Crayton and I decided last-minute to go to Querétaro this weekend, with our friends Jon and Ale.
We booked our hotel the morning we left, so I didn’t have time to research where we’d eat. Thank goodness for the Querétaro marketing machine — at one of the tourism kiosks in the Centro Histórico, I found a small pamphlet decorated with cookies that listed markets, restaurants and some of Querétaro’s typical foods.
The gorditas de maiz quebrado sounded particularly interesting. They were fried discs made of coarsely-ground masa, stuffed with either chicharrón — in Querétaro it’s called “migajas” — or cheese. A wallop of lettuce went inside. Chilangos, by comparison, don’t eat lettuce in their gorditas. The masa is smooth, the same as tortilla masa. As an aside, there are endless varieties of gorditas in Mexico. Some are baked, some are fried, some are sweet. Ricardo’s dictionary devotes 2 1/2 pages to explaining their differences.
Per the cute Querétaro tourism booklet’s recommendation, we hit the Mercado de la Cruz in the Centro Histórico. Eventually we found Gorditas El Guero y Lupita.
It was a madhouse. Every seat at the medium-sized puesto had been taken, with people sitting along the bar and crowded onto benches. A queue snaked between the register and the fryer, while the owner — El Guero himself — scribbled orders on small pieces of paper. Customers who’d finished eating cried out for more — “Seven more gorditas de queso!” — and El Guero wrote down those orders too, in a messy script.
Equally impressive were the women making the gorditas, who grabbed scoops of masa and stuffed them with cheese and chicharrón, patted them thin, and tossed them into the fryer. They were focused and quick, shaping the masa for only a few seconds before moving onto the next palm-full.
The gigantic fryer
That's masa in the large bowl, and cheese and chicharrón (migajas) in the buckets
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