Thank you to Joy Victory for reminding me of my cloud love affair.
Archives for June 2012
Wandering through Oaxaca’s Central de Abastos market
A few friends in Oaxaca warned me about how crazy-insane the Central de Abastos was. It’s huge. Don’t expect to see it all, they told me. You’re going to get lost and you have to be okay with it.
I’m a fan of Mercado de la Merced in Mexico City, so my eyes light up at this kind of talk.
I got to the market around noon, and my friends were right. I couldn’t see anything from where I’d been dropped off; clothing vendors, shoe sellers and people selling remote controls and batteries stretched on and on. I asked a young woman where the food was and she looked confused — it was like she’d never been there before. (Was this place really that big?)
Eventually I found the main market building and it looked pretty similar to what I’ve seen in Mexico City, with some extra additions: long, stringy tripas dangled from rods at the meat stands; chile vendors sold costeño and amarillo and three types of chile pasilla oaxaqueña, separated by size. The sweet bread vendors sold pillowy pan de yema and these oval-shaped breads with bubbly tops, sprinkled with pink sugar.
The real action was outside at the tianguis. The Central has a tianguis every Tuesday, which means vendors, many of them women, set up outside with their wares displayed on plastic tarps.
There were so many vendors, I couldn’t see where the line ended. They sold mountains of chiles de agua and baskets of heirloom tomatoes, and stacks of fresh basil, rosemary, poleo, chepiche. They sold pitayas and teeny cactus fruits called jiotilla, the size of kumquats. One group of vendors sold panela, unrefined cane sugar, in massive brownie-sized blocks. Further down about 30 women in aprons sat on stacks of newspaper and tied bundles of garlic together. Past them, perhaps a dozen more sat and tied bundles of spring onions.
In between it all, ambulant vendors hurried by, selling Oaxacan oregano and cal in rock form. “Quiere la cal, doña? Doñita, la cal!”
After about two hours, I’d loaded up two bags with purchases (there’s a clay artesanía section too, where I bought two comales de barro), and refueled with an empanada de coloradito. I scribbled down a few notes in my notebook and the last line was: “Just. Totally. WHOA.”
If you’re into food and you’re visiting Oaxaca City, you must stop by. My food friends in Oaxaca tell me Tuesday is the best day.
How to get there…
Pitaya (organ-pipe cactus fruit) agua fresca
For a long time, I thought I didn’t like pitaya. I thought it was the hot-pink fruit with white polka-dotted flesh. They’re gorgeous, but they don’t taste like anything.
Then I started seeing these things popping up at the markets. The vendors said they were pitaya, too, and that they were a cactus fruit from the órgano (organ-pipe) cactus in Jalisco.
I finally tasted one at Mercado San Juan last week. The vendor cleared off the spines with a soft brush and cut the fruit open, revealing a deep ruby red flesh exactly the same color as the nail polish I wear on my toes in winter. (Remind me later to tell you about my Mexican-fruit nail polish-naming idea. Mashed capulín is my second fave color after this.)
With its delicate black sesame-type seeds, the pitaya was even prettier than a red prickly pear fruit. I bought a kilo and decided to make an agua fresca.
A few days later, the pitayas were going bad and starting to give me the evil eye, so I finally blended the fruit with water and sugar, and strained it. Served a pretty pinkish-red glass to my friend Rebecca and she loved it — “a cross between cucumber and watermelon,” she said. (I’m thinking now that some jalapeño-infused simple syrup and tequila might make a kick-ass cocktail.)
Pitayas taste sweeter than a regular prickly-pear tuna fruit, and the flesh is a little more crumbly and moist. If you have other ideas recipe ideas, I’d love to hear them. In the meantime here’s a neat article on other types of edible cactus fruits.
Pitaya Agua Fresca
Makes 10 cups
1 lb. pitayas, spines removed
8 cups water
1/4 cup plus 1 1/2 tablespoons sugar, or sweetening agent of your choice
Juice of 1/2 lime (optional)
Cut the pitayas in half, and then in quarters. The fruit should easily peel back from the skin, if they’re ripe enough. Toss the flesh into the blender jar and discard the peels. Add about four cups water and half the sugar, blend until smooth. Strain into a pitcher and repeat. Taste for lime juice at the end. Refrigerate and serve cold, or over ice.
Hot-ass chile piquín salsa
My only knowledge of chile piquín prior to Saturday was that it was sold two ways in Mexico City: as a wrinkly, small red chile, or in powder form. (The powder is often used in spicy cocktails here.)
Last Saturday, a stand at Mercado Medellín had little bags of fresh piquín — small, green pea-sized chiles with rounded tips. I stopped and stared. “Es chile piquín?” I asked the vendor. She said yes and gave me a quick recipe: “Los asas, y los muelas con limón y sal.” You toast them, then grind them with lime and salt.
Seriously — how good did that sound? Especially with this heat we’ve been having. So I bought a bag, not really knowing what they tasted like.
When I got to my friend Liz’s house, site of cooking activities for the afternoon, I popped one in my mouth. My brain yelled “FIRE!” so I spit it out. Oh my god. It was like chewing on a raw habanero, or what I imagine that to be like. Toasting them would reduce the heat a little bit, so I forged ahead with my salsa.
I toasted garlic, tomatillos and chiles on the comal, then ground everything in the molcajete with some coarse sea salt and a little water. I ended with a squeeze of lime juice, and then dipped my spoon in to taste.
The result was a firecracker: right on the line between acid and sweet, with a hum of citrus from the lime. And the heat packed a double-wallop — it hit your tongue, then softened, then came back as a warm rush inside your mouth. I was addicted immediately.
“Try the salsa!” I told Erik, Liz’s husband. He did and coughed and turn red. I kept telling Crayton to try it, and he put a few drops on his tostada. That was enough for him.
I, meanwhile, kept spooning little teaspoons on my tostada and then wiping my damp forehead.
Fresh chile piquín salsa
Makes about 1/2 to 3/4 cup
Note: I’ve been making a lot of salsas in the blender lately, and there’s a huge flavor difference in making one in the molcajete. If you’ve got a molcajete, please use it. I promise you won’t be grinding very long — I spent maybe 10 minutes.
Ingredients
1 medium garlic clove, skin on
2 medium-sized tomate verde (I’m referring to the larger variety of tomatillo sold in Mexico; if you can only find the small ones, use three or four)
1 tablespoon fresh chile piquín
Juice of 1/2 lime
Sea salt
To serve:
Tortillas or tostadas
Avocado
Directions
Heat a comal or nonstick skillet on medium-high. Place tomate in the center of the comal and the garlic at the edge, so it doesn’t burn. Toast both until soft and blackened in spots. Remove to a small bowl.
Lower the flame slightly and add the chile piquín to the comal. Move quickly with a spatula or heat-proof cooking utensil; anything plastic will melt, because a hot comal is a beast. (Mine heats my kitchen in the winter.) The chiles should blacken in less than a minute. If they start popping all over the place, lower the flame and stir them vigorously. Remove to the molcajete when done.
Peel the garlic and place in the molcajete with your chiles. Add about 1/2 teaspoon coarsely ground sea salt. (I’m referring to the kind that goes in your salt grinder, the big kernels of salt.) Grind everything together with about a tablespoon of water. When you’ve got a thick paste — and it doesn’t have to be perfect — add the tomate verde one at a time. Grind some more, until the skins are mostly broken down. Add a little more water if you need.
Squeeze in the lime juice and stir to combine. Taste for more salt if necessary.
Serve on tostadas — I used teeny taquería-size tortillas that I’d crisped on the comal — topped with little wedges of avocado.
Remember that Saveur Food Blog Award contest last month?
I didn’t win. But the nice folks over at Istanbul Eats did.
Thank you to everyone who voted for me. I really do feel proud that I made it to the finals.
Mexico City street sounds, circa 1839
There are an extraordinary number of street-cries in Mexico, which begin at dawn and continue till night, performed by hundred of discordant voices, impossible to understand at first…. At dawn you are awakened by the shrill and desponding cry of the Carbonero, the coalmen, “Carbon, Señor?” which, as he pronounces it, sounds like “Carbosiu?” Then the grease-man takes up the song, “Mantequilla! lard! lard! at one real and a half.” “Salt beef! good salt beef!” (“Cecina buena!”) interrupts the butcher in a hoarse voice. …Then passes by the cambista, a sort of Indian she-trader or exchanger, who sings out, “Tejocotes por venas de chile?” a small fruit which she proposes exchanging for hot peppers. No harm in that.
….
Towards evening rises the cry of “Tortillas de cuajada?” “Curd-cakes?” or, “Do you take nuts?” succeeded by the night-cry of “Chestnuts hot and roasted!” and by the affectionate vendors of ducks; “Ducks, oh my soul, hot ducks!” “Maize-cakes,” etc., etc. As the night wears away, the voices die off, to resume next morning with fresh vigour.
This is from the excellent Life in Mexico, written by Frances Calderón de la Barca, wife of the first Spanish diplomat to Mexico. It’s a collection of her letters while she lived in Mexico City from 1839-1842, and it’s a must-read if you’re interested in this city and its history.
The book is in the public domain, so you can read it for free online — UPenn’s digital library has a full copy, or you can listen to an audio version LibriVox. Or if you’re like me and you like turning physical pages, you can order the book on Amazon.
BLT’s with ancho-pasilla spread and sauteed red onions
My craving for BLT’s started with the bread. Not Bimbo, but thickly sliced, toasted, homemade bread. The kind that deserves a good slathering of Brazilian banana-orange marmalade, which was slowly going bad in our fridge.
But back to the BLT. It would be a messy monster, with thick slices of heirloom tomato and thick slices of bacon. Nestled over the bacon would be a mound of sauteed red onions, still sort of al dente, and a layer of chile mayonnaise that oozed out the sides. But not a creamy mayonnaise, something more chile-forward (yes, I just said “chile forward”) — something with a little tobacco and fruit in it.
Last week I was in a bit of a funk because because mosquitoes kept torturing me while I slept. On Wednesday I finally found the ganas to make the bread. (Used Joy of Cooking’s Milk Bread recipe, without the egg wash because I forgot.) Besides the bread rising like a monster in the oven, it came out fine.
Last night — I had to act quickly because the bread was going stale — I fried the bacon in our cast-iron skillet and tossed the onions in the bacon fat, de-glazing everything with a bit of Indio beer. Whipped up a quick salsa in my blender and added a little mayo to even everything out.
The result was a two-hand-holder sandwich: big, gloppy, chin-staining, with juicy tomato bits dripping out the bottom. The spread had exactly the chile taste I wanted — hints of chocolate and tobacco and berries, with just a touch of heat.
I finished my sandwich before Crayton did, so I looked at him very sweetly and asked for a bite of his. Because he’s nice he said yes. I think I ate his last piece of bacon.
BLT’s with ancho-pasilla spread and sauteed red onions
Makes two big sandwiches with some left over
Note: The onions really make a difference here, adding a layer of sweetness and some texture. I’d definitely want to include them in any future BLT experiments. Also, I was tempted to make a chipotle mayo but I’m glad I didn’t — the smoky bacon stands out that much more.
For the BLTs:
Four slices thick white bread, toasted
A few leaves high-quality lettuce
1 1/2 small beefsteak tomatoes, sliced
150g or 5-6 thick slices smoked bacon
3 thick slices red onion
A few tablespoons dark beer
For the chile spread:
2 ancho chiles, stemmed, seeded and de-veined
2 pasilla chiles, stemmed, seeded and de-veined
1 small clove garlic, peeled
1 large tomatillo (50g or about 2 oz.), simmered in water until soft
1 1/2 tablespoons water
2 tablespoons mayonnaise
spritz of fresh lime juice
salt and pepper to taste
Hydrate chiles in hot water for about 10 minutes, until skin has softened. Place in blender with garlic and water, and tomatillo, and blend into thick paste. Add more water if necessary. Let cool to room temperature and stir in mayonnaise, lime juice, salt and pepper. Chill spread until ready to use.
Meanwhile, to make BLTs, fry bacon in a heavy skillet, or however you usually fry bacon. (Some people use the oven.) Remove bacon and strain out most of the grease. With the flame on medium-high, add onions to pan and cook, stirring constantly so they soak up all the yummy charred bits. Add a little more grease if they start to burn. After a minute or two, once the onions have started to turn translucent, add a stream of beer (if you want) to deglaze the pan. You could also add water or chicken broth.
To serve, spread each slice of bread liberally with chile spread. Top with lettuce, tomato, bacon and onions. Cover with remaining slice of bread and cut in half to serve.