The Mija Chronicles

Mexican food and culture, on both sides of the border

mamey

Hay nieves!

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It’s been hot in Mexico City lately, which means it’s the best time to buy nieves, or street-side ice cream or sorbet. A few days ago I found probably the best nieve I’ve never tasted, from a guy named Benny (that’s him under the hat) who set up on calle Ramón Corona just a short walk from Circunvalación. The street is just west of Mercado La Merced on the way to the Zócalo.

Benny’s helper, a young man, shouted “Hay nieveeees! Dulce de leche, mamey, limón!”

The sun shone high and bright. We wandered over. Benny lifted the aluminum lid and a creamy lagoon of orangey-peach mamey lay there, waiting to be scooped. It was the slightest bit runny, like freshly churned ice cream. My friend Ben and I split one order of dulce de leche and mamey, and I think I might’ve moaned on the sidewalk.

Benny says he makes the ice creams himself using fresh fruit and ingredients. He also takes special orders for birthday parties. His minimum is one bote — the size pictured above — which feeds about 300 people.

If you don’t have any weddings or baptisms coming up, you should seek him out for a scoop. He takes his cart along Ramón Corona, Mesónes and Pino Suárez, and he says he works year-round. He doesn’t venture onto the more touristic side of the Zócalo, where street vendors aren’t allowed. Here’s a handy map of where I found him below.

From the mamey files: licuado de mamey

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Two Sundays ago, one of the tianguis vendors suckered me into buying three mameys. I only wanted one. But he looked at me with these hangdog eyes and said, “Take two amiga. Por favor.”

Buying two was only five pesos more. It was like buying popcorn and a soda at the movies — supersize your combo for just a quarter extra. So I said fine: I’ll take two. He threw in a third for the same price.

A few days ago, I realized that I ever ate the darn things. I unearthed them from the refrigerator, and two had gone bad. But the other one was edible. I had been working at my computer since the morning and was in desperate need a pick-me-up, so I decided to make a licuado. Hard to believe I’ve never had a mamey licuado before, but it’s true. I hadn’t.

It ended up being the best mid-afternoon snack I’ve had in weeks. Thick and sweet like a milkshake, but without any ice cream at all. Just fruit and milk. The recipe is below. (If you want to call it that.)

I have to get back to work, but now my mind’s humming with all the other mamey possibilities. Mamey pudding… dairy-free mamey pudding… mamey mousse…

Mamey Licuado
Makes 1 serving

4.5 ounces of mamey, or about 1/2 cup
1 cup milk

Blend together until sufficiently pureed. Pour into a glass and serve.

Mamey ice cream

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After lunch on Saturday, Crayton and I went on a stroll through Plaza Rio de Janeiro in the Roma neighborhood. An ice cream vendor there caught my eye: she sat under a little tarp, with her metal ice cream cylinders wedged inside ice-packed buckets. Her flavors had been written in a whimsical font. One was fig with mezcal.

“Oooh, fig with mezcal!” I told Crayton.

“Do you want one?”

At this point we’d already walked by the place. “Well… no,” I said. “I shouldn’t.”

We’d just eat lunch. Which had included bacon.

“Are you sure?”

It’s truly astonishing how many times Crayton knows me better than I know me. I did want one, so we went back and I tasted the fig, which ended up being too sweet. But she also had mamey, a popular flavor in Mexico. Unbelievably, despite my mamey obsession, I hadn’t tried mamey ice cream yet. So I got one scoop.

I can’t even describe to you how good it was. It was kind of pumpkiny, and melon-y, and I think I detected some cinnamon. This morning I woke up thinking about it. And then I thought: I need to have an ice cream tasting party. I will gather all my ice-cream loving friends, make an ice-cream themed music mix, and then churn up three Mexican-inspired ice creams that I’ve been dreaming of lately: mamey, crema and piloncillo. We will have mamey splits, like a banana split, but better. We’ll cover our scoops with pumpkin seeds instead of walnuts. We’ll drink Kahlua-spiked coffee. (Which isn’t ice cream-ish, but fun nonetheless.)

This is going to happen. Stay tuned.

Homemade mamey frozen yogurt

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Mamey frozen yogurt

A lot of my culinary adventures lately have started with a rotting mamey. This one I’d been suckered into buying on Sunday at the tianguis. (Where, it must be remembered, I was hungry.)

I accepted a particularly juicy chunk from a vendor and thought, Well… maybe I can slice this up and have it for dessert. But when I got home, and over the next few days, I noshed instead on some dark chocolate Hershey kisses, a bag of American candy from Alice’s house and leftover banana pudding.

The mamey sat on the bottom shelf of my fridge, in the very back. It began turning brown at the edges.

Not wanting my poor mamey to die, and wanting my jeans to continue to fit me, I tried to think of something light I could whip up with it. Obviously not ice cream. But maybe… fro-yo?

A quick google search turned up a David Lebovitz recipe on 101 Cookbooks. It called for straining yogurt with a cheesecloth. (Ugh. Too lazy.) But that led me to David’s even simpler recipe on his own site, which called for basically dumping yogurt and sugar together, and then churning it in your ice cream maker.

I could do that. I could do that in, like, an hour.

So I cut up my mamey and mashed it with a fork, and added a few healthy squirts of agave nectar. (Did I forget to mention that I didn’t add any processed sugar to this?) I added some Activia yogurt I had in the fridge. I chilled it for an hour, and clumsily poured it into my ice cream maker, getting mamey-agave-yogurt stuff all over the front and sides of my mixer.

Twenty-five minutes later, it was done. And it was good.

Not out-of-this world spectacular — the texture isn’t as smooth and creamy as what you’d get at the store, and next time I think I’d add more yogurt (or lime juice?) to boost the yogurt-y tang. But it’s a fine first start. Definitely something I could snack on after dinner, or outside on our porch on a sunny day.

Plus, this opens up a whole new world of fro-yo. I’ve seen lychees at the market lately…. hmmm…..

Recipe after the jump, if you want it.
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Why it’s a bad idea to shop at the tianguis while hungry…

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…Because, after sampling everything the vendors hand you, including guanabana pulp and mamey and a big chunk of avocado, you STILL stop on the way out at the stand selling the world’s tiniest breakfast pastries, and you promptly purchase a whole bag of them, because they’re so little and cute.

You also ask the lady, “What’s that?” and point at what looks like a large chunk of bread. She says, “A borrachito — bread soaked in honey.” So you buy that too and gobble it on the way home, lack of antibacterial hand gel be damned.

And then, the morning after preparing a huge batch of chicken tinga, and eating four tacos stuffed with tinga and avocado and riquísimo panela cheese:

tinga

You eat said pastries with coffee, relishing in their butteriness, but really thinking, why did I purchase these again? I really bought a whole bag?

tianguis pastries

I’m spending like two hours at the gym today.

A dream realized: Whole wheat mamey muffins

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Mamey muffins

As you know, I’ve been adoring mamey lately. I bought another one on Friday at Mercado San Juan (more on that trip later), and I thought: I HAVE to bake something with this. It’s crying out to be more than a breakfast fruit.

Bread seemed like too much work. Pancakes, eh, not feeling them lately. But muffins. Muffins I could do. Muffins barely required any mixing. And my muffin pan was getting a little muffin top-ish around the middle. It needed a workout.

Since mamey tastes faintly of sweet potato (to me anyway), I trolled the Internet for a sweet potato muffin recipe. And bingo. The Wednesday Chef delivered.

Last night around 9 p.m. the sweet, warm scent of baking mamey muffins filled the apartment. I seriously wanted to bottle it and somehow post it on the Internet, just so you could all know. Hopefully scent technology is not too far away.

When they were done, I carefully extracted one from the pan, burned my fingers, split the muffin open and smeared it with butter. LORD. They were moist. Hot. Gently spicy, with just a whisper of ginger. My brain did backflips. This is how good they were. (Also, another sign, when I tasted the batter earlier — because you know, you gotta do that — I wanted to ravish the whole bowl.)

Recipe after the jump.
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Who’s your mamey?

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Sweet, luscious mamey

Tianguis vendors love to offer food samples. If they’re not asking, “Que le damos, señorita? Linda? Guapa?” they’re yelling, “Mango! Papaya!” and attempting to shove a piece of it in your face. (As politely as possible.) On Sunday a guy offered me what I thought was papaya — a wedge of fiery sunset-colored fruit with a coconut-like rind. It tasted weird. Sweet, but not too much. The texture reminded me of cooked sweet potato.

“It’s mamey,” he said. Then he asked if I wanted to buy two or three.

I’d wondered about mamey. The name alone always enchanted me. Mah-MAY. Can’t you see that dangling from a palm tree? Or like, doing a rumba dance?

So I bought one. Sliced it open yesterday and found a strange, glassy black seed. It looked exactly like an alien’s eye, from the kind of alien that kidnaps people in the middle of the night. Kind of scary. But it made me love mamey all the more. It’s an alien fruit. A coconut-papaya-sweet-potato alien fruit. Mmm.

Now, what to make with it. Mamey muffins. Mamey pancakes. MAMEY ICE CREAM, PEOPLE.