin) and next to it at the left, a crisp tostada smeared with delicious crema (Mexican table cream).

Manitas de cerdo: pickled pigs' feet. The well-scrubbed feet are cooked in salted water, then added to vegetables cooked in a pickling solution of vinegar, chile, vegetables, and herbs. In Mexico, manitas de cerdo can be eaten as either a botana (snack) or a main dish.

One of my personal favorite pork dishes: carnitas from Michoacán! These carnitas in particular are the best I've ever eaten: large hunks of pork are boiled in lard until crispy on the outside, succulent and juicy on the inside. Chopped roughly and served with various salsas, they make the best tacos I know. Find these at Carnitas Aeropuerto, in Zamora, Michoacán.

Adobo huasteco, another deliciously spicy pork dish. It's been a while since this last appeared on my table–and it's high time I prepared it again. Click on the link for the recipe.

Last but not least, here's a rosy bouquet of pig heads for sale at the Mercado de Jamaica in Mexico City.

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11 de August de 2018
Newest Kid on the Block For Tortillas :: Molino El Pujol

Enrique Olvera, creator of Restaurante Pujol, has recently opened a tortillería (a place to make tortillas) cum snack shop, right in the smack-dab middle of ever-trendy Colonia Condesa. At Molino "El Pujol", a lot goes on in a tiny space: nixtamaliz-ation of native corns, chocolate-making, mole-making, preparation of a few other items, and some on-the-spot eating, both inside and outside the shop.

I was quite happy to be invited to visit Molino (it means 'mill') "El Pujol". A young chef friend who has been working with the establishment as a freelancer offered to talk to chef Jorge León, the in-charge person at the tortillería, to see if he could receive me a couple of weeks ago. "Sure, tell her to come on over on Monday around three o'clock." Ooooh, by all means.

Chef Jorge is a native of the Mixteca Alta, Oaxaca, a rural area approximately two and a half hours into the mountains northwest of Oaxaca city. He got his start in the kitchen when he applied for a job as dishwasher at Casa Oaxaca (in Oaxaca city). He told me, "I started working in the kitchen out of necessity, not because I knew I loved the kitchen. My family needed income–I had no idea what Casa Oaxaca was, or what working there implied. I was washing dishes, I could give my family income: that's what I knew. Little by little I learned my way around and discovered my passion." He's 32 years old, worked at Casa Oaxaca for three years and has now worked for chef Enrique Olvera for five years.

Interior at Molino "El Pujol". In addition to selling tortillas, masa (corn dough) and a few other items para llevar (to go), the little shop also sells a few vegetables to use at home, and a few menu items to eat on the premises or take out. All photos copyright Mexico Cooks! unless otherwise noted.

Jitomates riñón (kidney shaped tomatoes) are endemic to the state of Oaxaca; the tortillería brings them from there to Mexico City. They are an heirloom fruit, one of the very few heirlooms cultivated in Mexico, with a deep tomato taste that brings unique flavor to whatever recipe requires it. They're very hard to find outside Oaxaca.

It's likely that these miltomates (tiny tomate verde–what you might know in a larger size as tomatillos) are brought from the state of Oaxaca, although they grow and are eaten all over Mexico in sauces, green moles, and other prepared dishes that require them. The wee miltomate (it measures about 2cm in diameter) is a more flavorful variety of the larger tomate verde; it grows among the corn, squash, and beans in the milpa, the ancient farming method of Mexico, still used today
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Molino "El Pujol" nixtamal-izes corn for its tortillas. The shop nixtamal-izes a new pot of dried corn every day. The huge kettle of corn for this day was a black corn from southern Oaxaca. All of the corn for "El Pujol" is sourced by don Amado Ramírez, a Oaxaca-based specialist in the biodiversity of corn.

Nixtamaliz-ation of corn involves simmering it for approximately 30 minutes in a large amount of water mixed with a small amount of cal (calcium hydroxide) and allowing the corn to rest overnight in the water mixture. After its overnight rest, the corn is washed thoroughly in several waters and drained, removing all of the cal cooking water. The prepared corn is then ready to be ground for making masa (in this case, corn dough) for tortillas, tamales, and other corn-based products.

Traditionally, corn masa is ground on a hand-made volcanic stone metate while kneeling on the floor or the ground. Enlarge the photo to see that this Purépecha indigenous woman has placed a petate (hand-woven reed mat) in the place where she is kneeling. She's kneading the blue corn dough on her metate; the long stone object just in front of the masa is the metlapil, a volcanic stone rolling pin used to grind corn that she nixtamal-ized the previou
s night. Molino "El Pujol" uses a mechanized grinding system in order to maintain the correct masa consistency and texture.

The finished product: fresh-off-the-comal (griddle) tortillas, both black and white, being wrapped in chef Enrique's invention: a 'newspaper" called totomoxtle (the word means corn husk) that offers information about corn as well as protection for one's tortillas. Tortillas at Molino Pujol are offered (as of this writing) at 21 pesos for 12. They're totally natural, traditionally made, and really delicious. Tortillas from a standard neighborhood tortillería usually sell for between 13-14 pesos a kilo, but these days aren't often made the old-fashioned way, with nixtamaliz-ed corn. Photo courtesy Eater.

The day that I visited Molino "El Pujol", chef Jorge 'El Moles' León told me that a team of young chefs would be preparing mole after the shop closed for the day. I was astonished to see the sheer quantity of each of so many ingredients involved in producing what turned out to be 40 kilos–nearly 100 pounds–of mole paste that would be used for the several of Enrique Olvera's restaurants where mole is served. This photo is a tiny glimpse of the huge tub of tomatoes ready to be incorporated into the mole. Huge, you can't even imagine.

Here, an enormous pot of peanuts, some with and some without skin, turning golden over the fire before being used to make the mole.

Here, a wide, wide pot containing about 18 inches of dried, reconstituted chiles, including chile ancho. The two young chefs who prepared the mole worked from 5:00PM on Monday until 4:00AM on Tuesday to complete the job.

A tiny portion of the enormous quantity of plátano macho (plantain) used to give both sweetness and consistency to the mole.

Mole madre/mole nuevo, as served at Restaurante Pujol. I took the photo during a meal there in January 2015, when the mole madre was about 600 days old. Chef Jorge explained mole madre to me by saying, "It's like what happens when you have leftovers after a big family meal or a party. You don't want anything to go to waste, so you add a little of this and that and invite people to finish it up the next day. Or the next day." The mole madre is currently nearly 2000 days old.

Chef Jorge brought me this really unusual (and really delicious) taco to try. The dark green on the outside of the tortilla is hoja santa, an herb that when cooked tastes like anise. The tortilla on the inside of the hoja santa is black corn, the same corn that is in the photo of nixtamaliz-ation. Toasting the two together on the comal (griddle), the flavors combine to create a marvelous taste. And inside the taco is a thick slice of perfectly ripe avocado, served with a white salsa that El Molino Pujol calls "guacachile". In fact, it's made of onion, chile serrano, and a bit of oil, blended together with some kind of secret Pujol alchemy. In the glass, the white liquid is agua de maíz: a fantastically refreshing agua fresca made with corn. Wonderful.

Chef Jorge also brought me this tamal de huitlacoche (a tamal [remember: one tamal, two or more, tamales] filled with corn smut). I would happily eat another one right this minute.

A view of the tamal filling. The black/beige-y part is the huitlacoche, the reddish part around that is a spicy, rich sauce that perfectly complements the corn fungus and the surrounding masa is of course house-nixtamaliz-ed corn. Now se me truenan las tripas–my stomach is growling!

The menu board at Molino El Pujol. Prices effective July 2018 and subject to change without notice.

My young friend with the fire in his hair, chef Eríc Martínez, who asked chef Jorge if I could visit Molino El Pujol. Eríc is pictured in my kitchen, making his own mouth-watering version of mole for my birthday dinner this year. Write down his name, remember his face. The culinary world is going to hear from this young man. You deserve it all, amigo.

A huge shout-out to chef Jorge 'El Moles' León, for kindness, generosity, and information–and for taking so much time to talk with me at Molino El Pujol. I asked him for a photo, but no, thanks.

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28 de July de 2018