Tortas ahogadas: my first attempt at cocina tapatía

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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.

Burritos al pastor

¿Burritos al pastor? ¿Que?

That's right. I put the al pastor filling in a flour tortilla. Now what would possess me to do that?

Well, I've been looking for something Mexican to cook after those disastrous polvorones, and the same friend for whom I baked them loaned me Down the Rabbit Hole by Juan Pablo Villalobos, which, by the way, you all should read.

Apart from the usual things you'd expect from great literature, this book made me want to do two things: learn Nahuatl and cook tacos al pastor (shepherd's tacos).

These tacos are apparently quite famous, but I'd never heard of them. And whenever I discover a Mexican dish I've never heard of, I have to cook it.

First, allow indulge in a bit of background and literary criticism (because old habits die hard). The tacos al pastor come into the story when the boy narrator, Tochtli, lists the foods he likes. It is interesting to note that all the Mexican dishes on his list (including enchiladas and tacos al pastor, but without the pineapple, which is "ridiculous" in a taco) are antojitos: starters or snacks. Proper Mexican main dishes like pozole and mole don't float his boat.

This could be simple childish fussiness, but it could also be Americanization of Mexican cuisine, for it is Americans who have taken a small number of Mexican antojitos and turned them into main meals, while ignoring the more challenging dishes. This is especially likely considering that, of the several world currencies he and his drug-dealing family have, their favourite are the US dollars.

Anyway, I looked up the recipe online and found a promising one on Rick Bayless' website. However, I had made tacos fairly recently, and while I enjoy making and eating them, it is quite a faff. Also, being antojitos, I don't anticipate they will feature prominently on Esteban's menu.

Also, I had remarked to my wife that, whereas for like 9 years whenever I made Mexican food I made classic American-style "combination plate" beef and bean burritos, since embarking on my journey through real Mexican food I haven't made one burrito.

But I still like burritos, even if they were possibly invented in San Francisco. And like tacos, they can be filled with anything. So I thought, why not make burritos al pastor?

This was an exciting opportunity for me, because it was my first chance to make Yucatecan achiote paste (recado rojo).

So what is achiote? It's a tree/shrub that grows in Mexico. It's called achiotl in Nahuatl (bizarrely, since the Yucatán is a Mayan region and Nahuatl is the Aztec language). You might know it by its Brazilian name, annatto.

The seeds of this tree are these tiny super-hard red pyramid-looking things, which are ground up with other spices and used to season meat throughout the Yucatán. Since I first read about it I've been dying to make it.

Where do you get achiote in Edinburgh? Lupe Pinto's of course. While I was there I also got some homemade flour tortillas, a tin of chipotles en adobo, a tin of tomatillos, three kinds of dried chile, some deadly hot naga chile sauce, and some pumpkin pie mix before the fucking Canadians kipe it all.

(By the way, though more and more supermarkets are stocking dried chipotles, Lupe Pinto's is still the only place in Edinburgh to get them en adobo; ditto tomatillos.)

Of course I cheated a bit. Lupe Pinto's sells both whole achiote seeds and ground achiote - for the exact same price. Having read about how hard the seeds are (Rick Bayless says even a spice grinder will have trouble with them), I opted for the pre-ground. I love my molcajete, but I'm only so strong.

Anyway, I made up the paste on Tuesday. I followed the Rick Bayless recipe exactly, so I won't repeat it here, but it's basically achiote, some cumin, some coriander seed, some cinnamon, rather a lot of garlic for a Mexican recipe, and some cider vinegar. Oh yeah, black peppercorns and a bit of wheat flour.

Interestingly, though this paste would seem über-traditional, it has clearly been augmented with Asian spices (and European wheat flour), introduced by the conquistadores. Mexico's complex relationship with its former oppressor strikes again.

This paste will keep for months well-sealed in your fridge.

On Friday, I made the full-blown al pastor marinade for the diced pork shoulder. Again, this is a Rick Bayless recipe, so I won't repeat it verbatim, but basically you combine the recado rojo with (for the amount of meat I was using) two chipotles and three tablespoons of the adobo sauce. Add some olive oil (another contemporary innovation I'm sure, as olives are traditionally scarce in Mexico), and blend.

I used pork shoulder that was already diced, and I marinaded the meat overnight.

Pay attention to the cut of meat you use, by the way. Pork shoulder has enough fat in it to be suitable for slow cooking. Strictly speaking, Rick Bayless' recipe called for you to marinade the un-diced shoulder overnight. Then you grill the cuts on a barbecue. Then you dice or shred the meat. This would make these tacos al carbón (tacos with a grilled or roasted meat filling). However, I had a side dish to prepare, and I needed the meat to just go away and cook slowly for a while.

So I browned the meat cubes on all sides, then added all the marinade (most recipes recommend keeping some back for other dishes) along with the pineapple chunks, covered the pot and put it in a fan-assisted oven on 160° C for an hour. This makes the tacos (or burritos in my case) de cazuela (tacos/burritos with a stewed or casserole filling).

Now, two Mexican things I'm particularly obsessed with are the Yucatecan pickled onions (cebollas en escabeche) and Thomasina Miers' warm sweetcorn salad. So I made batch of the cebollas to go top of the burritos and designed my own variation on the salad.

First, I made a salsa verde. However, I did not add any chile because I'm taking a lesson from Indian cooking and trying to include something non-spicy to balance out the meal. This salad was meant to be the "cooling" counterpart to the chipotles in the burrito filling. But ordinarily you'd want a couple jalapeños in the salsa verde.

Salsa verde

1 tin of tomatillos
1 bunch of cilantro/coriander
1/2 a white onion
A couple cloves of garlic (optional)

(Here is where I would list the chiles, which I didn't use this time. Just remember use pickled jalapeños or else roast them first, unless you intend to fry the sauce before eating)

Put all this in a blender, add some water to keep it loose, and blend to a fairly thick consistency (I made mine smooth and velvety, because of what I planned to do with it).

I may have accidentally ripped the above recipe off, by the way, but salsa verde, like the basic tomato salsa, is simplicity itself, so it's hard to write a recipe for it that differs significantly from all the other ones.

For the bulk of the salad I cut the kernels of one cob of sweetcorn (it is vital that you use raw corn on the cob for this or the corn will probably turn to mush. Tinned sweetcorn will have been heat-treated and thus cooked). Then I heated some butter and olive oil over a medium heat and added the corn, stirring constantly for about five minutes. Then I turned the heat way down and stirred occasionally for a further ten minutes.

Meanwhile I shredded one raw carrot, one raw courgette (zucchini), and about five raw radishes.

Mexicans love radishes, by the way. In Oaxaca they even have a holiday, la noche de los rábanos (night of the radishes), when people get together and carve radishes into various shapes. If I wanted to be truly authentic with this dish, I'd have kept one radish back and carved it into a rose or something. But I don't know how.

Anyway, when the corn had gone all sweet and carmelized (but not burnt), I took the pan off the heat, tipped in all the salsa verde and gave it a stir. Then I added all the shredded veg, gave it another stir, and covered the pan.

By now my stewed pork al pastor was ready. I scooped a bit of the filling into each flour tortilla, wrapped them carefully, and toasted them on a dry pan.

Then I put a long rectangle of the salad across each plate, lay the burritos perpendicular on top, and finished with the cebollas en escabeche. Behold: Burritos al Pastor con Ensalada de Verduras en Salsa Verde (photo below).

How did it taste? The veg, salsa verde, and cebollas are old friends of mine and were delicious as expected. Honestly, you can't go wrong with those things.

But the real star was the burrito filling. When I first opened the achiote, I was amazed that such a red powder could have such a "green", almost minty scent. However, after maturing a few says, the finished recado had a darker, spicier smell (and not spicy in the sense of "hot"; remember there's no chile in the recado).

Combined with the pineapple and chipotles this marinade became utterly addictive. So much so that I saved some of the sauce and cooked my eggs in it the next day.

Intriguingly, the sauce had a vaguely Indian flavour, which was either a coincidence or the result of the combination of cumin, cinnamon, and coriander seed (a classic trio in Indian cuisine). Whatever the explanation, it occurred to me this would make an awesome flavouring for my birriani.

The pork was well-cooked. Because I was unsure how it would turn out I served it with steak knives. But while it didn't quite fall apart under fork pressure it put up absolutely no resistance in your mouth.

In terms of spice, I could (as usual), probably have had it hotter, but it was pretty much at my wife's limit of chile tolerance (though thankfully not over it), and she was glad of the cooling salad.

I made this with two persons in mind, but we each had seconds of both meat and veg so this could easily stretch to three or even four servings.

Two final notes: achiote is also used to dye clothing, so wash everything it touches as soon as possible unless you want it to turn red; and no offence meant to Canadians. It's not their fault they celebrate Thanksgiving on Columbus Day.

Birriani

I swear I don't do this on purpose, but often when I've cooked something spicy, like Mexican or Indian food, I taste it and say "Good: that's got a nice tingle, but it's not too spicy." Then I look over at my wife, whose eyes are wide open, like a deer in headlights, and she says "Actually it's quite spicy."
This happens nearly every time I cook. FAIL!
I guess I just like my food muy picante. I can't help it. I find chiles are one of those things that you need more and more of. But I'd rather have that with chiles than heroin.
Anyway, in a previous post I mentioned my love of the biryani, and that the first time I had it (at Original Khushi's here in Edinburgh), it came the über-traditional way in an earthenware pot, sealed with unleavened dough that had turned into a chapati.
So when I came across a dish called a "birria" in Rick Bayless's book Authentic Mexican, a dish cooked in an earthenware pot and sealed with masa (corn tortilla dough), I immediately thought "Maybe this is like a Mexican equivalent to the biryani!"
(You'll recall from my post on Indian food that I'm a bit obsessed with the similarities between these two cuisines.)
Unfortunately a close reading of the birria recipe revealed this not to be the case. But it was too late: the idea was already in my head. I was about to unleash upon the world the Mexican-Indian fusion dish I call the birriani.
(See what I did there? Combining the two names into one? That's what linguists call a portmanteau.)
First, let's talk about the differences between the biryani as usually found in Britain and the birria as described in Rick Bayless's book. (I also consulted a birria recipe from Diana Kennedy, but chose to base my creation more on Rick's version, apart from using multiple kinds of chile).

Obviously the seasonings are very different, but apart from that:

In the UK, biryanis usually have diced meat. The birria, by contrast, is a slow-cooked full cut of meat, such as a shoulder (or even the whole animal, if you're feeding your extended familia).
No rice in the birria. This is the main difference. It ain't a biryani without the rice. It's the rice that makes it. In fact, in Madhur Jaffrey's book, the biryani is in the rice section at the back (after the bread section). In Bayless's book, the birria is in the meat section.

The birria is slow-cooked in a huge pot, on a rack, below which is some water. Thus the meat not only roasts, but steams as well, remaining moist throughout. More importantly, the juices drip down and and mix with the water to form the base of the sauce.

The biryani, by contrast, doesn't use water this way, and the finished dish remains "dry". In the UK, it therefore tends to be accompanied by a vegetable curry.

My favourite difference: the HEAT! The birria begins with a chile paste, and if you recall the intro to this post, you can probably guess the finished dish is quite spicy. The Biryani, though, contains no chile. It it is a mild dish. The heat comes solely from the side curry (which I always ask to be as hot as possible, though the chefs never believe me).

As I said, in planning this combination dish, I stayed closer to Rick Bayless's birria than Diana Kennedy's. However, there is one feature of Kennedy's version I borrowed: using more than one kind of chile.
Rick Bayless only calls for dried guajillos. Kennedy calls for guajillos, anchos, and even some cascabels.

But where to get these chiles? Lupe Pinto's, obviously. Except I didn't have time to drive all the way from Corstorphine to Tollcross, owing to being away for the Easter weekend, combined with potty-training my two-year-old (which pretty much stops you leaving the house).

But believe it or not, Tesco carries dried chiles! I started noticing it a few years ago. They often have anchos, and I have also seen cascabels. More recently they have started carrying something that really impressed me: "dried" chipotles!

In case you don't know, a chipotle is a smoked jalapeño. The word itself means "smoked chile" (in Nauhatl, I believe). Although I have developed a strong affection for the habanero, the chipotle remains my all-time favourite chile (it's the smoky flavour). But even in the US I had only every seen them tinned and soaked in a chile sauce (en adobo). So getting them in their dry form here in the UK was very exciting.
Tesco were out of anchos that day; luckily I had some left over from when I made mole poblano. The rest of the chile paste was all chipotle. This had become a smoky dish. (A significant change, as neither of the birria recipes call for chipotles).
The next decision to make was what rice recipe to use. The biryani uses plain basmati rice, seasoned with saffron milk. But I chose to use one of the Mexican "coloured" rice dishes. Originally I wanted the red rice, to go with the tomato sauce of the birria, but we happened to have a helluva lotta spinach that needed used, so I went for green rice or arroz verde (my wife's favourite, and mine as well, truth be told) instead.
And finally, the cooking method. I had flirted with the idea of keeping the rack and the water, and putting the rice in the water so both elements cook st the same time. But the lamb has a different cooking time than the rice, so it wouldn't have worked.
I still had to decide whether to marinate the meat. The birria recipe calls for the lamb to be marinated in the chile paste overnight, if possible. The biryani recipe I had called for no marinating at all.
I eventually decided to follow the biryani cooking method and the birria ingredients list (in both cases, more or less), and deemed marinating to be part of the cooking method (it tenderizes the meat). So I ditched it. No marinating.
Now, to the cooking.
(I discussed arroz verde in a previous post, so I won't repeat the recipe here.)
First, I made the chile paste: one or two ancho chiles and about 28 grams of chipotle.
Tear them into flat pieces and toast them on both sides in a dry pan until the skin blisters, then put them into a bowl, cover with boiling water, weigh them down with a plate, and let them soak for about 20 minutes. This is the standard way to reconstitute dried chiles, by the way.
Because I had no cascabels, I was worried the sauce wouldn't be spicy enough. So I saved the seeds from the chipotles, toasted them, and ground them with a bit of cumin and black peppercorns.
In the meantime I roasted three tomatoes and a clove of garlic, as described in my post on mole poblano. After I skinned the tomatoes, I put them into a molcajete with a teaspoon of Mexican oregano and ground that into a rough sauce.
When the chiles were done, I removed them from the water and blitzed them with the ground seeds, cumin, and peppercorns, along with a pinch of sugar and as much of the chile-water as needed to keep the paste running through the blades (using the chile-water instead of plain water is a trick I learned from making the mole).
Then I heated some vegetable oil in a pan to medium-high and browned the diced lamb on all sides. I removed it tho a plate, lowered the heat to medium, and fried the chile paste until it thickened and darkened a bit.
Then I returned the lamb to the pan, turned the heat down to low and covered the pan, adding more chile-water as needed to keep the mixture wet.
The lamb simmers for 30 minutes at this point, so this is when I made the rice.
After 30 minutes, I added the tomato sauce to the lamb and let the whole thing simmer another 30 minutes. By this time the rice was done.
Now, bringing it all together: I put a layer of green rice in the bottom of a casserole dish, then added all the lamb and sauce (it was still quite wet at this point, due to the slow-and-low cooking). Then I covered it with the rest of the rice.
I had considered sealing the pot with masa, but opted instead for kitchen foil as per the Madhur Jaffrey recipe. So I covered the casserole dish with foil and put the lid on. Then into an oven at 170° C for an hour.
It's a rustic dish ("birria" means something like "mess" in Spanish) but I tried to put it in as neat a pile as possible on the plate. I garnished it with cilantro (coriander), chopped white onion, and half a lime, which added a nice citrus lift.
The verdict? I can't say it's an improvement on the biryani, but that's largely because I love a good biryani. However, there's no getting away from the fact that my birriani was A) delicious and B) spicy as hell.
The dish still has a way to go before it becomes "refined". Also, I would like to try it with the red rice, and maybe a bit of diary, like crema espesa (a traditional biryani includes yoghurt).
The other thing this dish proves is the versatility of the biryani cooking technique. It's a great way to create a combination meat-and-rice dish.