The Mija Chronicles

Mexican food and culture, on both sides of the border

Mexican cooking school

Lessons in pineapple atole

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I haven’t written about my cooking class in awhile, mostly because I was starting to feel really comfortable there.

I’d figured out the answers to the nagging doubts that used to send me running to Yuri or another classmate. Chile water thins out a thick salsa. The mole is done when little pools of fat form on top. When in doubt, blend a sauce extra-fine, especially if it’s going to be served with meat. Overall, I had finally learned to relax. Mexican cooking doesn’t leave that much room for error. If I made a mistake, I could fix it.

Then last week, that familiar, scared-of-messing-up-because-I’m-a-gringa side came back. I’d been gone for awhile — I had to take another trip to the States, which meant I’d missed several classes. My Spanish had gotten rustier. The theme of the class was tamales, but I didn’t feel like doing any metate-grinding (for once) so I signed up to make pineapple atole. It was a traditional atole made with masa and sugar.

Yuri had told us to dilute the masa first in water, so I put a big pot to boil on the stove and tossed in the lump of dough. Stirred it around a bit so it would dissolve.

Patty, one of my classmates, looked up from cleaning verdolagas (did you know there are sweet tamales made with verdolagas?) and she peered into my pot. “What did you put in there?”

“Masa and water.”

She shook her head. “No…”

Ana, another classmate, looked up. “Did you put the masa in there?”

What was the big deal? Yuri had said to dilute it.

Ana looked pained. She said we had we had to take the masa out right now, and she sped to the other side of the kitchen for a bowl and a strainer. While she was gone, Patty told me that I can’t just put the masa in the atole pot like that. I’d end up with hard bits of masa in my drink, or worse, a layer of hard masa stuck to the underside of the pot.

“You have to dissolve the masa like this,” she said, fishing out a lump of dough. She placed it in a bowl, added water and mushed the masa together with the tips of her fingers, until she had a think paste. “See? This is what I always do when I make my atole.”

Of course she does. And if I’d made atole before, I would’ve known that too. But I haven’t made atole before!

Feeling like a lame gringa, I strained the masa out of the pot and poured the yellowish, cloudy water back on the stove. I was still worried that I’d ruined the drink. The lump of masa and the water had already touched. Did that mean something? I asked Ana and she shook her head. (I thought I detected a “that was a dumb question” look in her eyes, but perhaps I was projecting. Ana is really nice.)

Patty told me to strain the paste to make sure there weren’t any hard bits hiding inside. Just as I was doing that, Yuri walked up. He looked at me and raised his eyebrows. Straining wasn’t part of our instructions.

“I know you didn’t say to do this,” I started, “but it’s that, I was wrong, I added the masa at the beginning, it was too early, I had to take it out…”

He stared at me. His eyes said, Foreign girl, what the hell are you talking about?

“You don’t have to strain the masa, if you diluted it well,” he finally said. He mentioned something about the pineapple pieces that I didn’t quite catch, and then he walked away.

Once my cloudy water had boiled, I poured in my masa paste, stirring vigorously so any hard bits could break down. Eventually the water looked smooth. I added the pineapple that Ana had blended and strained, and then the pineapple cubes. I added a little sugar and tasted as I went along, not wanting it too sweet. I stirred and stirred, trying to make sure the atole wouldn’t stick to the bottom.

Yuri wandered by again. “It’s better to use a wooden spoon. You can really scrape the bottom.”

Finally, about 40 minutes later, the masa had bubbled and thickened, and it was done. I tasted a bit — it was sweet but not too much, and faintly pineappley. The masa added this hearty, rich flavor, much more complex than the cornstarch atoles you usually get on the streets here.

A few students came up to me while we were eating our tamales. “Did you make the atole?”

“I helped,” I said. I couldn’t take credit — I’d almost ruined the drink.

“Está rico.”

I allowed myself to feel just a little proud. I was the one who added the sugar and scraped the pot, after all.

I’m sorry I don’t have a photo to show you, but I was too busy slurping it up. Recipe to come soon, once I make it at home.

Desserts of the Spanish convents in Mexico

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The kitchen inside Puebla's Convento de Santa Rosa, where mole is thought to have been invented. Photo by Jesus Guzmán-Moya via Flickr

Spanish nuns arrived in Mexico in the 16th century. Over the next 300 years, they’d play a big role in shaping modern Mexican cuisine, creating dishes that combined both Spanish and indigenous ingredients. Several of the convent-era dishes are still eaten today, including mole, chiles en nogada, rompope and several other candies and desserts.

We’re studying desserts of the convents in cooking class right now, and it’s been eye-opening to learn what the nuns created. The ingredients are humble compared to what we’d use today. One simple biscuit called a tlaco combines pulque and lard. A stovetop pudding called manjar blanco calls for boiling chicken, grinding it until smooth, and then mixing it with sugar, ground rice and milk. (Everyone in the class hated that dessert. One student called, “Who wants a licuado de pollo?”) Wikipedia says the dessert came from Spain, but using ground rice as a thickening agent is an Arab technique.

Butter is rarely included in the convent desserts, or heavy cream. Both were too difficult to store and too expensive. You don’t see any chocolate either, except as a beverage to accompany a bread.

Ladling out bienmesabe, a pudding made from ground almonds, rice and coconut, mixed with milk and sugar

While I was impressed by the nuns’ ingenuity and resourcefulness — I personally loved the licuado de polla idea, even if the taste was a little odd — I was absolutely smitten with how the nuns named their creations. “Bienmesabe,” for instance, is a rice, coconut and almond pudding that means “tastes good to me.”

Ring-shaped cookies flavored with anise seed, dipped in piloncillo syrup and sprinkled with powdered sugar are “rosquetes impregnados del espíritu del anís.” (Rosquete cookies impregnated with the spirit of anise.) Last week we made “empanadas de la concepción,” or conception empanadas, flaky lard pockets filled with pastry cream.

I ate those for breakfast over three days, slicing off little slivers with a knife.


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Making homemade concha rolls for the first time

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I’ve mentioned a few times that I’m a big fan of conchas — they’re round, fluffy Mexican sweet rolls covered in a quilted or striped sugar topping. When I first moved to Mexico City, I was so amazed by them (they’re sold in the U.S., but are rarely any good there) that I lauched a concha taste test to identify the best concha in Mexico City. The test is still ongoing.

A few weeks ago, I was rushing in late to cooking class when I realized that our guest instructor for the day was a professional baker. He casually mentioned that we were going to make conchas, which made me feel like being on The Price is Right and watching the door open to reveal a new car. We were going to make conchas! For the first time!
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Grinding chocolate on the metate, the traditional Mexican way

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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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The Zen of bug-infested tortilla dough

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A few weeks ago, my cooking class instructor gave us our first major homework assignment. For the July 29 class, we were to bring one kilo of nixtamal, or dried corn that’s been soaked in a mixture of water and slaked lime. (Slaked lime is known in Spanish as “cal.”)

We could either soak our corn the night before class or do it Thursday morning. But the corn had to sit undisturbed for eight hours.

Luckily I already had my corn — I’d bought a kilo at the Central de Abastos about a month ago, before my cooking course even started.

I didn’t have time to make the corn Wednesday night. So at 9 a.m. yesterday, I padded into the kitchen, bleary-eyed, in my pajamas. I took out my corn from the pantry and poured it into a bowl.

I tweeted that I was about to make nixtamal. And of course I took a few photos.

Innocent-looking corn, before things turned ugly


The recipe I used, jotted down in class

I rinsed the corn under the faucet and shuffled the kernels with my fingers. And that’s when I spotted them: tiny black bugs, about the size of bread crumbs. My stomach dropped. There were bugs in my corn.
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Lessons in back-breaking Mesoamerican cooking: How to season a metate

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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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