Avocados, Chiles, Tomatoes

This is my first post under my blog's new name. The story behind that is: the über-cool and talented @Book_Love_Sarah heard me carping on about how potatoes were discovered in Mexico and called me a MexiGeek. I said "I should change my Twitter handle to that." In the ensuing discussion it was decided to change everything to MexiGeek.

Y provecho: Edinburgh's first and only Mexican Food blog (prove me wrong, people, but only if your blog is exclusively or primarily focused on Mexican Food; I don't wanna see a lot of general food blogs with one measly recipe for baked enchiladas -which they don't really eat in Mexico - vying for the title).

Now, following on from my very popular post on chocolate (thanks to everyone who stopped by and tread it, and especially to Jess for posting a comment), I'm still taking Thomasina Miers' new book for a spin. One thing Thomasina and I seem to have in common is a love of breakfast. Especially Mexican breakfast. So I wanted to try her new recipe for corn pancakes and avocado cream, crispy bacon and roasted tomatoes. And I figured while I was at it I may as well make her avocado soup as well.

If chiles are my favourite Mexican indigenous ingredient (and they are), avocados are probably my second favourite. In fact, the only thing I miss about California are the fresh local avocados (and my family, of course).

Wanna get your mind blown? Avocado is NOT Spanish for "avocado". It means "lawyer". Is your mind blown? Please respond I'm the comments section.

The Spanish word for avocado is aguacate, which comes from the Nahuatl word ahuacatl, which means "testicle". (Now your mind is blown, right?) Apparently this refers to a purported stimulating effect of eating avocados, though I've always felt the more likely explanation is that the stones look kind of like testicles.

By the way, in case you don't know, Spanish slang for "testicles" is huevos, which literally means "eggs". Another vulgar word for them is cojones.

The avocado soup was, of course, from Wahaca Cooking At Home. To paraphrase the recipe, take two avocados, two jalapeños (or one if you want less heat), some chicken stock, and some coriander/cilantro. Blend it all together, then season with salt and pepper and fresh lime juice and serve chilled. Garnish with chopped chives and sour cream.

This could not be simpler or more delicious, and was perfect for the warm summer evening when we ate it. Avocados, chiles, and lime juice are the trio that forms the backbone of guacamole (literally "avocado sauce"), so the flavour is like an old friend, but the cooling, silky texture makes this soup something very special.

The chives are from our back garden. We can't get rid of them.

However, as a main meal, I felt it needed something on the side. So I came up with a warm ensalada de rajas or "rajas salad".

And what are rajas? They are strips of asar-roasted chile, almost always chile poblano (the big fat green chiles, relatively mild, they use for making chiles rellenos).

Of course, fresh chiles poblanos aren't that easy to come by in Britain (the dried version, chiles anchos, are much more common). So I used a handy cheat based on an idea from Rick Bayless. Because he's me mate, of course.

In the absence of fresh chiles poblanos, you can use some assorted sweet peppers and one or two common green chilies to replace the heat.

This makes a delicious and colourful assortment of rajas, though, strictly speaking, chiles poblanos are always green have no sweetness. You can make it more authentic by using green bell peppers, but I like sweet red and yellow peppers, so I just went for it.

The colours! Dude!

Now, this time I remembered to take a few photos of what I call "asar-roasting".

For my new readers, asar in European Spanish means "to roast", but in Mexico it means "char on a hot, flat, dry pan or other metal surface (a comal)".

This was one of the indigenous Mexican cooking techniques and remains essential to getting that distinctive Mexican flavour into your food. In fact, Thomasina Miers' latest book has a chapter on asar-roasting called "Burn Your Food" - because that's what it looks like to the uninitiated.

Observe a sweet pepper asar-roasting:

The black spots mean you're doing it right

 
The idea is to get each side to come up in those black spots. Here's a picture of an assortment of peppers, chiles, and tomatoes after they have been asar-roasted:

This is so hot!

Once they have cooled for a bit, the skins slip off easily (in theory). For rajas, you asar-roast the chiles, skin them, de-seed and de-vein them, and cut them into long thin strips.

Rajas are often mixed with something else and used as a taco filling or other main dish. I'm not aware of them being served as a "warm salad" in Mexico. This was my own innovation.

To get the warm rajas salad to work, I needed a dressing. I had asar-roasted some tomatoes, so I decided to blitz them and use them as the basis of an impromptu Mexican-inspired vinaigrette. I call it a vinaigrette anyway, though it doesn't have any olive oil.

Although the soup and the rajas were both delicious, the dressing is the bit I'm most proud of because I made it up as I went along and it turned out brilliant.

Vinagreta de jitomate

Ingredientes
3 medium-sized tomatoes
2 spring onions
1-2 tbsp cider vinegar
1 tsp Mexican oregano

Preparación
Asar-roast the tomatoes and allow them to cool. As they will be blitzed, it is not necessary to skin them. Leaving the blackened skins on will give the dressing a deeper flavour.
Finely slice the spring onions.

Blitz the tomatoes in a blender. If you want a smooth textured dressing, blitz the spring onions as well. I left them sliced so the dressing could double as a rough salsa.
Add the Mexican oregano and mix well. Then stir in the vinegar a bit at a time until the flavour is just where you want it.

I used spring onions because I had them lying around, but you could substitute (or add) shallots, a bit of white or red onion, or even a couple cloves of garlic.

You could also add some chile. I didn't, because this was a dressing for chiles, and you don't want to pour chocolate syrup over chocolate ice cream, if you know what I mean.

This dressing couldn't be any simpler, but the roasted tomatoes and Mexican oregano give it that unmistakeable yo no sé que that just screams ¡Mehico! If you try this once, I think you'll find it hard to put up with store-bought salsa ever again.

Vinagreta de jitomate. Because "jitomate" is Spanish for "tomato"

We ate this on that one day when it was sunny in Britain

Salsa, and further adventures with tortillas

I never read recipes for salsa, because I learned how to make it from my mom, like a real Mexican would.

And my mother's salsa is delicious, so why would I use anyone else's recipe? That is the prologue to my adventure with what I call Shut the Front Door Chipotle Sauce.

But first some exposition.

Salsa means "sauce" in Spanish. In English, the word denotes the chunky tomato sauce that is ubiquitous in Mexican cooking (and a "spicy" Latin dance, but that's of no concern to us).

Just take a moment to reflect on how incredible it is that such a general word in Spanish has come to mean such a specific thing in another language. It is an indication of how important the basic tomato sauce is to Mexican food, but also of how thoroughly Mexico has occupied its niche in the international culinary world.

Of course, salsa also means sauce in Italian, and Italy has definitely embraced the tomato (though Mexico, as I love to point out, was born with tomatoes).

But as Rick Bayless writes, there is a marked difference between the taste of a Mexican tomato sauce and an Italian one. I always thought it was down to the chiles. It ain't. It's the asar.

Bayless writes that there are three techniques that make Mexican food distinctive. One of them is braising, charring, blackening, or otherwise cooking things by placing them on a very hot flat metal thing called a "comal". This is how you make carne asada. It's also how you make tortillas. And if a Mexican recipe calls for roasted tomatoes, they mean "tomates asados".

Of course, I don't have a comal. Outside of Mexico, we use a large dry frying pan on a high heat.

Discovering the asar technique was quite exciting for me, because even my own mother often bulks up her salsa with some tinned chopped tomatoes. Purist that I am, I couldn't help wondering what you did before there was such a thing as tinned tomatoes.

But why was I experimenting with other salsa recipes in the first place?

One of my favourite cookbooks is Thomasina Miers' Mexican Food Made Simple, and as I've written before, her approach to tacos is to prepare some fresh, seasonal ingredients with some Mexican herbs and spices (or their equivalents), wrap it in a homemade corn tortilla, and enjoy. This, after all, is what the Mexicans do.

So when my wife said we needed to use up some asparagus, I decided to dice them with some mushrooms and carmelized corn, sauté them in butter with some tarragon (Mexicans love aniseed) and make Spring tacos.

But what kind of sauce to go on top? Well, Thomasina recommends her sweet chipotle paste, and you know how much I love chipotles.

I had no intention of copying her recipe exactly, but I did take some inspiration from it. However, I wanted a sauce, rather than a paste, so mine was much looser. She calls for chipotles en adobo, but I used dried chipotles. She calls for fish sauce, which I didn't use. She doesn't call for Mexican oregano, but I used it, hoping for a kind of barbecue sauce effect when combined with the smoky chipotles. Also, I put in some white onion, just for the helluvit.

I had high hopes that this sauce would be kick-ass, and I was already planning to call it Shut The Front Door Chipotle Sauce. I did not think of it as a salsa, because it was not going to be chunky (I was even planning to sieve it, but when I tasted it, I rather liked the thicker,puree texture).

Now I know I haven't always been very structured in how I communicate recipes. Partly it's because I use a lot of other people's recipes (and they're copyrighted), and partly it's because I view this blog as more a chronicle of my journey with Mexican food, rather than suggestions of what my readers should cook. However I will put down my recipe for Shut The Front Door Sauce before continuing with my story.

Ingredients
6 medium tomatoes
3 cloves of garlic
1 medium white onion, diced
15 g dried chipotles
1 tbsp brown sugar (UK) / raw sugar (US)
1 tsp Mexican oregano

Method
Stem and de-seed the chipotles, reserving the seeds. Reconstitute the chipotles as you would any dried chiles.

Roast the tomatoes and garlic: put a large, dry frying pan on high heat. Put the tomatoes and garlic cloves (still in their papery skins) on the pan. When one side begins to blacken, turn it over (the garlic will blacken first, so keep both eyes on it). Once the tomatoes and garlic have black spots on all sides, remove from the pan and let them cool.

In the same dry pan, roast the seeds for a few minutes, stirring constantly, until they start to change colour. Then grind them immediately with a pestle and mortar.

When the garlic and tomatoes have cooled, remove the skins and core the tomatoes.

Remove the chiles from the boiled water (reserving the water for the sauce).

Put the chiles, tomatoes, garlic, onion, and ground seeds into a blender and blitz, adding some chile water as necessary to keep the mixture running through the blades. The consistency should be loose, with a soft texture, but no visible chunks or lumps.

Taste for seasoning and then add the sugar and oregano, mixing thoroughly. You can add more seasoning if you wish.

Now, right away I thought the sauce tasted good, but was it Shut The Front Door? Not until the next day. This is one of those things where the flavours need to mingle and marry overnight, so make it a day in advance.

Also, the six tomatoes make loads of salsa, without having to resort to any tinned toms, so that's one mystery solved.

Back to my story:

Although I was always happy with mi madre's salsa, I did notice that at some of the better Mexican restaurants the salsa they gave us had a certain je ne sais quois that our family recipe didn't have. However, I never thought to seek it out.

But I found it, practically by accident, while making this sauce! The secret to Mexican salsa is roasted tomatoes and oregano, of all things. (That's Mexican oregano, by the way.)

I love this sauce so much that I am pretty much scrapping my family recipe. From now on, I will use this as the base of my chunky salsa, adding some diced fresh tomato, chopped jalapeño, and fresh herbs to compete it.

I had wanted to take a photo of my sauce in a nice dish, but ended up eating most of it instead. Sorry about that.

The other news is that my tortilla-making skills are coming along nicely. This time I used a combination of traditional hand-patting with rolling in the ziploc bag. The edges were still a bit rustic, but definitely improving.

And finally the two photos: the first is leftover salsa on a sandwich the next day (delicious); the second is my latest batch of homemade tortillas.

Now I'm taking a holiday from the kitchen, but before I go, happy Cinco de Mayo! By the way, this is not Mexican Independence Day. That would be September 16th. Cinco de Mayo is the Battle of Puebla.