The Mija Chronicles

Mexican food and culture, on both sides of the border

chiles

Hot-ass chile piquín salsa

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Chile piquin 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.

Chile piquín

Fresh chile piquín, after I brought it home

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.

Red taquería-style salsa

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For awhile now, I’ve liked green salsa more than red. Green was always brighter, more acidic. A drizzle on my taco set off sparks on my tongue. And when the salsa had avocado, as green taquería salsas often do here, I wanted to curl up and take a nap in its creaminess.

Red salsa never hit me that way. It wasn’t luxurious or intense. Red salsa just sat there. Blinking. (Little did I know red salsa doesn’t work like that. It plants a seed, and then hurries away to see what you do with it.)

In the past few months, whenever I’d visit taquerías, I’d find myself looking at the red more than the green. I already knew what the green contained: chile serrano or chile verde, maybe chile de árbol or an avocado. But the red remained an enigma. Did the taquero use tomatoes? They’re not essential. Which chiles did he use? Guajillo, cascabel, mora? There were no acidic tomatillos to mask everything. With red salsa, you tasted the chiles themselves. The result was subtler, more mysterious.

I’ve been wanting to experiment with red salsas at home, so I tiptoed into the game with a batch of guajillo-árbol salsa from Ricardo Muñoz’s excellent book Salsas Mexicanas. I’ve used it several times before, always with good results.

This salsa contained a few tomatoes, pureed with toasted chiles until they became a thick, deep-red soup. (In another time five thousand years ago, maybe I could’ve dyed my hair with this stuff.) One bite murmured of garlic and the piney herbs of the guajillo. Then came the searing heat — like, straddling the line of edible — from the 8 chiles de árbol I used. Heat is the main difference between a table salsa and one you’d cook meat and vegetables in, by the way. The former, if you like spicy food, should be tongue-swellingly hot.

Seven days later, I still have a glass jar of this salsa in my fridge. I’ve slowly been working my way through it, spooning it into quesadillas, on chips, over eggs. It’s fabulous on anything.

Recipe below. Oh, and tell me — where do you come down on the fence? Red or green, and why?

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Smoky, spicy chile mora salsa

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One of my new favorite smells is the chile mora. It’s a smoked, dried jalapeño, and therefore classified as a chipotle. But it’s a bit sweeter and more raisin-like than the brown chipotles you see in the markets. It’s also not as hot. (The chile morita, a cousin, is much spicier.)

Chile moras smell so intoxicating — a heady mix of chocolate, raisins, herbs and smoke — that I was almost tempted to leave the batch I bought on my kitchen counter as an air freshener. But I bought them to make a salsa, so that’s what I was going to do. If I didn’t eat the chiles raw first.

Tomatoes and onions, after they've been roasted on the comal

Decided to use the molcajete, and I used the same technique as in other molcajete salsas I’ve posted on this blog — first grind the salt and aromatics, then the chiles, then the tomatoes. Each ingredient is added a little bit at a time to ensure the proper consistency.

My problem was that the chiles just wouldn’t break down. I’d gotten a few tough ones in my batch from the market, and their skin didn’t soften even after 20 minutes in hot water. Plus this time I was envisioning a thin table salsa — something that you could spoon into a taco, or over eggs.

So I broke out the immersion blender.

(You: “You did?”)

Yes, I did. A few quick pulses and a chorrito de agua and boom. I had what I wanted — a salsa that had the consistency of a thick soup or porridge, with bits of chile seeds still visible.

It should be noted that I still don’t trust myself with a blender to make salsas. Of the two batches of salsa I made, the second one came out looking like pureed tomato sauce. (Still tasty, but the texture was, as Mexicans say, equis. Meaning mediocre and nothing special.) My preferred salsa texture veers toward the heftier side.

Because the chile moras are so smoky, this salsa tastes good on just about anything. I liked it especially on sweet vegetables, which played off the mora’s raisiny notes. Layered it on a corn tortilla between roasted onions and red peppers, and it was just about perfect.
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How to make homemade enchilada sauce in three easy steps

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Whenever I ate enchiladas growing up — which means whenever my mom decided to make them, around once a year — we used canned sauce.

It was completely fine. I had no problems.

When it finally occurred to me as an adult that one could make homemade sauce (and that it would perhaps be better to make one’s own sauce if you were living in Mexico), I had no desire to. That would take like two days of roasting and grinding and stewing, right?

Wrong.

I had an epiphany a few days ago that changed my whole enchilada outlook: it’s possible to make a really good sauce — eons above of the canned stuff — in about 30 minutes.

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How to make chiles rellenos, Mexican-grandmother style

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My friend Lizzie lives with a real Mexican grandmother. Her name is Juanita and she just turned 90 years old. I’m not sure what her secret is, but she’s very active — she cooks big meals every day at lunch, and she shops at the tianguis, where she knows all the vendors. Plus she still does her hair every day, wrapping it in various braids and twists that are bobby-pinned to her head.

I’ve been hearing about Juanita and her cooking for a few months. (And envying Lizzie from afar for her housing arrangement.) Finally, it worked out yesterday that I could come over for lunch. Juanita would make chiles rellenos and white rice, and I could take pictures and notes. I was super excited. How fun was this going to be?

I arrived around 11:30 a.m., right when the trash man was stationed outside Juanita’s yellow apartment building, ringing his bell. (This is the universal sign meaning, “Neighbors, come outside and bring your trash, because the trash people are here.”) I walked through a small atrium and up a set of Art Deco-looking steps.

Juanita’s apartment was comprised of several small, cheery rooms. In the kitchen, a half-wall separated the area into two spaces: one held the fridge and a small, three-seater table; the other hosted the sink, stove and a few cabinets.

It wasn’t a cocina integral, and there was exactly one counter to chop things, if you didn’t count the kitchen table. But it worked. Juanita zipped around in her white nursing-style shoes, opening drawers, washing dishes, digging through the fridge to make space for a container of arroz con leche. Everything had its place.

We started on the chiles right away. First step: toasting the chiles on the comal.


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Homemade black bean burgers with cilantro-chipotle mayo, and ginger-carrot slaw

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My local grocery store doesn’t sell frozen veggie burgers. So if I want one, I have to make them from scratch. (Insert groan here.)

Really, I hadn’t craved them until recently. Who wants a veggie burger when you can have a warm carnitas taco? But then my pants starting getting a wee bit too tight. And I thought, well, maybe it’d be nice to have some more veggies in my life. (This from the girl who used to eat salads every day in the U.S., and whip up a frozen veggie burger at least twice a week. Sometimes I don’t know who I am anymore.)

I’d made homemade veggie burgers once before when I lived in Dallas, and I remember it being an intensive process, and one I didn’t necessarily want to repeat again. Then, a few months ago, I was flipping through a copy of Cooking Light that my mom had sent me in the mail, and I saw a recipe for a quick black bean burger. It called for mixing beans with onions, spices, some egg and breadcrumbs. Sounded easy enough.

A few days ago, I whipped some up for dinner, adding my own Mexican-ish tweaks — bolillo roll for the breadcrumbs, a serrano pepper for spiciness, and a good slather of cilantro-chipotle mayo on top. (Cilantro-chipotle mayo tastes good on just about anything.) Paired the burgers with a gujarati grated-carrot salad, a warm, gingery, toasty side dish that comes together in a snap.

Found the carrot recipe in a charming cookbook called Cooking Com Bigode, which my friend Jesica gave me a while back. The book, whose name is Brazilian Portuguese for “Cooking With Moustache,” doesn’t so much offer specific measurements as loose instructions designed to empower the home cook. It was written by Jesica’s bohemian friend Ankur, an Indian guy who camped out in Brazil for awhile.

If you don’t have carrots, you can pair the burgers with any other salad you want. I think something mild might be best, as to not overpower the gooeyness of the cilantro/chipotle mayo and spicy black beans. Maybe tomatoes with queso fresco and black pepper. Or even jicama with a spot of lime juice.

A quick note: These burgers don’t have a typical “burger” consistency. They’re soft and kind of creamy, but crunchy on the outside from a nice sizzle in the frying pan. Ergo, I wouldn’t pair them with a traditional bun. I didn’t use any bread at all and didn’t miss it (I was too busy wow-ing over the mayo), but if you’re dying for bread, I would try a thinly sliced, toasted white or wheat bread.

Crayton, who loves a good carnitas taco, really liked these. Although he was a little alarmed by the mound of carrot salad I put on his plate. He said, “That’s too much,” and so I took some off. (I thought: How can one have too much carrots? They’re carrots!)

I know he’s very excited for all the other vegetarian recipes I have planned in the future.

Recipe below.
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Roasted peach ice cream with manzano-chile infused caramel sauce

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Roasted peach ice cream with caramel sauce

A few weeks ago, I was strolling around Mercado San Juan when I spied some white, donut-shaped peaches at a back stall.

“Can I have a taste of these?” I asked the woman.

She grabbed one and cut off a thick slice. One bite — one juicy, sweet, summery bite — and I was sold. I bought a kilo.

I had a vague idea to make ice cream, but when I got home and started googling, I realized I’d just barely hit the tip of the iceberg. I could make roasted peach ice cream. With caramel sauce. But not just any caramel sauce. Chili-infused caramel sauce.

[Pause for “Ooooooooh” moment.]

The spicy caramel sauce idea wasn’t mine. Food, She Thought, an LA-based food blogger, had gushed recently about a habanero-caramel sauce sundae she’d tried at a fair, and then successfully made at home. Roasted peaches would go perfectly with that. Right?

And so. A few weeks ago, I cut up my peaches and doused them in agave honey. Then I arranged them like fat little snails on a baking sheet….

Mmmm... peaches

Peaches ready for roasting

And then I roasted ’em….

Roasted peaches

And I snuck in a few bites of peaches, and they were so fabulous, I almost wanted to cry. But no. Must not eat more. Must put them in the ice cream.

Into the cream they went. By then I’d done so much work, I was ready to eat the damn thing already. Forgot to mention, my recipe called for peach preserves, but my local Mexican supermarket doesn’t carry them. So I whipped up a quick batch by hand. Yes, I’m insane.

After pouring my ice cream into an old yogurt container, which I keep for just these types of purposes, I got up the next morning and tasted it.

And it was… okay. Not spectacular. But good for a weeknight. (If I was the type of girl who ate ice cream on a weeknight — usually I prefer dark chocolate.)

The deal was, the ice cream needed more depth. I didn’t use any eggs — I was “experimenting” — and it was just too milky and creamy. Plus, despite me roasting the peaches, it lacked in-your-face peach flavor. Maybe I should have used more. Or maybe I should have added more homemade peach preserves. In any case, next time I’m going to use Dorie Greenspan’s recipe, which calls for pureeing peaches and adding it directly to the custard. And I’m going to try out peach liqueur. Wish they sold fifths of that… I can’t see myself drinking peach liqueur, ever.

Feeling kind of lukewarm about the peaches, I made the caramel sauce a few days later. And for my very first caramel sauce, it was great. Luscious and pretty and creamy. (The secret: Don’t stir it. EVER.) Per Food She Thought’s instructions, I sliced up some manzano chilies (couldn’t find habanero) and added them to boiling water. Then I added that water to the sugar, which eventually became caramel.

The sauce was spicy, but in a strange way. Like, three minutes after you started eating, a slow burn developed, somewhere in the back of your throat. I wanted more fire up front — something to contrast immediately with the sweetness of the peaches.

I’m still researching this — maybe I should try adding chili oil at the end, instead of spicy water at the beginning? Because my next stop is chili-infused cajeta. Morita-chili infused cajeta.

Meanwhile, my jar of spicy caramel is still sitting in the fridge. I’m thinking about drizzling it on apples. The ice cream just isn’t good enough.

Recipes below, if you’re interested.
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Mexico City summer food: Chili and cornbread

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Chili and cornbread

Mexico City summer weather is strange. It’s sunny, but only sometimes. The other half of the time it’s chilly and rainy. If you forget your umbrella around 2 p.m., you’re screwed. Unless you enjoy sheets of water falling on your head.

If I were still living in Dallas — where it is supposed to hit 104 today — I would currently have the oven under lock and key. I’d be whipping up a panzanella salad with heirloom tomatoes, or quinoa with baked tofu, roasted red peppers and feta. (Quinoa fairy, please send me some in Mexico City. Kthankxbai.) Here, though, the whole “light summer meal” thing is kinda not applicable. I want stews. Soups. Hot, hearty things.

So this weekend I whipped up a batch of chili, which used to be one of my go-to winter meals, because it took like 30 minutes.

This time it was not so easy. I had to buy and soak my own beans, since the supermarket doesn’t carry canned pinto or kidney. Ground turkey doesn’t exist, either, so I randomly selected a package of ground beef, wondering whether it was lean or not. (What does “angus” mean? Twenty percent fat? Thirty?) I added onion and chipotle, and my favorite brand of canned tomatoes in Mexico. Then I simmered the darn thing on the stovetop for nearly three hours. THREE HOURS.

The result was fantastic, though. At the last minute I decided to make some skillet cornbread, too, using cornmeal I brought from the States. This now means I’m out of cornmeal, but hopefully I can figure out how to buy some from a tortilla press. (“Maiz de grano”? “Elote de grano”? “Maiz molido”? Anyone?) My local supermarket doesn’t carry it.

Anyway, if you also happened to be looking for cool-weather food ideas, the recipe is below.

Americanized Mexico City Chili

1/2 c. dried black-and-white “vaca” beans, soaked overnight in cold water
1/2 c. dried small pink beans, soaked overnight in cold water
1 onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
1/4 c. tomato/chipotle puree (basically boxed tomato puree mixed with chipotle chiles — it’s concentrated and super hot)
1/2 lb. ground beef
1 480g can of Cirio Whole Tomatoes (This is my favorite Mexican tomato brand. Hunt’s blows.)
1 teaspoon sweet smoked paprika
1 to 2 tablespoons ground cumin
pinch of cayenne
sprinkle of chili powder
salt and pepper to taste

Garnish:
Chopped jalapeño
Cilantro

For chili:
Heat 1 tablespoon of canola oil in a dutch oven. Add your onion and cook for five minutes or so, until soft. Add the garlic and stir, cooking until aromatic, about 30 seconds. Then add ground beef and cook until browned, about 10 minutes. If you bought “angus,” like me, you will have a lot of fat. Drain it off and continue. Your meat now drained, add the tomato puree, beans and tomatoes, and enough water to cover everything by three inches.

Bring to a boil, then simmer until beans are tender, skimming off fat from the top and adding more water if the mixture gets too thick. This will be about three hours if you live in DF. About twenty minutes before the chili is done, add your spices. Serve with chopped jalapeño and cilantro. And, if you’re lucky enough to find cheddar cheese at your local market, add a sprinkle of that too.

Skillet Cornbread
(Adapted from Joy of Cooking’s “Northern Cornbread” recipe)

Position a rack in the center of the oven. Preheat to 450F. Grease your iron skillet with vegetable or canola oil. Then whisk together in a large bowl:

1 1/4 c. stone ground cornmeal
3/4 c. all-purpose flour
1 to 4 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda

Whisk together in another bowl:

2 large eggs
2/3 c. milk
2/3 c. buttermilk (I make my own buttermilk, since I can’t find it here.)

Add the wet ingredients to the dry, and stir until just moistened. Fold in two to three tablespoons of warm, melted unsalted butter.

Batter will be really wet. Pour it into the pan, and bake until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, about 20 minutes.

My first, self-organized Mexico City street food tour

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Street food flauta

Just around the corner from my house, there’s a line of street food stands maybe six deep. They’re so close, we can hear the dudes rolling out their steel carts in the wee morning hours. At various times of they day, you can find chocolate and rice atole, plastic cups brimming with yogurt and cereal, sandwiches (some made with American-style bread, others on bolillos); flautas, carnitas tacos, tacos de suadero. And sunglasses and ties, too.

It’s a travesty that I haven’t tried any of it yet. So yesterday I grabbed my friend Alice, a street food fiend, and we hit the streets for our first-ever Mexico City street food tour.

Here were our rules:

Keep it manageable. We’d only visit stands near Cuauhtemoc, which is my neighborhood. On the next tour, we’ll delve into other areas. (Like the stands on the south side of Plaza de Insurgentes. GOD they look good.)

Share. We’d split every item, as to keep tummies hungry for more food.

Be efficient. We’d keep the tour to 1 1/2 hours. (This was my rule. I had to be back to continue working on a story.)

Street food essentials to have in my purse:

Essential tools for a street food tour

Here’s how it went to down. Pics and details after the jump.
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