Tortas ahogadas: my first attempt at cocina tapatía

Hero Shot! Story below!

One of the things that excites me about this recipe is that it's a torta.

Where I'm from in California, people don't necessarily know there is leavened bread in Mexico. They think everything comes in a tortilla.

So these huge Mexican sandwiches are one of the hidden gems of Mexican cuisine.

The torta ahogada ("drowned sandwich") is a special kind of torta, and characteristic of Guadalajara.

My favourite placename in the whole world is Guadalajara. To me, it just sounds like Mexico.

(I was actually shocked to learn there's a Guadalajara in Spain; I'd always taken it for an indigenous name.)

Guadalajara is the second-largest city in Mexico (after DF, of course), and it's the capital of the state of Jalisco. In English, a person or thing from Guadalajara is "Guadalajaran", but in colloquial Mexican Spanish the word is tapatío/a.

Jalisco is the home of many things non-Mexicans think are common throughout Mexico, like tequila, mariachi music, and the Mexican hat dance (called the jarabe tapatía in Spanish).

While these things are internationally known, Guadalajara's distinct torta is not. 

The "drowned" torta is a torta of carnitas, and it's drowned in a super-hot salsa picante made mostly of chiles de árbol.

This dish is fairly easy to make, though it requires time. It has three essential components, two of which are procurable here in the UK.

The one that isn't is the Mexican bread.

The torta ahogada, however, is made from kind of sourdough-ish bread called birote, which is typical of the region. So you could presumably substitute sourdough bread.

(There used to be a Mexican bakery in London called Los Pastelitos, but they've closed. I'm sure they had bolillo, the more common type of Mexican bread, but they may not have had birote.)

The other two components are carnitas and the salsa.

Carnitas means "little meats" in Spanish, and in practice it's usually shredded (or at least diced) pork.

Pork is possibly the most popular meat in Mexico, (though chicken is probably the most commonly eaten). Pigs were introduced by the Spanish, but they're easy to keep, don't need a lot of space, and will eat just about anything, making them much more practical than the fussier, space-hungry beef cattle.

Also: pigs are delicious (sorry, veggies).

Because it's such a common thing, there are about a million recipes for carnitas, varying what seasonings you should use, how precisely to cook it, and even how big the pieces of pork should be.

I prefer to do mine like pulled pork in the slow cooker.

Carnitas

Ingredientes
750 g pork shoulder
2 cloves of garlic, minced
1 inch cinnamon stick
10 black peppercorns
1 tsp Mexican oregano (which you can get from Mextrade)
1/2 tsp coriander seeds
1/2 tsp cumin
Orange zest
Salt
Water to cover

For a Yucatecan twist you can add some El Yucateco achiote paste, which is also available from Mextrade.

Procedimiento
If you're not using pre-ground spices or achiote paste, make sure to toast everything separately on a hot dry frying pan or comal and then grind it all down.

Rub your pork with your seasonings and ideally let it sit for an hour (or overnight in the fridge).

Place the pork in the slow-cooker and carefully pour about 300 ml of water down the sides of the chamber. You don't wanna wash off that spice mix.

Then cook on low for ten hours or on low or for two hours on high and then two or three more hours on low (I've actually got better results this way).

When it's done, remove the pork and shred it with fork; it should just fall apart.

The best carnitas fall apart with nothing more than a harsh look.

Now for the salsa picante.

A reader informed me that in Guadalajara you can actually get tortas ahogadas with either the super-hot salsa de chiles de árbol or a not-so-hot tomato sauce.

I definitely prefer the picante sauce, but if you don't, try good quality Mexican salsa roja like this one from La Costeña.

Or, for the super-hot version, try this one from Valentina.

And if you're up for a challenge, you can make it from scratch.

Speaking as someone who adores pipián and is practically obsessed with salsa verde, I must say this is probably the greatest sauce in the world ever.

As far as I know, salsa picante ("hot sauce") is its only name. It is made throughout Mexico with a myriad subtle variations, but apparently always with the fiery chiles de árbol as the star (many people add piquín chiles too, but I don't).

The recipe I use is slightly modified from one by Rick Bayless. It uses a whole bag of chiles de árbol from The Cool Chile Company or Mextrade. 

Salsa picante

Ingredientes
60 g chiles de árbol (plus reserved seeds)
2 cloves of garlic, minced
20 g sesame seeds
20 g pumpkin seeds (hulled)
4 allspice berries
2 cloves
a pinch of cumin seeds (½ tsp or 5 g max)
180 mL cider vinegar

Procedimiento
Cut the stems off the chiles and twist them gently between your fingers until the seeds fall out. Save the seeds. There are easily 50 or 60 chiles in the bag, so this takes a while.

Toast the chiles in the a hot dry frying pan or comal and gently stir until they just begin to darken and you can smell a chile aroma rising.

They will burn quickly so don't toast them too long!

Put the toasted chiles in a bowl and cover with just-boiled water. Weigh them down with a plate and let them soak for 15 minutes.

Meanwhile toast each kind of seed and spice separately in the hot dry frying pan until they darken slightly and release their aroma. Stir constantly so they don't burn.

Let the pumpkin seeds sit until the first one pops, then stir constantly until they all have popped.

The chile seeds will burn quickly so stir constantly from the start; if one pops, it's time to take them off the heat. Also, they will release capsaicin vapour into the air, so toast them last and keep the extractor fan running.

Put the seeds and spices into a molcajete (mortar and pestle) with the minced garlic and grind down to a paste.

Remove the chiles from the water and put in a blender with the ground garlic, seeds, spices, and vinegar and blend to a smooth texture.

Add up to 200 mL of the chile soaking water, a tablespoon at a time, until the salsa is a thin, pourable consistency, sort of like Tabasco, but with pulpy bits.

Now pour the salsa through a sieve to strain the pulp out. You will have to press the pulp against the sieve with a spoon to make sure you extract every drop of liquid.

(Actually I pass it through a sieve first and then put the remaining pulp through a muslin and squeeze really hard. This stains the muslin - and your hands - something awful, but you don't want to lose any of that precious sauce.)

Put the strained salsa into a sealed container and let it mature in the fridge overnight. It will be a beautiful bright orange colour. It contains enough vinegar that it will literally keep for months in the fridge.

This sauce will hurt so good!

Finishing the torta

After you've done all this, all you really have to do is knock together the tortas.

Slice your bread (a good sourdough bread should do it), fill it with carnitas, and drown the sandwiches in the sauce.

Traditionally some raw white onion is used as a garnish, though I prefer Yucatecan cebollas en escabeche.

Some cheese is also nice: crumbled queso fresco from Gringa Dairy works really well.

In Guadalajara, if you think this sauce might be too much for you, you can order your torta "media ahogada" ("medium-drowned").

Apparently you can also go hotter and ask for "bien ahogada" ("well drowned").

This is actually manchego because Lupe Pintos was sold out of queso fresco.

I had dreams of making mine bien ahogada, but when it came to it, I held back, not because I was afraid of the heat, but because I couldn't bear to use up all that beautiful salsa in one go.

Whenever I make this sauce, I find myself taking a spoonful of it straight before I go to bed. It's that good.

¡Taco, Taco, Taco, que me Taco!

So, this post is partially in celebration of getting over a thousand pageviews and partially to introduce some planned changes to this blog (whenever I get around to making them).

I have five blogs; one is seasonal, and I don't expect it to get many hits when it's not Christmas; one is about my two-year-old, and it's mainly for my relatives; one is for random writings that I feel I may as well put out there, but I don't mind if nobody reads.


The other two are what I consider my "primary" blogs: this one and James Aristophanes Keaton.

If you're a regular reader here (and if you've read my first post), you'll know I'm writing a novel about a Mexican chef, which is why I need to know so much about Mexican food. I have occasionally posted about the writing process when I haven't cooked anything interesting in a while.

Based on how I tag this blog and especially on the search terms that lead people here, I'd say the majority of the audience for La Cocina y Yo are foodies rather than lit majors. My most-viewed posts are food posts (with my mole posts topping the list).

Quite quickly after starting this blog the pageviews exceeded my expectations (and I do disable my own pageviews). Even so, 1,000 is quite a milestone. In addition, my posts are fairly regularly shared on twitter and have earned me followers like @spicyfood and @thecurryguy (and, finally, A Mexican in Scotland). When compared to my other blog, which only has a couple hundred pageviews (though it hasn't been up for as long), you could say La Cocina y Yo is the more successful of the two.

On the other hand, James Aristophanes Keaton has 21 followers, to this blog's five. That means that, though JAK doesn't get as much attention, I'm more assured of repeat readers. JAK gets "likes" as well (a Wordpress feature). For all I know, the La Cocina audience is mainly one-time viewers who end up here by accident and never return. That's the thing about blogging: without "likes", comments, and named followers, you never really know who's reading or if they enjoy it.

I would like to have more confirmed repeat readers, and I would especially like all of you, if you're out there, to read my novel if and when it ever gets published. So I'm going to make a few design changes, a combination of suggestions from friends and advice from other blogs I follow, to encourage a more "visible" participation. I'm not trying to guilt-trip you into following me or commenting, by the way. If the changes work, visible traffic should increase "organically".

First, the ads. I'm sure you noticed my flirtation with having adverts on this blog. I optimistically thought Google would be cool enough to find Mexican-themed ads. I would even have settled for links to the McMaya resorts on the Yucatán peninsula. But no. Just unlimited data packages and tablet computers and other shit you can't eat.

One thing I know from adsense is that not one viewer has ever clicked on one of those ads. Know why? Because people looking for a blog about mole poblano don't give a rat's ass about  SIM cards!

So I ditched the ads. Instead I want to choose the Mexican-food suppliers, blogs, and other resources I want to give a shout out to. Therefore, hopefully very soon, I will be creating some new pages to that purpose. I say pages because, believe it or not, I like to keep as much as possible above the fold (meaning you don't have to scroll down to read it).

I plan to have a page for other Mexican food blogs, a page for non-Mexican food blogs my implied readers may find interesting (several pages if there are enough to form categories).

I also want a page (or pages) of links to ingredients-suppliers around the world so you can really cook this stuff yourselves. I will try to vet all of these, though as more than half my readers are in the US this may be tricky.

And lastly I want a page of cookbooks, with reviews based on my actual experience of using them. I may also review restaurants some day, but that would have to be very local to Edinburgh. Except when I go on vacation.

Basically I want this blog to be, in part, so portal to the wider world of Mexican food enthusiasts. (Some of this material will be replacing the current sidebar menus, of course.)

However, the blog must also remain about me and my project. Therefore I will be including an About the Author page with more information than just the sidebar, and contact details, so you can tell me what a puto gringo ignorante I am if you want. Positive feedback will also be welcome.

Naturally, there will also be a page about the project itself, with as many details as I can copyright.

Lastly, I would like to establish a newsletter, subscribable via email. I will probably be confining news about the writing process to the newsletter, and I aim to do one or two a month.

So, lots of plans. We'll just have to wait and see if I can bring this all to fruition.

In the meantime, what have I cooked?

As promised, I turned the rest of my chiles de árbol into a salsa picante. And I'm glad I did, for three reasons:

1) it's hot as hell!

2) it's delicious as fuck!

3) my wife loves it (I didn't expect her too)

This is one of those typical sauces that's in nearly every cookbook (and apparently at every taco stand in Mexico). I ended up using the Rick Bayless version, with a few modifications, because he included pumpkin seeds and I LOVE pumpkin seeds.

I don't usually do this when I've more or less followed someone else's book, but I will paraphrase the recipe, because I really want everyone to taste this.

Ingredientes
40 g chiles de árbol (dried)
2 cloves of garlic, minced
2 tbsp sesame seeds
2 tbsp pumpkin seeds
4 allspice berries
2 cloves
1/2 tsp cumin seeds
3/4 cup cider vinegar

Para Hacer
The first thing you have to do is stem and seed all those chiles (there will be, like, 50 of them). This takes forever. You have to cut the stems off and then roll the beautiful little red chiles between your fingers until the seeds fall out. Save these seeds to toast and grind later (good rule of thumb: never throw chile seeds out. You can almost always use them in what you're cooking).

Next reconstitute the chiles as described in my last post. (I'm happy to say I didn't burn any this time.) Rick Bayless doesn't call for the chiles to be reconstituted, but most other recipes do, and I had plans for the soaking water.

Now you must roast/toast/asar the seeds in the usual way: in a hot flat fry pan, stirring constantly so they don't burn. When they start to darken in colour they're done.

Rick Bayless had a variation for toasting the pumpkin seeds though. He recommended leaving the pumpkin seeds sitting in the pan until the first one pops, then stirring constantly until they all pop. I tried this and it worked brilliantly, so I'll be doing it again.

Once the seeds are done, they go into a molcajete with the garlic and spices for a good grinding.

By now the chiles should be ready. Remove them from the water with tongs and put them in a blender with the ground seeds and spices and the vinegar and blitz it to a smooth texture.

Now strain it through a medium-mesh sieve. This also takes forever because you have to push as much liquid as possible out of the pulpy residue. You basically want to end up with a bowl full of orange liquid and a mass of dry pulp. Discard the pulp. Remember it is compostable (let's be green).

Now add 3/4 cup of water to the liquid. I used the chile-soaking water, as I always do ever since I learned it from making mole poblano. Let the sauce "mature" for 24 hours in the fridge before serving.

I love this sauce so much I've been putting it on everything (within reason). I've even taken to drinking it straight with a dessert spoon.

My first use for it, though, was to go on top of the sweetcorn and courgette tacos I made last Saturday. I served the sauce on the side and warned my wife it would be quite hot. However, she lapped it up with almost as much gusto as I did, which demonstrates how delicious this sauce really is, as well as how much my wife's chile-tolerance has grown. (Remember, chiles de árbol are the second-hottest chile in Mexico.)

Also of note: I discovered that I have been making my tortilla-dough a bit too dry. I added a little extra water this time and got a much rounder shape. Every time I make tortillas, I learn something new!

And lastly, my two-year-old loved the tacos (she's still too young for the sauce though), so she's definitely her father's daughter.

Now, I was going to take pictures of all this, but I pure couldnae be bothered, so instead I have selected a little music video for you. It's called "Paco". If anyone leaves a comment I'll tell them a hilarious anecdote about this song.

It's a Spanish, rather than a Mexican song (Mexicans generally have better taste than this), but it's hilarious and I think of it every time I make tacos. I've also taught my daughter to sing it.

It's apparently about seven niños, at least one of whom is called Paco, on the camino de Sevilla. In Spanish, "que me" is an intensifier, so the chorus translates as "Paco, Paco, ¡PACO!" I don't know why there's such so fuss about Paco; my wife suggested that perhaps todos los niños se llaman Paco. ¿Por qué no? ¡Disfruta!

The Truth about Chillies

I'm not sure if you have noticed this, but I regularly use two different spellings of "chilli". While I am certainly not immune to inconsistency or typos (I once spelled "dairy" as "diary" in this very blog), the chilli thing is intentional.

The word chilli, however you spell it, comes from Nahuatl, like a great many other names for Mexican ingredients or dishes. In Spanish it became chile (plural chiles), just as Nahuatl <i>molli</i> became <i>mole</i>. I love Spanish and I'm pretentious enough to make a big deal of replacing everyday words with their non-English root words (you should see me when I get going with German). On the other hand, some of the food I write about is either Indian, some nouvelle-cuisine-ish creation of my own, or a hybrid of the two, in which cases it doesn't seem as appropriate to insist on using the Spanish word.

Therefore the compromise I reached with myself was that, when referring to Mexican food or something firmly rooted in Mexican cuisine, I would use the spelling "chile/chiles"; for everything else I would use "chilli/chillies". Like Rick Bayless, I avoid using "chilli pepper" because peppers, which get their great from a substance called piperin, are unrelated to chillies (Latin capsicum), which get their heat from capsaicin (which is what the Scoville units measure).

As a personal aside, piperin might as well be candy to me, and while I am most certainly affected by capsaicin, I have never had a chilli I didn't want more of. But mustard oil, produced by the breakdown of sinigrin in horseradish, wasabi, and (of course) mustard, completely floors me. It is my hotness Achilles' Heel.

Anyway, because I had done it a few times, I assumed I pretty much knew how to reconstitute dried chillies. Well, it turns out I still have more to learn.

I had bought some dried chiles de árbol ("tree chiles", though they don't grow on trees) from Lupe Pinto's. I was very excited about them, because I've never cooked with them before, and they are meant to be the second-hottest chile in Mexico (coming just behind the mighty habanero).
But what to put them in? I read recently - in a guidebook for Mexico, that when chiles are used in Mexican stews, marinades, and other dishes, they tend to be on the mild side, whereas the chiles in side salsas and other condiments tend to be hotter than hell.

While I have not found this rule spelled out in any of my cookbooks, it does gel with my experience of cooking Mexican food. In the mole, for instance, two of the three types of chile were mild, and the other was only medium. Even in the burritos al pastor, which used chipotles (technically also medium, but on the hot side of medium), the amount of chile used was limited so that it didn't become overpowering.

As if in confirmation of this tendency, I was unable to find a Mexican main course that includes chiles de árbol. Instead, all the books wanted me to make salsa picante ("hot sauce" - because standard Mexican salsa isn't "picante" enough, apparently). This sauce is made with the árbol chiles, and is by some accounts like a much better version of Tabasco sauce.

I have every intention of making salsa picante. But in the meantime I really wanted to try using chiles de árbol as an ingredient in a main course.

I also remembered that it had been a while since I chilled Indian food, so I grabbed Madhur Jaffrey's book and looked up "chillies" in index. I was on the verge of making vindaloo when I discovered a recipe for spicy baked chicken. The recipe called for a mixture of paprika and cayenne pepper, but I said fuck that and substituted five árbol chiles.

Which is where the FAIL! comes into it.

Dried chillies can be divided into two groups: wrinkly-skinned and smooth-skinned. Most of the dried chillies I have worked with before have been wrinkly-skinned, which means you have to press them down on the pan to get them to toast properly. Not so with smooth-skinned chiles. Apparently they can just lie there; they already have sufficient surface area exposed to the heat.
Also, most of the chillies I have worked with before have had fairly thick, meaty flesh. Chiles de árbol, however, have smooth, paper-thin skin. And lastly, I may have had the pan on too high a heat.

So what happened was I seeded and deveined my chiles, popped them in the hot pan and pressed down with my spatula as usual.

Instantly a black, acrid smoke rose up, making me and my entire family choke (my wife and daughter actually had to leave the house; there must have been a lot of capsaicin in the air).
 Worst of all, the chiles were already charcoal! Completely unsalvageable.

(Actually, the top halves which hadn't touched the pan yet were okay, but just over 50% of the chiles went down the drain as fine black powder.)

So I started again, this time lowering the heat and continually tossing the chiles until they slightly darkened in colour. Them I covered them with just-boiled as usual and all was well.

The Indian dish I was making turned out brilliantly. I've so far never been steered wrong by Madhur Jaffrey.

One of the things Jaffrey writes about is the technique if dropping whole spices into hot oil, which she says is characteristic of and peculiar to Indian cooking. (Mexican cooking would certainly use the asar technique.)

I dropped whole cumin seeds into hot oil for the rice and dal that accompanied the spicy baked chicken. The moment those seeds hit the fat my kitchen was filled with a beautiful smell that I have previously only encountered in Indian restaurants. It was amazing, and not unlike the time roasting ("asar-ing") tomatoes unlocked the secret of authentic Mexican salsa for me. It was one of those moments that drive home what I love about cooking. In fact, loved it so much I've started doing it for other rice dishes as well.

I haven't made the salsa picante yet, but I will definitely write about it when I do, even if I ruin it. In the meantime, here's a photo of the Indian dish I cooked using Mexican chiles:
Masaledar murghi with masoor dal and tahiri (Hindi must be an awesome language).