Salsa de fresa con totopos dulces

This is blender salsa, but you can dice the strawbs for a pico de gallo style salsa or bash the holy living f**ck out of them in your molcajete

Because it's summer and strawberries are the best summer fruit ever, I thought I'd share this lighthearted take on tortilla chips and salsa.

I'm not great at desserts, so when I'm planning a three-course menu I really struggle with the finale.

But this "dish" is ridiculously easy to make and the comic transformation of what is usually a savoury snack into a pudding almost makes it a show-stopper.

The key element is the strawberry salsa.

I came up with this because my daughter hates chiles ("They're too spicy ") but she LOVES strawberries. So I tried to think of a way she could enjoy chips and salsa.

She's four by the way.

Basically everything I would put in the classic Mexican tomato and chile salsa has a corresponding sweet ingredient in the strawberry salsa.

• Instead of tomatoes, I use strawberries (duh).
• Instead of diced white onion I use diced apple.
• Instead of fresh cilantro (coriander) I use mint.
• And instead of chiles I use chiles.

Ha!

Seriously though: you can leave chiles out of this one. HOWEVER, if you want to use chiles, try a bit of habanero. It's fecking hot, but the fruity flavour is ideal for this recipe. Just take it easy if you or your guests aren't hardcore chileheads.

So now that you have all this stuff, make it into salsa more or less the same way you would make standard (raw) tomato and chile salsa.

Then make the totopos (tortilla chips).

For these I uncharacteristically use flour tortillas.

First I preheat the oven to 160 C.

Then I cut the tortillas into triangular wedges using a pizza cutter (I kid you not).

Then I melt some butter and brush a baking tray with the butter using a pastry brush.

Then I place the tortilla wedges on the tray and brush them with more butter.

Then I dust them with ground cinnamon and sugar and bake them for about 20 minutes or until crisp.

(You can deep-fry them instead, in which case you would have to use oil, and dust them with cinnamon and sugar after frying, before they cool. But I never deep-fry my totopos.)

Y provecho!

I don't think they really eat these in Mexico, but they are still the bomb. 

I like to put a few totopos on everyone's plate and put the bowl of salsa in the middle, so it becomes a sharing activity and promotes socializing. 

You should also have a bowl of extra totopos to hand, because even after the strawberry salsa is finished, your guests will want more of these. In fact, so will you, then next day. 

Spicy KANKUN Cochinita Pibil

Lookin' for some hot stuff, baby, this evening?

As a fan of Mexican salsas, extremely hot chile sauces, and KANKUN in particular, I was excited to get a couple bottles of their 85% Habanero sauce in the post.

I repeat, "a couple bottles".

85% habanero is, as they say, muy picante, so this supply will last me a while.

While I'm a big fan of pouring hot chile sauces on everything I eat, I have also been trying to think of ways to use this salsa as an ingredient. And because habaneros are typical of the Yucatán, this seemed like the perfect opportunity to make cochinita pibil.

I last wrote about Yucatecan pit-cooked (pibil) dishes when I made pollo pibil (pibil-style chicken). And ever since I've been looking forward to making the equally popular pork version: cochinita pibil.

To recap, the pibil dishes are meant to be cooked in a Yucatecan cooking pit called a pib (it's a Mayan word). You dig a hole, line it with hot stones and ashes, lay your food in the pit (wrapped in a protective covering like a banana leaf), and bury the lot.

Then let it slow-cook to perfection!

Well, I don't expect you to dig a hole in your back garden (if I tried this at home, Mrs MexiGeek would pit-roasting me in it).

Instead, you can compromise by slow-cooking cochinita pibil in the oven.

What you CAN'T compromise on, though, is the seasoning, which here means achiote paste.

Achiote paste or recado rojo is made with the hard red seeds of a tree native to the Americas. It is quite easy to make, lasts months in the fridge, freezes well, and is useful for other Yucatecan dishes (so don't be afraid to make a big batch).

Even better, recado rojo is made of easy-to-find ingredients, except for the achiote itself, which is available from specialist shops and on-line suppliers (it is often sold as "annatto", the Brazilian name).

Homemade achiote paste and the molcajete it was made in.

These same suppliers often sell ready-made recado rojo, so you can use that and save yourself a step.

The other thing a pibil dish requires is the juice of Seville (or bitter) orange. These are available year-round in the Yucatán but are restricted to January in Europe.

I bought a big bag last year and froze the juice, so I'm sorted, but you can also make mock bitter orange juice by combining two parts grapefruit juice with one part orange juice, then adding a dash of lime juice.

You can get the orange and grapefruit juices out of a carton but I would definitely recommend using fresh lime.

All pibil dishes, whether cooked in an actual pib or not, are traditionally wrapped in a banana leaf, which not only keeps the meat soft and moist but also imparts a characteristic flavour.

Banana leaves are available from some Asian grocers (look for ones with Thai ingredients), but if you can't find any, just wrap the pork in parchment (en papillotte, as the French would say).

If you have a good quality casserole dish, you could even do without the parchment.

Or you could make this dish in a slow-cooker (whether you use banana leaves or not).

KANKUN Cochinita Pibil

Ingredientes

Marinade
1 recipe recado rojo (about 50 g)
90 - 100 mL Seville orange juice (or bitter orange substitute)
1 - 2 teaspoons KANKUN Habanero Sauce (or to taste)

Pork
1 - 1.5 kg pork shoulder or loin
A banana leaf or cooking parchment (optional)

Procedimiento

First I made the marinade.

In a bowl, I combined the achiote paste (recado rojo) and Kan-Kun with enough Seville orange juice to loosen it to a pourable consistency. This turned out to be about 100 mL, which covered the pork nicely.

Then I added the KANKUN Habanero sauce. I used just about two teaspoons. Normally I would taste in between to get the balance right, but I'm not sure if you should eat raw achiote paste, so I had to test it using sense of smell.

If the mainade is gritty (which is likely if you made it in a molcajete), blend it with a hand-blender until it's smooth.

The three amigos of the Yucatan: achiote, bitter orange, and habanero!.

Then I prepped the pork.

My partner in crime Wee Sadie had bought me banana leaves from a shop on Leith Walk ages ago. I started trying to unfold the leaves (they are HUGE) and cut two pieces large enough to line my casserole dish and wrap around the pork.

Please resist the temptation to steal banana leaves from the Royal Botanic Gardens.

You will have to wipe the leaves clean and cut off any edges that are starting to go brown or curly. Some people also recommend you pass the leaves briefly though a flame so they soften a bit, but I found the ones I used were malleable enough without this step.

Handle them carefully, though, because they do like to rip at the seams!

I lined a casserole dish with one of the leaves, laid the pork in the dish, and poured over the marinade. 

But don't just pour the marinade. Massage it in with your hands. Work that flavour!

After I washed my hands (do this frequently: achiote is also a powerful dye!), I covered the pork with the other leaf and tucked it down on all sides so the pork was wrapped fairly tightly.

Snug as a bug!

I put the lid on and left it to marinate in the fridge overnight. If you're not into waiting 24 hours to cook something, at least give it an hour or two. But the more time, the better.

When you're ready to cook (which is hopefully the next day), preheat the oven to 180° C (160° fan) and cook for 3 to 4 hours.

I had to leave this to the ever-capable Mrs MexiGeek, because I was at work. The pork went in at 17.30, as per my instructions.

I checked it at 20.00 (after 2 and a half hours). I was looking for the pork to be soft, moist, and tender, so I even peaked under the banana leave and gave it a bit of a "test shred". I deemed it should go back in until at least 21.00.

Now it's ready.

You'll need to use your judgement here, but your pork may need as much as five hours, depending on your oven and the size of your cut of pork. If you're doing the slow-cooker method, my estimate would be 10 hours on low or 2 hours on high followed by 3 hours on low. (This is based on successfully doing carnitas in a slow-cooker.)

When the pork is done, remove it and shred it like pulled pork or carnitas: it should fall apart easily. 

I then poured the remaining marinade and cooking juices from the dish over the shredded pork and gave it a good mix.

Like the greatest ever carnitas. The serving dish is hecho en Mexico too!

You can serve the shredded pork with warm tortillas and make tacos, or serve with a traditional Mexican rice dish.

I chose Mexican red rice, but I didn't use enough tomato, so it didn't come out very red. Also, I used diced chiles poblanos instead of peas. 

Still, it looked and tasted awesome:

And of course I added some extra KANKUN. Because some like it hot!

Another classic way to serve cochinita pibil is shredded on top of panuchos, which are Yucatecan tortillas stuffed with refried beans.

But whatever you choose, make sure you top the pork with Yucatecan pink picked onions (cebollas en escabeche) and serve some more Kan-Kun Habanero sauce for those who really want to crank up the heat!

The thing I love about the pibil dishes, and really all Yucatecan food, is that it's a million miles away from the stodgy Tex-Mex cuisine that people sometimes assume is real Mexican food. 

These flavours are vibrant, fresh, and yet deep and complex. 

In particular, the pibil pork (as opposed to the chicken dish) is rich, but the citrus of the bitter orange (and the cebollas en escabeche) cuts through it nicely, which the achiote paste adds deep, complex undertones. 

And of course, the KANKUN. I used just about two teaspoons in my marinade, and the flavour (and heat) of the habanero sauce was present throughout the whole dish. It was not too spicy, though. I'd say I hit upon just the right amount. 

(Mrs MexiGeek found it scrumptious as well.)

And again, habaneros, with their characteristic fruity flavour, are the perfect chile to complement this dish. 

And this is a serious habanero sauce. KANKUN use true habaneros for this sauce, not Scotch bonnets (which are related to habaneros, but not really the same thing). This commitment to using the authentic chile is important, because you need that true habanero flavour in a dish like this.

Of course, habaneros are one of the hottest chiles; some of them can reach 350,000 Scoville Heat Units, I think. They're certainly over 100,000. So for readers who think they might not be able to cope with that, I have some final advice. 

I added KANKUN's new habanero salsa to the marinade, but many cooks make the marinade without any chile, instead serving some chile salsa on the side.

This approach works well if you or the people you're serving people don't like too much chile heat, as each diner can take as much or little extra salsa as they choose.

So if you or any of your guests are a bit wary of the fiery habaneros, feel free to halve the quantity of KANKUN, or even leave it out of the marinade and just have a bottle of KANKUN on the table, for the hardcore chileheads.

Pain 100%: This sauce will fuck you up!

Sometimes sauce don't feel like it should. You make it hurt so good!

I suppose the dumbest thing you could think about Original Juan's Pain 100% sauce is that it's just a name.

That's what I thought at first. After all, they sell it at Marks & Spencer, the same place Margaret Thatcher used to buy her underwear.

There's nothing "hot" about that.

But 100% Pain is not just a name. It's not a gimmick. It's not misplaced bravado.

It's a warning.

Used carelessly, this sauce will fuck you up.

The thing that gives this sauce bragging rights is that habaneros are the first ingredient listed, indicating this is literally a sauce of habanero chiles, rather than a tomato sauce with a chile or two to give it a "kick".

It's actually the habanero flavour that "got" me. Habaneros aren't easy to come by in Britain. Often I have to substitute Scotch Bonnets, which aren't quite the same.

So when I first tasted this sauce, I kept adding more and more. I just couldn't get enough of that real habanero flavour.

I estimate I used two and half to three tablespoons of sauce on two modest-sized fish cakes.

Obviously my mouth was on fire, but that didn't bother me because, unrepentant chilehead that I am, I actually like the burn.

Also, I've made sauces and relishes out of naga chiles, which are hotter than habaneros. I was like "No probs, I got this!"

And anyway, habaneros contain dihydrocapsaicin, which is intense but short-lived. A few minutes later I was fine. Or so I thought...

Later that evening I began to feel a strange sensation in my stomach. It started as an uncomfortable churning, but quickly escalated to severe pain.

I sent my three-year-old upstairs to get help from my wife, but being a toddler, she didn't quite get the message across.

So I literally crawled up the stairs, dripping with sweat, and heaved myself into the living room before collapsing on the floor.

I was seriously considering calling NHS 24, but I stuck to my two-pronged chile mantra: "The pain is only temporary" followed by "You will not be permanently damaged".

"What if he doesn't survive? He's worth a lot to me!"

That, combined with some Gaviscon and two capsules of paracetamol (Tylenol to you Americans) and I was able to ride out the storm.

Which taught me a valuable lesson: never use more than a teaspoon of this sauce at a time.

I've generally been able to stick to this rule. My teaspoons are rather generous, though. Because I never learn.


My rocky introduction to 100% Pain aside, let me tell you why I like this sauce:

• Real habanero flavour - apart from being one of the hottest chiles in the world, habaneros have a distinctly sweet and fruity flavour, which is woefully addictive (and why I just can't leave this sauce alone)

• It comes by its heat "honestly" - by which I mean it's not beefed up with artificial capsaicin extracts like some other "extreme hot sauces" are. It's hella hot because it's made from hella habaneros, and habaneros are hella fucking hot.

• It "does what it says on the tin" - (as we say in Britain). It says 100% Pain, and that's what you get. Although I initially thought the name would be a bluff, as a chilehead I am comforted that the sauce really is that hot

Now, being MexiGeek, one question I have to address is: is there anything particularly "Mexican" about this sauce?

Habaneros, of course, are the distinctive chile of Yucatecan cuisine, but most of the Yucatecan recipes I've made call for one or two habaneros.

As opposed to 15 or 20.

When making a nice Mayan chiltomate sauce, for instance, a couple habs is more than enough.

However, I did find a very similar-sounding recipe in one of Diana Kennedy's books, which calls for 12-15 habaneros, a bit of seasoning (Mexican oregano, etc), and just enough vinegar to dilute the sauce to a pourable consistency.

That sounds about right. So there is a real Mexican analogue to this sauce.

Interestingly, Diana says more than once that this sauce should be used sparingly and that "a little goes a very long way".

As a final note, I recently discovered the Smoking Tongue blog, which chronicles one man's attempt to drink a bottle of hot sauce every day.


I notice that 100% Pain is not one of the sauces.


I don't even want to think about what would happen if you tried to down a whole bottle of this sauce in one sitting.


I'm sure hallucinations would be on the agenda.


I used two types of chile sauce on this sandwich, because I never learn anything.



Sweet and Spicy: Habaneros' Hot Sauce review

Photo from habvan.com

The last time I was in Birmingham Habaneros didn't exist. If it had, I would have forced the entire crew of the Times Spelling Bee to have lunch there.

One of the things I love about being MexiGeek is discovering new Mexican food products and suppliers here in the UK.

So when Habaneros offered to send me a bottle of their homemade sauce, I was like "Sí, claro!"

But first a little background on these guys.

Habaneros define their cuisine as "Mexican Street Food". The menu sticks to a handful of Mexican classics, with a focus on fresh, locally and sustainably sourced produce.

They import chiles and other speciality ingredients from Mexico; everything else comes from the local area.

The emphasis on local suppliers and short, traceable supply chains has always been a mark of quality in the food industry, but in light of recent events it has become pretty much essential.

Habaneros name the local farm that supplies their meats, and even their vegetable dishes are used with seasonal produce, so your veggie taco will have slightly different veg in spring than in Autumn.

Amazing! That alone would be reason enough to support them, but there are a couple other things that earn Habaneros a place on my "must-visit" list.

The burrito/taco fillings include barbacoa and chcken tinga!

The tinga is especially exciting for me. So many places would just dust some grilled chicken with chile powder and call it "Mexican". That Habaneros is offering a true classic of Mexican street/market food puts a big MexiGeek smile on my face.

Also, carnitas, barbacoa, and tinga all come with some significant time investments. These are marinaded, slow-cooked meals. So this menu shows that Habaneros are willing to put the time in.

Pickled Red Onions, aka cebollas en escabeche are my favourite condiment ever! I can never get enough of these.

And of course there are the homemade sauces.

All Habaneros' sauces are homemade right in the restaurant. This includes not only the one I tried, but its mild, medium, and extra-hot cousins, and of course Mexico's sine qua non sauces guacamole and fresh tomato salsa.

I tried the "Hot Sauce", which is their second-hottest sauce and the hottest one they generally offer to customers (the "Habanero XXX" sauce is apparently only available by request).

This is a smooth pouring sauce, rather than a chunky diping salsa.

Before I even opened the bottle the ingredients had me intrigued: habanero chiles came first (nice), plus there were some classic Yucatecan spices like allspice, black pepper, and cumin. And peaches!

For me, the peaches are the true genius-stroke of this sauce. Sweet and spicy is one of the world's great culinary pairings. You could easily achieve that with just sugar. But using fruit also boosts flavour, and since habaneros themselves have a fruity taste, it's an excellent match.

Fruit and chile go hand-in-hand in Mexican cuisine. A simple fruit salad will invariably be topped with chile and lime powder called tajín. Fresh and dried fruits feature in most of the moles. They even add fresh fruit or fruit juices to guacamole and salsa in the Yucatán.

It's an instantly addictive combination, and I've been putting this sauce on nearly everything I eat for the past couple days.

I've even been tempted to drink it straight from the bottle.

But be careful though. The sauce is made from habanero chiles, so it has a pretty healthy kick. It's nothing I can't handle, but if you don't eat chiles literally every day of your life like I do, you may want to use it sparingly. A little habanero goes a long way.

Amateur Chile-Growing (day 7)

MexiGeek is many things. "Gardener" is not one of them.

But I love chiles so much I'm actually attempting to grow my own.

I tried this last year too. I eventually got some green shoots in my propagator. But then I went on holiday for two weeks and when I came back they were nearly dead.

I managed to revive them, sort of, but they never flowered and certainly never set fruit.

Then a few weeks ago I came home to find that Mrs MexiGeek had bought me a chile plant already setting fruit. I don't know exactly which kind of chile because the label typically doesn't say.

(This is a common problem with commercially-bought fresh chiles in the UK.)

They are definitely a kind of capsicum frutescens, possibly malaguetas, a Brazilian relative of the tabasco chile.

The chile pods have the long, thin, tapered look of tabascos, and they remain upright rather than hanging (pendant), which is apparently typical of capsicum frutescens.

However, true tabascos are meant to ripen first to yellow or orange before turning red, while these go straight from green to red.

The other reason I think they might be a tabasco relative is that they are pretty fucking hot.

I don't know how much longer this plant will continue setting fruit, but in the meantime it inspired me to plant more chiles of my own.

Last year I planted jalapeños, güeros (Hungarian wax peppers), and something I've never heard of called the "Peruvian Purple". I'm trying all three again this year, but I've got a new chile as well.

A friend of my mother-in-law's grows her own chiles and gave me some; I saved the seeds and planted them along with the other varieties.

These chiles were yellow, but very hot, and clearly a kind of capsicum chinense (the habanero family).

They had the characteristic "chinese lantern" shape you get from habaneros and Scotch Bonnets except that they were longer, like a Naga (which is a chinense/frutescens hybrid), but even more so.

They also had the fruity sweetness you often get with ripe C. chinense chiles.

(Of course, these chiles tend to be so hot many people don't notice they actually have a flavour. But you should really try tasting past the heat. You'd be very impressed.)

At Day 7 after planting, the chinenses are the only chiles to have begun sprouting.

Look hard. There's definitely a green shoot in there.

If they continue to do well I'm curious to find out a couple more things about them.

• Is yellow their fully ripe colour or do they turn orange and red?

• Do they taste better when fully ripe or immature (green)?

While the new baby keeps me from having time to cook elaborate food, I'll be periodically updating you on my chiles and writing about other Mexican food topics.

Before I sign off for this week, though, here's my chile wish-list (chiles I'd like to grow at home in an ideal world):

True habaneros: when I need fresh habaneros I usually get Scotch Bonnets. Some books say they're the same thing; some say they're not. Just in case, I'd like to have my own supply of the real McCoy.

Chocolate habaneros: they don't taste of chocolate, but I want them anyway.

Chiles de árbol: the second-hottest chile in Mexico. If I had these on tap I'd make salsa picante every week!

Chiles serranos: the jalapeño is the one fresh Mexican chile you can usually buy from a UK supermarket, but god help you if you need serranos.

Oddly, there a few chiles I don't want to grow:

Jalapeños: I know I am trying to grow them right now, but that's just because they're there. These are too readily available to need to grow your own.

Poblanos: one of my favourites, and very hard to get in Britain. So why don't I want to grow them?
Because making chiles rellenos or even rajas is such a faff, I actually like having their limited availability as an excuse not to make them more frequently.

Pasillas de Oaxaca: This is my new favourite chile, but it's a smoked chile, and don't see myself smoking chiles at home. So there's no point in growing them.

Hasta luego!

This Week's MexiFeast: Lime Soup (sopa de lima)

This was the first authentic Mexican dish I ever cooked, and it's still one of my favourites.

It's also dead easy. This recipe serves two as a main or four as a starter.

Take two chicken breasts

one roasted, chopped red pepper

three roasted, chopped tomatoes

chiles to taste (some like it hot; others do not)

one chopped onion

two cloves chopped garlic

the juice of two limes

500 ml chicken stock

Put all that in a pot, bring to the boil, then turn the heat to medium-low and simmer for about 20 minutes.

When the chicken is cooked, remove it and take the soup off the heat.

if you have the time and inclination, make your own crispy tortilla strips out of corn tortillas and put them in the serving bowls. Or you can just crumble up some store-bought tortilla chips.

Shred the chicken and place it in the serving bowls on top of the tortilla strips/chips.

Strain the soup through a sieve. You don't want any bits floating in it.

Ladle the soup over the chicken and tortilla strips and garnish with chopped coriander (cilantro).

This is a soup from the Yucatán, so the chile should technically be a habanero, but these are very hot. Don't use it if you can't take it.

The red pepper, too, is probably not original, but I think it adds a nice sweetness.

Sopa de Lima

I've decided to name my protagonist Esteban, after my brother, who learned to cook before I did.
Although he is a Mexican, Esteban (my fictional character) was born in the US, while his parents were living there illegally, so he is a de facto American citizen (unless Bush changed that rule). However, he was deported with his parents soon after he was born, and he grew up in Tijuana.
But that's not where his parents come from. They are from Oaxaca, and that is the culinary heritage he usually looks to when creating his food.

The other cuisine he becomes enamoured of is Yucatecan. And that's where sopa de lima comes in.

Almost all Americans from the southwest will be familiar with tortilla soup (and if you're not, you need to try it). Well, sopa de lima (lime soup) is the Yucatecan variation. A the name implies, it is flavoured with fresh lime juice, which adds such a compelling lift that I've completely gone off making the non-lime kind.

Sopa de lima was the first recipe I cooked from <i>Two Cooks and a Suitcase</i> (in effect launching me on my culinary adventure), and it was an instant hit.

As with all traditional soups, there are as many versions of the recipe a there are grannies and old aunties who make it. So when I got four new Mexican cookbooks for my birthday this year, I found lime soup recipes in three of them (and standard tortilla soup recipes in all four).
I recently tried one of the new recipes, but unfortunately it just inspired me to return to the Two Cooks one.

The recipe is really very simple, which for me is part of the attraction. To make a batch for two people (until Abby starts eating dinner with us we'll be cooking for two most nights) you need:

2 chicken breasts
1 roasted tomato, roughly chopped
1 roasted red pepper, roughly chopped
1 white onion, roughly chopped
2 cloves of garlic, roasted and roughly chopped
1 chile pepper, roasted or pickled (NOT raw), seeded and diced
1 tablespoon of Mexican oregano
The juice of one lime

The chile you use is a matter of some controversy. The habanero is the ubiquitous chile of the Yucatán. It is also the hottest chile known to humankind, and it has a very distinct flavour. The only recipe I know that calls for it in the soup proper is Thomasina Miers' in <i>Mexican Food Made Simple</i>. Which is not to say I doubt you'll ever get this soup with habanero in the Yucatán; I'm just saying be sure you know what you're getting into.

The other recipes I have call for a green chile, which I usually read as "jalapeño", though it could be any green chile.

You'll also need somecorn tortillas, cut into strips and fried.

Though roasting tomatoes, garlic, peppers, and chiles is not hard, one of the great things about this soup, is that there's a cheat version. Use pre-roasted, stuff out of a jar and some diced, pickled jalapeños (even Tesco has these now). And for the tortilla strips, get a bag of tortilla chips and crush them.

Basically, bung everything except the tortillas in a pot and cover with water. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat to medium and simmer for about 20 minutes or until the chicken is fully cooked and tender.

Remove the chicken breasts to a plate, let them cool briefly, then shred them. I make a cut against the grain and rapidly shred the meat with a fork, like waiters do with crispy duck in Chinese restaurants.

Now strain the soup. The first time I did this I felt very weird about throwing away all the bits, but all the flavour by now will have gone into the broth, so there's no need to keep the chopped bits, and  they would be very off-putting floating around in the soup.

Place some shredded chicken into each bowl, add some broth, and top with the crispy, fried tortilla strips, and maybe some chopped coriander and a lime wedge.

The variation I tried recently came from Diane Kennedy's <i>Essential Cuisines of Mexico</i>.
Kennedy is meant to be the Julia Childs of Mexican cooking, so I had high hopes for this recipe. However, there were two issues with it which made it less successful than the simpler Two Cooks version.

The first issue was the amount of chile. Whereas Two Cooks calls for one chile, Kennedy gives a specific weight of chopped chile. I initially took this as good sign, as chiles can vary in size. However, the jalapeños I used came from Mexico (there was no English on the can), and were very hot. Jalapeños can very from 2,500 to 5,000 Scoville units, and these were definitely at the higher end of that. This meant the final soup was far too spicy.

The problem with this isn't that we're chile-wussies. It's that the dish ended up lacking balance.
Balance was something I heard them talk about a lot on Masterchef, bit I never really understood it until I cooked this soup for the first time. No one flavour overpowered the others; nothing got lost in the shuffle. Everything was there in just the right amount, working in harmony. It was beautiful. That kind of balance is impossible to achieve if the chiles drown out all the other flavours.

The other issue was the chicken. Kennedy calls for chicken on the bone, which is probably more authentic than breast. However, I suspect that chicken legs and thighs simply can't get tender enough in 20 minutes, the ready breasts can. The meat was difficult to shred, and still had a chewy texture. Mexican chicken tends to be more active (and therefore tougher) than battery farm chicken (we used organic, free-range chicken). As a result, Mexicans often boil chicken (and other meat) for a long time to soften it - much longer than 20 minutes. Failing that, I think you're going to need breast meat.

However, I did learn some interesting things from this experiment. Kennedy omits the roasted sweet pepper and does not use roasted tomato (odd, since she has a fool-proof method of roasting toms that Rick Bayless also cites in his book Authentic Mexican). However,as I began simmering the soup, the aroma was immediately familiar, and there was nothing in the pot at this point except chopped garlic, Mexican oregano, and water. This suggests that the true soul of this dish consists of of those two ingredients (so if you wanna make this soup, you better get hold of Mexican oregano).

The other thing I'll take with me is Kennedy's garnish idea. Although she doesn't use habanero in the soup proper, she recommends roasting some, skinning and seeding it, and chopping it finely. Then you put the chopped habanero in a dish on the table for diners to help themselves (put a small spoon in the dish as well, as it's dangerous to touch chiles with your bare hands).

This added lovely flavour and colour to the soup, and as it's on the side, anyone who doesn't want their head blown off can just leave it out.

India

I've never walked into a room and had someone come up to me and say "Would you like to try the hottest chili known to humankind?"

Until Saturday. On an innocent trip to the Royal Botanical Gardens in Edinburgh, my wife noticed a stall near the entrance with a sign that read "Want to know about spices?"

The stall was part of an advertisement for the forthcoming Biodiversity Library Exhibition. It featured lots of spices, including cloves, ginger, etc, but the part that captured my attention was the row of chilies, ranked in order of piquancy ("hotness" or heat) in Scoville units.

For those who don't know, the Scoville scale, named for its creator, measures the heat of chilies in Scoville Heat Units (SHUs). To test a chili, you take an extract of it and give it to a panel of usually five lucky tasters. If any of them can feel the burn, you dilute the chili extract and taste again. The number of SHUs is the number of times you have to dilute the chili extract before none of the five tasters can detect any heat.

Bell peppers have zero. Common black pepper has like 50 or less (or would, if it contained capsaicin). A jalapeño has between 2,000 and 3,500. The mighty habanero has from 100,000 to 350,000.

The chili they were offering me at the stall was the infamous bhut jolokia pepper, also called the naga king pepper or "ghost chili". The hottest pepper in the world. 855,000 SHUs.

The ghost chili is a hybrid, but one of its parents is in the habanero family, and habaneros are a good friend of mine.

The lady at the stall said that so far no one had dared try the bhut jolokia. Whether this was true or not, I had no intention of passing up the opportunity. So they got me a plastic teaspoon and I took a small amount.

The first thing I noticed was that it didn't smell spicy. This could have been because it was in powder form, but no tiny particles of capsaicin floated up to tingle my nose. Instead it had a pleasantly aromatic bouquet with an earthy undertone.

When I put out on my tongue, it took a few seconds for the heat to start kicking in. I love slow-burn chilies. Firstly, they give you time to savour the distinct flavour of the chili (no two kinds taste alike, you know) before the burn kicks in. Secondly, rather than having it all up front, the growing burn is something to look forward to (I know that probably sounds twisted). And finally, it usually means the chili experience will last longer. I find that, the quicker the burn peaks, the quicker it fades.

As I stood there savouring the burn, another guy at that stall took my picture for posterity. All the while, people kept asking me "Is it hot?"

Of course it was hot. It had 855,000 Scoville units. But there are a couple things to know about me and chilies. I tend not to lose my head, no matter how hot the chili, because I know that it cannot do any lasting harm (unless you're actually allergic to capsaicin, which I am not). Also, I actually like the burn. Again, I know that probably sounds twisted, but it's true none the less.
My wife once mentioned that I must have reached the point where chilies don't burn anymore. "Oh no," I said, "They definitely still burn. I don't expect they'll ever stop burning. But I like the burn. I want them to burn."

It then occurred to me that a fondness for chilies may be a form of culinary masochism. But I'm not sure I can be bothered addressing that.

So how hot was that chili powder? Well, it was pretty fucking hot, and I hope my zen-like calm didn't lull the un-initiated into a false sense of security, because if you're not really used to capsaicin (the acid in chilies that makes them burn), you could easily be in a lot of pain. I mean a lot of pain. Blind panic style pain.

But on the other hand, when my wife asked me if it was noticeably hotter than the habaneros I was so used to eating. I couldn't really say. I guess so, but did it really feel nine times hotter? It occurred to me that there may be an upward limit to how much capsaicin the human tongue can actually detect before it just becomes "really fucking hot."

But more worrying was the fact that this was not actually the most uncomfortable I've ever been while eating chilies. That honour goes to a vindaloo I had on Brick Lane in the summer of 2007. It could be down to the amount of chili on my tongue (I may be a chili fiend, but I'm not an idiot. I respect the heat and I only took a little taste), or the unusually warm weather that year in London, but the Brick Lane curry had me sweating and gulping lassi. The bhut jolokia did not.

This is not definitive evidence of relative hotness, however. In fact, the vindaloo was probably made with the bhut jolokia chili.

The bhut jolokia pepper was developed in Asia, and so far all the food I've mentioned in this post is Indian.

In the UK, Indian cuisine occupies the same niche that Mexican food does in America: a non-native but culturally connected cuisine that makes copious use of chilies (the ability to eat which often becomes a source of manly bravado). Though all chilies come from the Americas originally, Asia has embraced them with the same fervour that the Mediterranean embraced that other Mexican export, the tomato.

And because Mexican food in Britain is only now becoming more than a cruel joke, North American expats have had to develop a taste for Indian food to get their chili fix.

This naturally has relevance for my book. When he first comes to Edinburgh, Esteban goes to work in an Indian restaurant. This means that I have to learn to cook Indian food.

Which is not a problem, by the way. I am fascinated by Indian food for the same reason Esteban is: ingredients. How have two countries on opposite ends of the Earth managed to depend on such similar flavours when cooking?

I began my Indian cooking adventure with the shahi korma, which differs from the more familiar korma because it uses ground almonds rather than coconut milk, and was a million miles away from the sweet gloopy yellow stuff you get from most take-aways. And on Saturday the adventure continued with a biryani.
Biryani is my favourite Indian dish. Whenever I try a new Indian restaurant, I order the biryani. If they can't get that right, I don't go back.

My homemade biryani

It's interesting that I chose to cook something so involved so soon after my mole odyssey. Altogether, the biryani took me just over three guy hours to prep and cook, and used some very similar techniques to the mole. For example, I once again had to drop raisins into hot oil and fry them until they plumped up. And there was grinding nuts and spices into a paste, and then frying that paste until it browned.

I'm not going to go into detail about the recipes here, because this isn't an Indian Food blog, it's a Mexican food blog, and also because in both cases I just followed Madhur Jaffrey's recipe. Her book is on the sidebar menu, and if you're at all interested in cooking Indian food, I highly recommend it.

What I would like to do, though, is go through the ingredients to see just how similar they are to Mexican food.

Lamb: Both Indian dishes were lamb dishes. Lamb is one of the most traditional meats in British cuisine, but is not actually common in India or Mexico. In both countries, these dishes would probably be made with goat. I have no qualms about eating goat. It's just that they don't sell it in Tesco.

Garlic and onion: The Indian dishes made noticeably more use of garlic than the Mexican dishes. However, the amount of onion was comparable. And seriously, where would savoury food be without onion?

Ginger: In Western cuisine this is often used in sweet dishes. When it appears in savoury food, it screams "Asia". Because it comes from Asia. So this is definitely more indicative of Indian and than Mexican cooking.

Almonds: We saw almonds in the mole. Nuts are found elsewhere in Mexican cooking, but it tends to be pecans, walnuts, or that North American staple the peanut (not a true nut, by the way). So this ingredient is definitely more Asian than Mexican.

Fat: The cooking technique of frying things in fat was imported into Mexico by the Spanish. Mexicans usually use lard, and if you want to get super-traditional, you should use "homemade" lard render from the fat of something you cooked the night before. I have, for instance, fried quesadillas in lard I rendered from chorizo. Delicious. However, I can't bring myself to buy a pack of lard from the supermarket. I don't wanna die, at least not in my 30s. So I use vegetable oil. Madhur Jaffrey's recipes called for vegetable oil as well, though a more traditional Indian fat is ghee, or clarified butter. I love frying things in butter, but again, I wouldn't recommend doing it all the time, for your arteries' sake. The point is, Indians and Mexicans both fry food, but they use very different fats.

Spices: By which I mean things that aren't chilies. Indian food from cheap take-aways is defined by thick creamy sauces and/or a lot of chili. Proper Indian food is defined by its masterful blending and balancing of spices. The Indian dishes used cardamom (can't get more Indian than that), clove (which is used in moles, but otherwise is rendered superfluous by the native allspice), cinnamon (which has definitely been embraced by Mexico, though it is originally Asian), ground coriander (which, though equally associated with Indian and Mexican cuisine, tends to be only the fresh herb in Mexico, rather than the ground seeds), and cumin. This last is one of my favourites, and one of the trio (along with chilies and coriander) of ingredients that prompted me to compare Indian and Mexican cuisine in the first place. As it turns out, cumin is more common in northern Mexico than elsewhere, which makes sense, as northern Mexican cooking (with its beef and flour tortillas) is what informs most Mexican food available in the US.

So far, then, only two and a half ingredients unite these cuisines after all. My investigation, however, is by no means finished.

On a final note, I am aware that the bhut jolokia had been replaced as the world's hottest chili by the naga viper chili. It's still pretty fucking hot, though.