To know more about Mexican food, I decided to take a cooking class today. As it turned out, I was the only student - watched over and instructed by two cooks :-)
First I had to decide which meals to cook. Since I was the only student, I had to make all the decisions myself - but as it turned out, I decided well. Maybe the soup choice could have been better, but all the other dishes were excellent. This is what we made:
- Tortillas with Guacamole
- Quesadillas
- Two different salsas (a base salsa, and one with a maguey worm blended into the base salsa)
- Pumpkin flower filled with cheese
- Sopa de Milpa
- Mole Coloradito
- Natilla
- Agua fresca de pepino, chile y límon
The second step after deciding on the dishes was visiting the market to buy the ingredients. Of the several markets in Oaxaca, we went to the Sanchez Pascua market which was only a few blocks away. Everything in these markets is organic and grown in the countryside surrounding Oaxaca. The ladies from the farms come to the market only when they have something to sell; so everything that is sold is in season and freshly harvested.
Something that really impressed me in the market were how many different types of dried chili are available in Mexico. Back home, they only ever seem to sell one type - chile de árbol - in tiny little bags. Here, the situation is a little different:
Of all these - as far as I've tried them - chipotles are my favorites. Chipotels are jalapeños that have been dried over smoke. What an excellent taste!
After the market, we went back to the kitchen and started cooking. I have to say - the cooking experience is quite pleasant when you're assisted by two real chefs who prepare the right quantities of everything on nice little plates and take care that your food doesn't burn ;-)
The first step was making tortillas. This is surprisingly easy: you just take a small handful of dough - the ready-made dough can be bought in the market - and put it into the tortilla press. The press is really only two pieces of wood or metal with a lever attached that squishes a ball of dough into the flat, round shape a tortilla is supposed to have.
Second was the soup - also very easy: cut up all the ingredients, add water, let cook. And, of course, stir from time to time:
The most interesting and involved food to make was the mole, simply due to the amount of ingredients going into the mole and the fact that everything had to be roasted first, then blended together, and then cooked some more. Because making mole is such a long process, you can buy ready-made mole paste in the market. There are several different kinds of mole, depending on the ingredients, but most of them are named for their color: black, green, red, etc. The mole coloradito we made had two types of chili peppers - and lots of them:
Aside from the chili peppers, the ingredients were almonds, pecan nuts, raisins, tomatoes, onions, garlic, thyme, oregano - and chocolate.
So then, after a couple hours of cooking, we got to the eating part :-) These were the pumpkin flowers filled with cheese:
I'd never had pumpkin flowers before, but let me tell you - they were delicious! Combined with the cheese and herbs inside... mmmh! Next up, the mole coloradito served over chicken breast:
Honestly, I don't have words to describe the taste, but it was SO GOOD! Just the right amount of spiciness, very thick and rich, and with so many different tastes all coming together to make one wonderful dish. I might even be in love with mole coloradito now ;-)
Finally, the desert was natilla, which is a kind of custard:
After lunch, I was so full that I really didn't want to move. So I just sat down in a nice bit of shade in some peaceful little square and read for a while. When I felt like moving again, I went to visit the railway museum. Like in many South American countries, the story of the Mexican railway is, overall, a sad one. Initially, the railway brought wealth and new possibilities to the people (some of them, anyway), but around the middle of the 20th century it started to stagnate. In the 1990s, the railway was privatized in an attempt to revitalize it - but the private investors quickly began closing all those parts of the railway that were not profitable. Right now, I'm not sure if there are any trains in operation left in Mexico. If there are, they surely do not come to Oaxaca, because this is what the station-turned-museum looks like today:
The museum had the wonderful feeling of a lost place to it, with all the old locomotives and train cars standing in the midst of weaving grass. At the same time, it didn't feel lost at all, because it has been turned into some kind of gentle public space with benches, pathways, and children's playgrounds in some of the cars. I thoroughly enjoyed wandering around and looking at old railway artifacts.
