I finally brought them home from cooking school. On the upper-left corner of the metate, you can still see the stains from the cacao beans from the time we made chocolate from scratch.
metate
Grinding chocolate on the metate, the traditional Mexican way
Most people probably think of chocolate as being European, but the cacao bean itself — the bitter seed that gives chocolate its taste — is native to Mexico.
The Mayans were the first to domesticate the crop, thousands of years before the Spaniards arrived. (The name cacao actually comes from the Mayan word kakaw.) Later, Mexica priests and other upper-class Aztecs drank ground cacao as a beverage, mixed with water and spices. The Mexica venerated cacao so much, in fact, that they used it as a currency and imposed a cacao tax on conquered villages.
Yesterday at cooking class, Yuri told us we were going to make chocolate from scratch, in the traditional Mexican way. We’d each grind 1/4 kilo of cacao beans on our metates, drawing out the natural cocoa butter until the beans turned into a thick, glossy liquid.
In keeping with the way the nuns used to make chocolate in Mexican convents, we’d each receive a portable flame to place under our grinding stone. The flame would heat the stone and melt the cacao a bit, making it easier to grind.
I had no idea what lie ahead of me — a common theme in this cooking class — so I kneeled on my straw mat and began grinding with high spirits. The beans crackled and crunched under my metlapil.
We’d toasted the cacao beans in the last class, so pulverizing them produced this nutty, kind of toasted-walnut smell, mixed with aromas of intense dark chocolate.
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Lessons in back-breaking Mesoamerican cooking: How to season a metate
Yesterday I trucked down to Mercado Merced and bought my metate, the lava-rock tablet and grinding stone I need for my cooking class.
I was a little worried that I’d pick the wrong one. Would it have enough of a slope? What if I got the wrong-size grinding stone?
When I got there, most of the metates looked the same, and there wasn’t much of a selection to begin with. (“There’s not much of a commercial demand,” one vendor explained.) I ended up choosing one with only a slight slope and a surface that didn’t look too porous. It cost 370 pesos, or about $30 USD.
The vendor wrapped it in string y ya, I was done; I carried my new metate on the Metro all the way home. My friend Julie, bless her heart, came with me to help bear some of the weight.
Yesterday at cooking class, everyone sat down to use their metates to grind nixtamal, the corn treated with slaked lime that would eventually become tortillas. Yuri had one question before we could all proceed: “Is there anyone here who hasn’t seasoned their metate?”
I waved my hand in the air. Naively, I had no idea what was involved.
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