EatMx: Real Mexican food, at home and on the road

More Baja Wines Will Be Heading North

Wines from Baja California have been hard to get on this side of the border. The good news is, a group of interesting boutique Baja wines will soon be available in California. 

Even better news is, the distribution won't be handled by some outside commercial firm but by La Mision Associates, which is headed by Michelle Martain. She's part of the family that owns Cavas Valmar in Ensenada.

Martain brought some of the wines to a press conference at Rivera restaurant that previewed the Baja California Culinary Fest 2012, which will take place Oct. 11-14 in and around Tijuana. 

This event will include wine dinners prepared by the region's top chefs, winery tours, cooking demos, a culinary workshop, a Tijuana street food tour and much more. For more information, check the fest's Facebook page. 

Lined up on the bar at Rivera were some of the wines Martain will make available in California. They were paired with appetizers from host chef John Sedlar and guest chef Miguel Ángel Guerrero from Tijuana. The tasting included: 

Viñedos Don Juan Meritage 2009. This opulent blend of Merlot, Syrah and a small amount of Cabernet Sauvignon (second from left at the top) shows the minerality and faint saltiness that appear often in Baja wines. Only 364 cases were made. The winery is located in the Valle de Las Palmas, 17 miles south of Tecate. 

Vena Cava Cabernet Sauvigon 2010 and Tempranillo 2010. Vena Cava is noted for its Cabernet, but this Tempranillo is stunning. Part of the credit goes to the vintage, says Philip Gregory, winemaker and director.

The year 2010 was very good in the Guadalupe Valley, where Vena Cava is located. But 2011 was good too, and 2012 appears to be another winner, says Gregory, who will start work on this year's Sauvignon Blanc in a couple of weeks.

A prestige talking point: The 2010 Tempranillo was served at a dinner during the G-20 summit that brought world leaders to Los Cabos in Mexico in June. 

Cavas Valmar Cabernet Sauvignon 2009 and Tempranillo 2009. These red wines (top right) are specialties of Cavas Valmar, which dates from 1983. The grapes for both came from the San Vicente Valley. They're big enough to go well with hearty meat dishes, even spicy mole. The winery also makes a Chenin Blanc. 

Bodegas San Rafael Cabernet Sauvignon 2004. This was the oldest wine at the tasting but from one of the newer wineries.

Bodegas San Rafael planted its first vineyards in 2000 in Ojos Negros, where the high altitude results in cold nights and warm days that lead to higher levels of tannins, acidity and fruit in the wines. Cabernet was one of the first varietals planted.

Santo Tomás Tempranillo-Cabernet Sauvignon 2010 and Barbera 2006. These big reds come from the oldest winery in Baja California. Interesting news is that the winery is currently producing a white wine from the historic red-skinned Mission grape, and this will be exported to California.

Check the Santo Tomás website to learn more about the wines and to see what Mexican dishes are suggested to pair with them. 

 

Five More Top Places for Mexican Food

Top tastes were plentiful at AltaMed's "East LA Meets Napa" benefit, where some 30 restaurants and food purveyors presented their best. Other booths poured wines, mostly from California but some from Mexico too.  

The food ranged from trendy updated dishes such as Rivera's maize cornets filled with a chopped vegetable and lettuce salad, avocado, chiopotle crema and micro amaranth to straightforward tacos, sandwiches and handmade tortillas.

See the preceding post for the first five taste. The following five--actually seven because they include two drinks--show why you ought to plan on attending next year's tasting. Check AltaMed's website for updates. You can also read there about AltaMed's work in providing health care to underserved communities.   

6. Zapien's Salsa Grill  put out citrus-marinated carnitas on tortilla chips (above). The tangy bits of meat were all the more tasty because they were combined with nopales salad, caramelized onions, tomatoes and crumbled Mexican cheese. 

Zapien's Salsa Grill and Taquería, 6702 Rosemead Blvd., Pico Rivera, CA 90660. (562) 942-7072.

7. Lotería Grill made the hot night more comfortable by serving two delicious cold drinks (at top). The magenta one is cactus fruit and pineapple; the pale green drink is cucumber with lime juice.

You could sip your drink and then eat Lotería's taco de pez espada al pastor (above), a swordfish taco with the same zesty seasonings as carne al pastor, meat cooked on a vertical spit. 

Lotería Grill, 6627 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90028. (323) 465-2500. And four other locations.

8. Guisados contributed its chicken tinga recipe to AltaMed's new book about Latino restaurants in the Southland, "In Their Own Words II."

At East LA Meets Napa, you could obtain the book with a donation. Then at Guisados' booth, you could taste the chipotle-spiced tinga, spooned into a flour tortilla (above). 

Guisados, 2100 E. Cesar E. Chavez Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90033. (323) 264-7201.

9. Carnitas Uruapan was superbly generous with its scrumptious conchas and cookies. You could eat as many of these freshly baked goodies as you wanted. Then you were handed paper bags so you could take some home for breakfast.

Carnitas Uruapan Market & Deli, 2102 E. Cesar E. Chavez Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90033. (323) 265-2474.

10. Casa Oaxaca  earned stars for its presentation of the Oaxacan dessert nicuatole. Each square of the milky corn mixture was served in a corn husk with bright cactus fruit sauce dribbled over the top. Soft meringue spooned into crunchy thin pastry shells was just as tempting.  

Casa Oaxaca, 3317 W. First St., Santa Ana, CA 92703. (714) 554-0905.

10 Top Places for Mexican Food: Part 1

If you wanted to see how good Mexican food is in Los Angeles and surrounding areas, you should have been at AltaMed's "East LA Meets Napa" benefit last weekend at Union Station.

Problem is, the event sold out rapidly. Only some 1,500 people got to sample the impressive array of food from local restaurants and wines produced by Latino winemakers.

In three hours, it was impossible to get to all the restaurant booths, but here are five top tastes. Another five will appear in the next post.

1. CaCao Mexicatessen's tuna tostaditas (above) were such a draw that this was the first restaurant to run out of food. The tastes of sustainable Fijian albacore tuna sat on a bed of wasabi guacamole. Under the microgreens on top is a serrano chile and soy salsa.

CaCao Mexicatessen, 1576 Colorado Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90041. (323) 478-2791.

2. Setá in Whittier offered tostaditas too. But what stood out was the restaurant's bright, spicy chipotle shrimp on sour cream mashed potatoes.  That's owner Hugo Molina's wife, Aricia Alvarado, holding a serving at the top. Molina (above) not only prepared and dished up the food but gave a cooking demo.  

Setá Restaurant,13033 Philadelphia Street, Whittier, CA 90601. (562) 698-335.

3. La Huasteca showed off a great variety of its specialties including cilantro shrimp, coconut fish, cheese tamales, even chiles en nogada sprinkled with pomegranate seeds. If you didn't have room for all that, you would have been happy just to taste a chicken tamal with spicy mole negro (above).

La Huasteca, 3150 E. Imperial Highway, Suite 100, Lynwood, Ca. 90262. (310) 537-8880.

4. Juan's Restaurante offered an unusual organic cactus mole (above). Made with cactus paddles (nopales), it was mild, nutty and slightly sweet, delicious to sip by itself from a small cup.

Juan's Restaurante, 4291 Maine Ave.,  Baldwin Park, CA 91706. (626) 337-8686.

5. El Cholo's green corn tamales (above) have been drawing customers for decades. The tamales contain only cheese, but the booth offered dark mole sauce to pour over them if you weren't content with their classic sweet flavor.

El Cholo, 260 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, CA 91101. (626) 795-5800. And other locations. 

Shrimp Hot Dogs and a Cool Coconut Drink

People go to Tacos Estilo Ciudad Obregón for dogos de camarón, which are shrimp hot dogs. This stand in San Felipe, Baja California, is named for owner Martín Mendoza's hometown in the state of Sonora.

The hot dogs are great--shrimp stuffed into soft buns brought from Sonora. The one above is loaded with condiments provided by the stand.

There are other good sandwiches too, like one that contains a fresh California chile that's been roasted, filled with ham and cheese and wrapped in bacon (at right).

The corn that you see on top comes from rajas, a mixture of green chile strips, corn and thick Mexican crema. It's in the condiment bar along with lots of other toppings. 

Or, if you want something familiar, you can have a hamburguesa with fries and a soda. 

 

The stand has two carts, one for sandwiches, the other for tacos. Mendoza, above, is cutting up carne asada for tacos. Lengua (tongue) and cabeza (head meat) are other popular fillings.

The time to go is night, when it's pleasant to sit outside after a hot day in this desert country and eat a sandwich or taco with a cold drink.

You'll find one of the best Mexican drinks you'll ever taste at this stand. It's coco horchata, or coconut horchata.

Ground rice is the traditional base for horchata. But in parts of Mexico such as southern Veracruz, people drink coco horchata that is made from ground coconut instead of rice.

And in Yucatán, there is pozole con coco, a Mayan drink of young corn ground with coconut. 

But the coco horchata at Ciudad Obregón (at right) is exactly what it sounds like--traditional rice horchata that is mixed half and half with the water from a fresh young coconut.

A truckload of green-hulled coconuts sits behind the stand, ready to be used for coco horchata. They come from Colima, I was told. 

Some of the tender, almost gelatinous, coconut flesh goes into the mix too. The flavor is deep and rich, with a faint, perhaps natural, saltiness.  

This cold, sweet, rich-tasting drink is so good that I was determined to reproduce it at home. The horchata part was easy. Click on the link for the recipe. For the coconut water, I bought a peeled young coconut at a Thai market and extracted the water and some of the flesh.

Poured in a tumbler over ice, homemade coco horchata is delicious. But I guess the only way to get the real flavor and the right atmosphere is to go to San Felipe and drink it at Tacos Estilo Ciudad Obregón.

Look for the stand at night on the street called Mar Caribe Norte. You'll know you're there when you see the twin hot dog and taco signs.  

 

A New Baja Chef Emerges

If you want to ace out other chef groupies, be the first to brag that you know this name: Julio César González Zetina.

You can say that Zetina (at top) is on his way to becoming the newest of the hot chefs in Baja California. And the first to work on the opposite coast of Baja from Tijuana's Javier Plascencia, who has been capturing most of the attention these days, and Ensenada's Benito Molina.

Dedicated to local products and indigenous cuisines, Zetina spent 10 years in Quintana Roo researching Mayan foods and culture and handling chef gigs in Cancún. Then he taught regional cuisines at the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California in Ensenada. 

In January, he opened El Balcón Cocina Artesanal in La Placita, an upscale shopping plaza in San Felipe on the Sea of Cortez.

The restaurant occupies a breezy space on the upper floor looking out to the street, thus the name El Balcón (The Balcony). And it has a handsome tiled outdoor kitchen where González and his team put out extraordinary food.

Take, for example, the five-course lunch he produced the day I was there. 

It started with an aguachile of cazón (dogfish) marinated in green and red chile salsas (above) set off by a scattering of crisp sea asparagus, verdolaga leaves, chapulines (Oaxacan grasshoppers) and seeds from pods known as huaxes or guajes. Crisp tortilla cut-outs framed the plate. 

The next course (above) brought together foods from three regions. Yori muni beans from the Yaqui zone of northern Mexico were tucked inside thick oval masa cakes called tlacoyos.

On top, Zetina placed clams from the Sea of Cortez in a Mayan sauce, which tasted of the Yucatecan seasoning achiote. Lettuce leaves almost hid crisp crumbles made from beans and tuna.

Zetina and his sous chef, Marcelino Morales Villegas, are both from Puebla, so they were at home putting together a plate of shrimp with three moles--mole barroque, which tasted like a fruity, dark red Puebla mole, and green and red pipián sauces (above). Fried tortilla circles from the aguachile cut-outs top the cactus salad on the side. 

Ask Zetina how he makes a dish and he reels off a string of ingredients and spices more quickly than you can write them down. I did manage to get some of the components of the green pipián--pepitas, sesame, cumin and coriander seeds, green chiles, tomatillos, radish leaves and hoja santa.

After three courses of complex and spicy flavors, Zetina sent out vanilla ice cream scented with lavender flowers, accompanied by puffed amaranth on one side and chocolate syrup on the other.

And then a plate of Baja cheeses to eat with two fruit compotes (above). One combined orange and banana, the other fresh strawberries and jamaica flowers, infused with such spices as star anise, cinnamon, cloves, coriander and cumin. The crumbly mixture on the side includes pumpkin seeds, nuts and toasted coconut.

Instead of relying on what's available locally, Zetina brings in hydroponic and organic produce from the Guadalupe Valley. San Felipe fish markets supply him with freshly caught fish and shellfish.

And a wine shop in La Placita makes it possible to get good Baja bottles to go with the food at El Balcón.

At this lunch, J.C. Bravo's Palomino, a white wine from the Guadalupe Valley, coped well with a range of spicy and sweet flavors that would not have been easy to pair with a single wine. 

El Balcón Cocina Artesanal, Avenida Mar De Cortez 614-202, in La Placita, San Felipe, Baja California, Mexico.

Note: The restaurant is now on summer break. It will reopen in mid September when the weather starts to cool down. 

Have a Fish Taco Where They Started

San Felipe introduced the fish taco, or so its loyal inhabitants claim. If you want to try one where those people go, the place is Taquería & Mariscos Adriana on the malecon, facing the beach and the Sea of Cortez.

You won't meet Adriana. She's in Washington State. It's her mother, María Soledad Solorio Figueroa, who has run this stand for 24 years.

Here you see her, dipping pieces of fish in batter. Then she'll fry them until golden brown. 

María places the fried fish on a tortilla. Then you create the taco by adding the condiments she has set out.

There are plenty of salsas--one with avocado, another with cilantro, a chopped fresh salsa and a violently hot red salsa.

Tacos without that red salsa (above) aren't tacos, María says. She makes it with toasted pico de pájaro chiles.

If you can't eat anything that fiery, you can cool the taco down with shredded cabbage, thick crema and a cold beer on the side. 

Or she'll make you some ceviche (above) or a seafood cocktail with your choice of shrimp, oysters, octopus or clams, or a campechana, which combines them all. 

Taquería y Mariscos Adriana, Avenida Malecon 196, San Felipe, Baja California, Mexico. 

A REALLY HOT RED SALSA
Inspired by María's salsa, but slightly different 

5 dried pico de pájaro chiles, or chiles de árbol 
3/4 pound roma tomatoes
1 serrano chile
1 large clove garlic 
Salt to taste

Toast the pico de pájaro chiles on a hot griddle until fragrant and slightly darkened, but not burned.

Place the tomatoes, serrano chile and garlic in a saucepan. Add water to cover. Bring to a boil and boil, uncovered, 5 minutes, until the tomatoes are softened.

Drain the vegetables. Remove the peel from the tomatoes. Cut off and discard the stem of the serrano chile. 

Place the tomatoes, serrano and pico de pájaro chiles and the garlic in a blender container and blend until pureed. Remove to a bowl and stir in salt to taste. 

Makes about 1 1/3 cups. 

Clam Soup for Lunch

A huge Dutch oven with a red lid sits on the counter in Isabel Sosa's kitchen in San Felipe on the Baja coast.

It's full of clam soup, the way she makes it for her family.

Getting the clams is no problem. Kids pick them up on the shores of the Sea of Cortez, and Isabel's husband is a boat mechanic who can get the best seafood in exchange for his work.

To make the soup, Isabel sautees rice with butter and garlic, then adds celery, onion, cilantro and green chiles and, finally, water and clams.

The broth is fresh and pure, tasting of shore and sea. The clams are small and sweet.

Soon all I can hear is the clatter of clam shells as the guests seated around the counter work on their bowls. 

A large, foil-covered roasting pan sitting nearby holds the next course. The guests can hardly believe what they see when Isabel takes off the foil. Inside are gorgeous fresh crabs.

They have to eat these with fingers and teeth, because there are no mallets or crab crackers. The crabs are tender, though. And the juice is sweet and fragrant. 

Isabel (above) has steamed them with butter and garlic, then added catsup, water, celery and, surprise, Chinese oyster sauce

Finding Chinese ingredients in a home kitchen here is not unusual. Mexicali, two hours away, is loaded with Chinese restaurants, and markets in San Felipe stock Chinese sauces, some made in Mexico, others imported. 

Meanwhile, Isabel is stirring a pot of soft, almost liquid beans. She's going to spoon these onto homemade flour tortillas for us to fold and eat. But I want my tortilla plain.

Good as the beans are, there could be nothing better than to dip that tortilla into the heavenly juices from the crab pot.

A Hearty Fisherman's Breakfast

Miguel Ramos has been a fisherman all his life. He lives in San Felipe on the Sea of Cortez in Baja California. 

This day, he has stayed on shore in order to cook breakfast for visitors who want to see what home cooking is like in San Felipe.

He welcomes us to his modest, comfortable house, and we sit around a table set with fresh chiles, cut limes, salsa and tortillas wrapped in hand-embroidered cloths to keep them warm.

We are going to eat what Miguel says fishermen would cook for breakfast over a wood fire on the beach.

After orange juice and coffee, he brings us plates of fish machaca, the fish hash that is universally popular in this fishing port.

To make this, Miguel has cooked corvina with tomatoes, onions, serrano and fresh California chiles. The seasonings are pepper and garlic-flavored sea salt from San Felipe.

He has also refried pinto beans, making a soft puree that is spread across our plates. We spoon the beans into tortillas and fire these breakfast wraps up with Miguel's homemade salsa (above).

To make the salsa, Miguel roasts pico de pájaro chiles, which are small dried chiles similar to chiles de árbol, and blends them with fresh green chiles, tomatoes and garlic.

The salsa is fiery. For cool contrast there is locally made queso fresco--fresh cheese--that is fine textured and pleasantly different from what I buy in Mexican markets at home.

Before leaving San Felipe, I pick up a sack of pico de pájaro chiles (above) in order to make Miguel's salsa at home. I've not seen this variety in markets in Los Angeles.  

My version is a little different from Miguel's, but mouth-burning spicy.  If you can't take it that hot, reduce the number of chiles.

SALSA MIGUEL
Based on a recipe by Miguel Ramos of San Felipe

5 dried pico de pájaro chiles, or chiles de árbol 
2 fresh California chiles
2 tomatoes, about 6 ounces total
1 large clove garlic 
Salt to taste

Toast the pico de pájaro chiles on a hot griddle until they are fragrant, toasted and lightly browned, but not burned.

Cut off the stems of the California chiles. Combine the California chiles, tomatoes and garlic in a saucepan. Add water to cover. Bring to a boil and boil, uncovered, until the tomatoes and chiles are softened.

Drain the vegetables and let them cool until you can handle them. Peel the tomatoes.

Place the California chiles, tomatoes and garlic in a blender container. Add the pico de pájaro chiles and salt to taste. Blend until finely ground. Turn out into a bowl. If not using right away, cover and store in the refrigerator. 

Makes about 1 cup.