Exploring exciting food varieties

A week in Oaxaca City, Mexico has been an adventure in tasting exciting food and flavours. With wide cobbled streets, ancient stone buildings shaded by gracious trees and dense bright colours on the walls, Oaxaca reflects a vibrant mixture of Zapotec civilisation and Spanish Catholicism. Familiar were the trees — jacarandas, bougainvillea, flamboyant — our bright aliens in their original home. Oaxaca is named for the Huaje tree (Leucaena Leudephala) and there is one in my garden, visited daily by purple crested lowries. 

First drink encounter was with a michelada — a weird sounding beer cocktail. But on a hot day, next to a super-bright blue swimming pool in a lush tropical garden, I was ready to follow my friends and give one a go. Onto a base of lime juice, Mexican hot sauce and Worcestershire sauce over ice, one pours a cool dark beer. The rim of the glass is encrusted with ‘worm salt’ — crushed chillies, salt and ground-up dried mescal worms — the same larval critturs you get at the bottom of the tequila bottle — which hang out on the agave plants — proving you have an authentic liquor.

Back home I tried out the drink on my family — having brought back real ‘worm salt’.  However, the Tabasco I used instead of Mexican hot sauce was way too powerful and had everyone’s eyes streaming. Also better to drink the beer through a straw so you don’t get an added dose of chillie salt on your lips — but I was too jet-lagged to notice this until we looked at the holiday snaps.  When done right, it’s amazingly refreshing with a sparkly zing — and I shall keep experimenting.

Oaxaca is the home of mezcal — a strong smokey liquor distilled from the heart of the maguey plant — a type of agave. Generally mezcal is not mixed with other liquids but is served with sliced oranges and worm salt. We did however enjoy a delicious margarita in a local restaurant and my home re-creation of this was much more successful. Without triple sec, or any other orange liqueur, I made a simple orange syrup with freshly squeezed orange juice and rind, sugar and water. The cocktail was two parts mezcal to one part fresh lime juice, a slug of the orange syrup and then shaken vigorously with ice in a cocktail shaker.

On the food front I brought back plenty of ideas as well as chocolate mole — a mixture of chocolate, chillies and spices — used to cook meat and chicken dishes. No supermarkets in Oaxaca and everyone shops at the many street markets. In the huge Juarez market one can get anything — from household goods and electrical appliances, to party dresses, family clothes, fruit, vegetables and meat — as well as a hundred varieties of chillies!

Street food is variations on the flat corn tortilla, a staple food since pre-Columbian times. It is made by curing maize in limewater, which causes the skin of the corn kernels to peel off, then grinding and cooking it, kneading it into a dough, pressing it flat into thin patties, and cooking it on a very hot comal — a sheet metal plate over either a charcoal fire or gas grill.  Standard fillings are black beans, guacamole and soft, white cheese — all with optional hot sauce.

Also prolific on the streets are fresh fruit vendors with little carts — selling mixtures of peeled fruit chunks or juicing them for you on the spot. A mixture of orange, carrot, cinnamon and honey helped treat the horrible cold that afflicted me.

g.jeke@yahoo.com

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