An Oaxacan food trip, with recipes
Mia Stainsby
Vancouver Sun
When it comes to food, my husband is of the Fear Factor school of eating. During a two-week holiday in Mexico’s Oaxaca state, he was in search of the holy mescal grail. At one tasting, he sampled a side plate of worms. (“A bit like capsules that pop between the teeth,” he reported. “Ick,” I retorted.)
Vancouver Sun
When it comes to food, my husband is of the Fear Factor school of eating. During a two-week holiday in Mexico’s Oaxaca state, he was in search of the holy mescal grail. At one tasting, he sampled a side plate of worms. (“A bit like capsules that pop between the teeth,” he reported. “Ick,” I retorted.)
Later, I joined him in another Oaxacan specialty, chapulines (grasshoppers). First in an ice cream cone where the spiny legs made for ticklish licking, and then, more visibly piled atop little tortillas with Mexican cheese.
“I’m feeling my inner Tony Bourdain,” he said, crunching into the chapuline-topped memelitas, washing them down with mescal. Even I liked the Mexican delicacy, huitlacoches, otherwise known at corn smut.
While I admire his eating without borders approach, there’s a whole lot more to Mexican food than grasshoppers and worms and mescal. More to the point, there’s more the Tex-Mex burritos, enchiladas, tacos, and nachos that have fooled us into thinking we’re eating just like Mexicans.
That’s northern Mexican food, impregnated with Texan and Californian ideas. It’s like confining Chinese food to chop suey, chow mein and egg foo yong — a travesty. While Mexican cuisine doesn’t match the breadth and depth of China, it certainly doesn’t get anywhere near the respect and recognition it deserves. The United Nations took note in 2011, adding Mexico to one of five countries in which the cuisine is an “intangible cultural heritage.” Puebla, Veracruz, Mexico City (a fusion of regional cuisines) and Merida are other areas rich in food culture.
Oaxaca region’s unique regional cooking dates back to pre-Columbian times. I ate in small villages, venturing out by collectivo taxi or bus, to markets in small villages and during a bike and hiking trip with guides to other villages, In Oaxaca city, I ate in some of the most celebrated restaurants in Latin America.
The soul of Oaxacan food are in the myriad of moles (mo-lay), a balance of chilies, spices, herbs, vegetables, and sometimes, yes, chocolate. The meals I fondly remember weren’t in the high-end places where international influences creep in. I liked the really authentic dishes, unchanged for centuries, and I liked the character-driven places where you eat them. One dish I’d never heard of and which immediately stole my heart was the tlayuda, an oversized thin tortilla cooked on a comal or grill. Traditionally, they’re placed in a palm leaf basket which gives it a nubbly texture and somewhat smoky flavour. It’s layered with pork fat, refried beans, Oaxacan cheese, salsa and meat or veggies and eaten flat or folded.
The best we had was at Tlayudas de Libres, where it was cooked on a streetside grill, belching out smoke. It’s been going for three generations, opening at 9 p.m., and staying open all night with everyone from students to workers to politicians coming in.
In the mountain village of Llano Grande, I had a memorable breakfast, a rustic study in simplicity done well, an airy omelette covered in a delicate tomato sauce. It looked ravishing in the morning sun (we’d moved the table outside to the yard, thus attracting some friendly village dogs).
In Cuaji Moloyas (which were told, means “the place where the mole freezes in the pot”), I visited another village restaurant, with another smiling and stout woman stirring pots of food. My poblano chili was not memorable but when I asked about a sauce simmering on the stove, she gave me a small dish of it with chicken. It was a masa-based tomato sauce. Delicious.
At a market in the village of Zaachla, we talked to a young man who spoke English fluently. He and a friend were eating at a tlayuda fonda (family run food stall). He said the rendered pork fat used on them is taken from the bottom of the pan because it’s tastier. We treated them to lunch and ordered ourselves squash blossom tlayudas, which, we wondered might have been the root of our problem later in the evening and the next day. I spent most of the day tethered to the hotel room, close to a toilet.
At most markets, we saw the tejate lady, whipping up a beige, foamy beverage that’s was described to us as an energy drink. It’s water mixed with paste of maize, fermented cacao beans, mamey (a fruit) pits, rosita de cacao (flower). It’s actually not bad for a drink that looks like over-watery pancake batter.
At Itatoni, it’s a celebration of heritage corn, which for millennia, has been the staple of Mexican food. (It’s a favourite of the legendary Alice Waters, of Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley and an early visionary of local, sustainable foods in North America.) At Itatoni, I was introduced to tetela, or triangular tortilla turnovers with various fillings. They grind their own cornmeal and the cooks press tortillas and cook the food to order. They fill tetelas on the griddle, flipping the sides over, forming a triangle. The blue corn version we tried came with a sauce like fresh farm cream. So good!
I loved the fruity dishes from the southern Isthmus of Tehuantepec region. Tropical fruits insert themselves into savoury dishes at every turn. At an Isthmus restaurant called Zandunga, one such dish (estefada del istano) is a paste of finely ground beef, pineapple, apple, and banana. Garnaches are small corn tortillas, topped with cheese and a tropical fruit sauce. And for dessert, squares of sweet potatoes and pineapple paste. On the beverage menu, I see how much we have to learn about Oaxacan mescal: The mescals on offer was broken down by 20 varieties of agave, from which mescal is made. It was like a wine list, sorted by grape varietals.
At the 20 de Novembre market, a corridor nicknamed Hell Alley, spews thick, dark smoke. It smells like a barbecue and that’s just what’s happening in there. Vendors display thin slabs of beef and pork, about three feet by two feet. You order how much you want, they cut it and ladies, flapping paper fans like giant herons taking off, grill the meat on wood-fired barbecues. There’s chorizo and veggies to grill as well and side orders of salsa and guacamole, all extras. Yelling, pushing, elbow-to-elbow dining, hawkers hawking, are the flip side to lip-smackingly good eating. Should you die on the spot, your body will be well-preserved, like bacon, from sitting in Hell Alley.
At higher-end restaurants, like Casa Oaxaca and Origen, service ramps up and the food is kissed by the outside world. It hasn’t the heartfelt pull of ancestral times. Salsa is made tableside in a molcajete (mortar and pestle) with roasted tomatoes, tomatillos, garlic, onions, and chilies. Wild herbs, blossoms and corn sit in a virginal white bowl, waiting for a server to pour hot lemon grass broth, transforming the mélange into soup.
Suckling pig becomes a confit with almond mole; pig’s feet are wrought into a terrine; prawns are skewered and dressed with guajillo (chili pepper) sauce (really light, really restrained) and served with a swoosh of chayote and banana purée.
A bubbled blue corn tortilla, baked with fresh cheese, is more apt to be called artisanal than traditional. The most wonderful rendering of old and new came as a guava tart with rose petal sorbet and fresh raspberries. The sorbet screamed of roses and the swoosh of raspberry coulis was just as aggressively raspberry — thanks to amazing farmers producing beautiful produce for these modern chefs.
The villages in Mexico have held fast to pre-Columbian traditions while they’ve incorporated the meats and other ingredients that the Spaniards introduced but food keeps their identity strong; it’s their pride, their union and their soul. They dream up all kinds of festivals and rally around food. At one time, and perhaps still, the worth of a woman in marriage was measured by how well she cooked those dishes.
But, alas, the world is breathing down its neck. Pilar Cabrera, who runs La Olla restaurant and Casa de los Sabores Cooking School in Oaxaca, sees traditions of the most intact food eroding. Of all the regions in Mexico, Oaxacans have held strongest to their roots which are Zapotec and Mixtec.
“We need to keep and preserve our ingredients and recipes because one day, we might lose them. We need to write and research our own recipes. All the cookbooks that have been written about our cuisine are by chefs from other parts of the world. This is very sad,” says Cabrera.
“Women are losing parts of our cooking traditions. Change is slow but it’s happening. We’re losing some ingredients and people have begun to work to protect mole ingredients.”
When I ask about Oaxaca being the “land of the seven moles,” she’s exasperated. “It’s a big mistake. It’s discouraging. It might have been someone marketing. We don’t have just seven moles. As you move outward from central Oaxaca, there are more moles and more moles. It depends of the blend of chilies, herbs and spices.” Although seven are the most common moles, there are upwards of 200 moles. And they don’t necessarily use chocolate. “Chocolate is only for seasoning,” says Cabrera.
Moles are stars of a meal. On our bike tour, we stopped for lunch at our guide’s favourite fonda in a village. The menu board perplexed me. It was a list of mole sauces. As the guide (who trained for the Seoul Summer Olympics in 1988 before being pre-empted by a call to serve in the army) explained, you choose your mole and as the small print at the bottom of the menu showed, the meat is secondary. The cooks will often send out a mole sampling to gringos and for me, it had to be the negro (black) mole. For $5, it was a beautifully complex, subtlely sweet, gentle sauce (accompanied by chicken). It’s often the festival mole and is made with seven types of chili peppers, plantain, onion, tomato, tomatillo, clove, cinnamon, chocolate, nuts, tortillas, avocado leaves and more. The chili peppers are roasted, thus the blackness.
There are hundreds of chilies in Mexico and moles should have, at least, a bit of spiciness.
“My grandmother was my first teacher and if it wasn’t spicy, she used to say ‘it tastes like sh–,’” Cabrera laughs. “A little heat is good but some moles are not so spicy. You play with smoky, sweet, hot. Negro is the most complicated with 20 to 30 ingredients and it’s the celebration mole, made for festivals.”
Susana Trilling, who has written a cookbook on Oaxacan cuisine, runs Seasons of My Heart Cooking School in Oaxaca and hosted a PBS show of the same name, explains the allure of Oaxacan food and why she moved there from the U.S.
“The cooking techniques here are ancient customs that have been preserved for over 1,000 years and that is what gives the food its unique flavour. Crops are picked in their ripe stage to allow the flavours to reach a delicious peak. Every dish has its own magic, and its own traditional sauce to make it even more special. Oaxacans are proud of their food and rightly so, for its flavour can be subtle or very intense but always pure Oaxaqueno. Worldwide fascination with the culinary delights of Mexican cuisine has continued to grow and as a result Oaxaca has earned recognition as a very special place with a unique cooking style.”
Mia at Mont Alban, pre-Colombian ruins.
A cooking class
Pilar Cabrera navigates the colourful La Merced Market in Oaxaca and we, nine adults, follow, like her goslings. The market is for locals and talk about locavore — fresh cheeses, meat from nearby ranches, Mexican chocolates, fruits, vegetables, flowers. At the comedones (food stalls) women sell food and drink.
We’re taking a Oaxacan cooking class at Cabrera’s cooking school, Casa de los Sabores and we’re shopping for, sampling, and learning about ingredients, then we’ll head back to her home to cook and eat.
On the menu, she has memelitas (small corn tortillas with toppings), salsa de dos chilies (salsa with two chilies), soap de flor. de Calabaza (squash blossom soup), verge Oaxaqueno con pollo (Oaxacan green mole with chicken), and pay de reqeuson con salsa de chocolate de Oaxaca (cheesecake with Oaxacan chocolate sauce).
We’re taking a Oaxacan cooking class at Cabrera’s cooking school, Casa de los Sabores and we’re shopping for, sampling, and learning about ingredients, then we’ll head back to her home to cook and eat.
On the menu, she has memelitas (small corn tortillas with toppings), salsa de dos chilies (salsa with two chilies), soap de flor. de Calabaza (squash blossom soup), verge Oaxaqueno con pollo (Oaxacan green mole with chicken), and pay de reqeuson con salsa de chocolate de Oaxaca (cheesecake with Oaxacan chocolate sauce).
Cabrera also runs a restaurant in the city called La Jolla (the pot), where my husband and I had dinner the night before, supping on some Oaxacan specialties, including the chapulines (grasshoppers) that Oaxacans adore, the most delicate tamale ever, and mole amarilla with rabbit and pitiona (a verbena-like herb). Dessert was a flan with mammee fruit salsa (it’s a fuzzy-skinned fruit that’s been described as a combination of pumpkin, sweet potato, cherry and almonds) and rosita di cacao flower (an aromatic, pungent flower).
Cabrera is no stranger to Canada and has been a guest chef at the Stratford Chefs School in Ontario as well as at a Mexican restaurant in Toronto. She’s planning a trip to the Pacific Northwest in the near future, she says. The celebrated Chicago chef, Rick Bayless, who operates two of the most authentic and exciting Mexican restaurants in North America (Topolobampo and Frontera Grill) visits Cabrera and the Oaxaca region every year. In fact, I visited a small Oaxacan village (where a rabid dog, quarantined to a flat rooftop, greeted us in the throes of hysteria, foaming at the mouth) and Bayless had been there a week earlier.
“I love this place during the weekend especially,” says Cabrera of the La Merced. Cabrera navigates the market, picking up greens, masa (a corn flour dough for the memelita base), fresh Oaxacan cheeses, squash blossoms, herbs (like avocado leaves, yerbasante leaves, expazote leaves), chayote, tomatillos, huitlacoches (corn fungus, also known as corn smut) divvying the ingredients into shopping bags we’re all assigned to. “You have to carry a lot of change,” she says. “The small vendors don’t have much change.”
I buy some mole to take home. Cabrera assures me the sniffer dogs at customs will not take me down. It’s made with chilies unique to Oaxaca. She buys roses from one of the many flower vendors. She introduces us to tajate, a cold beverage unique to Oaxaca made with maize flour, mammee pits, rosita de cacao, fermented cacao beans ground into a paste. It’s popular with indigenous Mixtec and Zapotec peoples in the area. Cabrerea says it’s good for energy. In other words, it’s the Red Bull of Oaxaca. I tried tejate a few days later at another market and considering its beige-grey hue and foamy texture, it’s quite delicious, slightly chocolatey and sweet.
At the cooking class, in Cabrera’s modern, glassy home, we are three Canadian couples and a Scottish mother and two daughters; we’re asked to don grandma bib aprons which don’t exactly thrill the men. We’re given handed recipes and tasks. Even in her contemporary kitchen, she relies on the coal (a simple, flat, round griddle) for grilling tortillas, toasting spices, cooking vegetables and meat. The coal goes back to pre-Columbian days. Next, the molcajete, a stone mortar and pestle, which coaxes more flavour out of grind chilies, spices, garlic than a food processor.
The cazuela, a heat-resistant clay dish, is something I’ve seen at every restaurant in Oaxaca, glazed grassy green inside and unglazed outside. I came close to buying one but knew it would end up a ‘what-was-I thinking’ purchase and I’ve made far too many of them on my travels. (Like the four au dai tops I had tailor-made in Vietnam — those tops with the long side slits that look heavenly on young tiny, ethereal Vietnamese women. What was I thinking?)
We knead the corn masa, pinch off small balls and flatten them in a tortilla press for the memelita appetizers. We cook them on the coal and add toppings of queso fresco, huitlacoche and tomato.
We grind roasted chilies in the molcajete, throwing in garlic and salt. Then we grind tomatillos into a purée. They’ll go into the salsa.
For the soup, we strip kernels off corn and cook them with onions, zucchini and squash blossoms. And then, we turn to a modern device, the blender, to make the gorgeous soup.
The green mole for the poached chicken requires blistering chilies, tomatillos, garlic on the coal. The coal, while primitive, is a lot lighter and easier to handle than a fry pan. Greens, masa, cloves, allspice berries, cumin are added to the chili mix.
By the time the dishes are all prepared, we’re famished but before we eat, Cabrera sits us down for another Oaxacan specialty — mescal, which is finally finding its way to North America. While tequila is made in industrial quantities, mescal is still an artisanal craft. One facility I toured had a horse powered mill to grind the cooked agave leaves. Cabrera pours us three mescals from local producers, all smooth with individual complexities.
The memelitas quickly disappear. The huitlacoche (mushrooms, really, that grow on corn) in the topping doesn’t deter anyone. Squash blossom soup is velvety smooth. We’re pretty pleased with the Oaxacan signature — the mole. It’s soft and herbal and spicy and sweet, an unusual complexity wrought of herbs we’d be hard-pressed to find in Vancouver like epazote leaves, yerbasanta leaves. Jalapeno peppers add a little heat; cloves, allspice berries and corn masa round out the flavours. The cheesecake dessert has the tress leche thing going on with evaporated and condensed milk along with requeson cheese, which is a lot like ricotta.
The meal done, Cabrera called for cabs to whisk us back to our hotels but they’re late. Something one must get used to in Oaxaca city are traffic delays due to protests and demonstrations. On that day, it was a union thing and members were protesting corruption in a water contract tender. Someone was shot. Taxis arrived and for drivers, it was just another day. I love the way drivers keep their cool, rarely laying on the horn or steaming up during back-ups and gridlocks. It’s that kind of level-headed endurance, it would seem, that has informed Oaxacan food, for centuries.
Recipes
These are some recipes from the cooking class at Casa de los Sabores in Oaxaca. I talked to Gilles L’Heureux, chef and co-owner of Los Cuervos Taqueria and Cantina, about where to buy some of the specialty ingredients. The biggest challenge in Mexican cooking outside of Mexico is matching the superlative corn tortillas and masa, he says. Trade laws prevent exports of Mexican corn. Mexican cheese can be replicated here, but the milk is different and will never taste the same he says. Ingredients like chiles des arbol and pasilla chiles can be found at Latin markets like El Sureno Market (1730 Commercial Dr.). – Mia Stainsby
Salsa de dos chiles (Two chile salsa)
(from Casa de los Sabores)
This recipe called for 3 avocado leaves but it’s unlikely you’ll find them locally, so I’ve omitted the ingredient. It also calls for grinding in a mortar and pestle which releases the best flavours but if you don’t have one, a food processor will have to suffice.
6 chiles de arbol
4 small or 2 large chiles pasilla
12 medium tomatillos, papery husks removed, rinsed
3 peeled garlic cloves
½ tsp (2 mL) sea salt
Clean the chiles de arbol and chiles pasilla by wiping them with a damp cloth. With heavy skillet over medium heat, add chiles and toast, pressing down with spatula until they start to blister and release their aroma, about 5 to 10 seconds. There may be a few brown spots but do not over-toaste to avoid bitterness. Turn and repeat for other side. Transfer to a small bowl when done. Pour hot water over to cover. Set aside until they’ve softened, about 10 minutes. Drain, reserving the soaking liquid. Remove the stems. Remove seeds if desired. Chop coarsely. Set aside.
In the same skillet, put tomatillos and roast, turning often with tongs until almost entirely black, about 7 to 10 minutes. Transfer to a bowl and set aside. When cool enough to handle, cut the roasted tomatillos in halves. Set aside.
In molcajete or mortar and pestle, grind garlic cloves and salt; add the chiles, one by one, and grind until crushed, adding some reserved soaking liquid to facilitate grinding. In small batches, add the chopped roasted tomatillos and grind to a coarse puree. Taste and adjust the seasoning with salt if needed.
Sopa de flor de Calabaza (Squash blossom soup)
Save this for summer when squash blossom brighten your garden and when corn is fresh from the farmers’ market. In place of quesillo, you could substitute Monterey Jack or mozzarella; and crème fraiche or sour cream can stand in for Mexican crema.
2 tbsp (30 mL) butter
1 tbsp (15 mL) diced white onion
1 cup (250 mL) fresh corn kernels
2 cups (500 mL) squash blossoms, rinsed, trimmed, with 6 reserved for garnish
4 cups (1 L) chicken broth
Salt
Freshly ground pepper
Shredded quesillo
Mexican crema
In a large pot, over medium heat, heat butter until melted and hot. Saute onions until translucent, about 5 minutes. Add corn kernels and cook about 3 minutes. Add the zucchini and cook until beginning to soften, about 3 minutes. Add squash blossoms and heat for 1 minute. Transfer to a blender and puree. Transfer back to the large pot. Add the chicken stock.
Heat, occasionally stirring, until soup comes to a boil. Season to taste with salt and pepper.
To serve, ladle the soup into bowls. Garnish each with a reserved squash blossom, some shredde4d quesillo and a dollop of crema.
Makes 6 servings.
