Rancho Gordo: Experiments from my mostly New World kitchen and gardens

Noche Mexicana Tour: Making Tamales

I don't think you can take too many classes on tamal making. Each teacher has a slightly different trick or technique and it's always fun to get together and make them.

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After a very full day, the guests on the tour made their way to the tamal workshop.

It's always odd that so many of us think nothing of making fresh pasta, or pad thai and yet these key Mexican techniques are so foreign to us and we share a border. I aim to fix that. A good tamal is thing of beauty and worthy of your attention!

Tamal is singular. Tamales are plural. In Spanish, there is no word tamale. I think it's accepted English now, however, and there are much bigger battles to be fought.

Another key reason to take a class is get to know the dough and how wet it should be and what texture. It's really a place where cookbooks can only be so much help.

When it came time to mix the fat in with the masa, Chabela insists it's better by hand and she would never use a mixer. Time for the big guns and Gabriel came in and impressed all with his mixing skills.

Once all the tamales were made and taken to the kitchen for steaming, we all enjoyed a well-deserved bowl of Mole de Olla, a local vegetable and beef stew with the addition of the sour prickly pears, xoconostle. It was pretty grand, proving once again the basis for a good soup or stew is often an incredible broth. It's something you just can't replicate with a store-bought product.

Grits. Polenta. Mush. Hominy.....Explain the Differences to Me!

Any southerners out there? I need some help.

Here is what I know: Ground dry corn is called polenta and mush.
Dried corn that's been treated with wood ash, cal or lye is called hominy.

What the hell are grits?

Are grits the same thing as polenta? I've heard the term "hominy grits". Are these different than regular grits, having been treated? Or are all grits "hominy grits"? Is it regional within the south?

In Mexico, as we know, the process of removing the skin from the corn is nixtamalization. It makes the niacin available and stops the spread of pellagra, a vitamin deficiency disease heavy polenta eaters suffer from. Would heavy grits eaters suffer the same thing?

Any and old advice is welcome!

 

Noche Mexicana Tour: Morning of Corn, Corn and More Corn

I always chant that the foundation of Mexican cuisine is chiles, beans and corn. Restaurants that don't specialize in these things may have some nice dishes or a hip bar, but they're missing the essence of Mexican cooking. There are shortcuts and there are the traditional methods that are simply superior.

As part of the tour of the hacienda grounds, we made our way to a neighbor's cornfield (milpa) and then Gabirel and Antonio had everyone harvesting ears of field corn.

Believe me, the not so subtle irony of gringos being supervised in an agriculture setting by Mexicans was not lost on me!

 

Back at the hacienda, a fire was started and water heated, anticpating the corn.

Shucking corn is apparently back breaking work and requires a break with a platter of sopes from the kitchen. Gracias, Antonio.

Lily, who is from Colombia but lives in Guadalajara, apparently likes hers.

While the corn cooked, matriarch Chabela held a seminar on nixtamal, the product of soaking corn in cal and then heating it and then letting it set. This is later ground into the dough, masa, that's used for tortillas and tamales.

Lupe, the other matriarch of the hacienda, found this incredible brass strainer in Santa Clara del Cobre in Michoacan. I want it!

Next, the nixtamal and the group made their way to the smoke kitchen where bean farmer Roberto's mother demonstrated how she uses the metate to grind the cooked corn into masa. The idea was to let all the guests have a go at it but she was very protective of her metate and no one else would be using it!

She also demonstrated hand patting tortillas. We were all a mess at this.

Meanwhile, Gabriel and Roberto cut the corn and cooked it further with salt and epazote and served it in corn husk "boats" and "spoons", bringing the morning's harvest full circle. I have to say, there was a lot of killer food on the trip but this fresh corn snack was one of my favorites.

Noche Mexicana Tour: The First Morning

My idea to have a tour to Mexico came from my need for someone else other than me to experience my version of Mexico. Everyone seems to come away with something different but I was overwhelmed with my new Mexican friends, their way of life, their families, the bean farmers, etc. I had too share this with someone!

On the Mexican side, they were also ready to show off their success. So we just did it! We sold out in less than 24 hours and luckily everyone that came was interesting, curious and gracious. I now have 13 new friends and I'm so proud to know them.

(Antonio preps the juice before the guests arrive.)

I won't give you a blow by blow but I did want to post some images. These are from the first morning. We'd had a nice cocktail party on the roof the night before but it was pretty dark and I was looking forward to seeing actual faces. After breakfast, we took a tour of the hacienda which was meant to impress the guests (and it did) but the Mexicans couldn't get over their interest in the local flora. I always like to say it's fun to break stereotypes on both sides of the border.

(Breakfast started with fruit, juices, pan dulces, and coffee before Gabriel's mother, Chabela's incredible chilaquiles)

(In the church's bell tower)

(Her name is "Saraita" but I suspect it might mean "ham". She just loved to have her picture taken!)

(Everyone seemed to love identifying the flowers and plants on the property.)

To be continued......

 

Noche Mexicana in Hidalgo

I just spent an amazing few days with some of my wonderful Rancho Gordo customers from the US in Hidalgo. It was a pipe dream a few months ago but we pulled it off. We were hosted by my business partners from Xoxoc and psent most of the time in their ex-hacienda. The food and drink were incredible but the chance to meet some of our bean growers, their families and see how much they love what they do and their appreciation for our support was pretty moving.

I'm so tired I'm almost goofy but I'm filled with recent memories and a little overwhelmed. It was a weird, rare wonderful meeting and it seems everybody learned a little something from each other.

New Books That I Like

A few titles worth your consideration:

Mary Karlin's Artisan Cheese Making at Home is beautiful and inspirational. Home cheesemaking requires a little more dedication than breadmaking or ice pops, but Mary brings the mysterious within our grasp and I can't wait to get started.

With 1493, Charles Mann continues his New World history. I recommend reading 1491 first.

Here in California, it seems we all want to pretend we're from Italy and somehow our collective past is Tuscan. Maybe not but it seems that way sometimes. I'm intrigued by the era of the missionaries and their complicated legacy. The California Missions is just about perfect, performing a balancing act between coffee table book and history.

Lourdes Castro is apparently a very good cooking teacher in Miami. My only exposure was from the cover of her book Simply Mexican, which looks simply awful from the photo of her looking as if she's never handled a cob of corn before. I'll cut her some slack because her Spanish-English cooking dictionary is excellent. Eat, Drink, Think in Spanish: A Food Lover's English-Spanish/Spanish-English Dictionary would be handy for a professional working with a Latin staff but we at-home cooks who love noodling around with Mexican and other Latin foods will find it invaluable. I'm embarrased to find words I thought I was using correctly, only to find I've been making huge mistakes. Not surprised, but embarresed.

 

Ricotta or Requeson with Beans

I don't want to sound like a broken record but this trick turns a very good bowl of beans into something to remember.

Ricotta is a simple, easy to make, cheese that's fine commercially but sublime when you make it yourself of have a good source. I've never made cheese beyond yogurt cheese but Mary Karlin's new book, Artisan Cheese Making at Home has me pretty excited about the possibilities.

The Mexican technique is to fry the cheese with onion, garlic, jalapeño or serrano chiles and fresh epazote. A blob of this into a bowl of beans is great. In Hidalgo, it's not rare to add some boiled cactus paddles as well. I've been using this spread as a filling in quesadillas and even as part of the mix in scrambled eggs. You could easily make it more European by omitting the chiles and epazote and adding thyme or even rosemary. I think a plop on some pasta with tomato sauce would be great.

 

Please, Don't Hate Me!

Remember those old hair care commercials and some actress came on and said, "Don't hate me because I'm beautiful!" Well, my version is don't hate me because my young son is obsessed with cooking and his latest infatuation is with the molcajete. And it's not just a proud parent bragging, but he made an excellent sauce.

He's making Diana Kennedy's salsa from Oaxacan pasillas. I have to admit I can get bored working a molcajete but he just rocked on. He also made the tortillas for dinner and would have kept going if I had let him.

His brother also likes to cook but not as much. He has many good qualities and one of his is his willingness to give his tired old father a foot massage. Now you can hate me.

The next morning the chef made much of the breakfast, which included eggs and his salsa, plus DK's cascabel chile salsa. Our neighbor and friend, Connie Green, had brough by a big bag of chantrelles and they went very well with refried beans from the previous night's Good Mother Stallards.

 

Rye Berries

Jenny and Anson from Seattle's great specialty food store, picnic, stopped by for a visit and being the very swell people they are, they brought me bags of heirloom rye berries and farro. Farro I've had but I was really interested in trying the rye berries.

I know nothing about them. I cooked them in lots of boiling water for about 30 minutes with a little salt and onion. I drained them and then added some leftover beans and a happy dallop of Greek yogurt and finally a sprinkle of Oregano Indio.

Absolutely delilcious but I know nothing about this grain. Some of them exploded like wild rice does. Should they all? It has a great flavor and teamed really well with beans but it didn't have any of what I would consider "rye" flavor.

Am I missing any other interesting grains?