The best coricos I have ever tasted were homemade. They appeared on a table of baked goods at a dinner in the city hall of El Fuerte, a colonial town in the state of Sinaloa. The dinner was organized to show off the foods of the region
Coricos are corn flour cookies that are popular in northern Mexico. Those at El Fuerte were ring-shaped, light and so tender I thought they must be loaded with lard. But they were made with vegetable shortening, and only enough of that to hold together flour, water and sugar. They contained no baking powder or spices.
El Fuerte's coricos can't be duplicated elsewhere, because they require a white corn flour that is only available there. Known as harinilla, it's made from locally grown corn.
The cookies are baked in a wood-fired clay oven, which also makes a difference. You can just barely see them in the photo above.
Another type of corico (at top) is a flat cookie, not ring-shaped. These turned up at the top of La Rumorosa, a winding, rocky, sharply mountainous stretch between Mexicali and Tecate in Baja California.
I saw them at Tacos Lalo, which is famous for its tacos a vapor--steamed tacos. Lalo's has been making these soft, moist, meaty wraps since 1973, and most drivers pull off the highway to get them.
That's mine (above), filled with beef, potatoes, lettuce, onions and salsa. (Read here what Street Gourmet LA's Bill Esparza wrote about Lalo's in OC Weekly.)
When I went to pay my bill, I spotted the coricos in a rack beside the order counter (far left, above). Lalo's doesn't make them. They come from La Nueva Fama Panadería, a Mexicali bakery that has been making coricos for decades.
These oval hunks of golden, crunchy goodness contain corn and wheat flours, sugar, eggs, vegetable shortening, baking soda and baking powder, which makes them very different from the El Fuerte coricos.
They're a commercial product, but that's not criticism. I was delighted to find them and to see on the label that they have a distributor in northern California. This means I may find them again one day, without the long drive to Tacos Lalo.
Tacos Lalo, La Rumorosa, Baja California, Mexico. (No street address, but you can't miss it. It's on the left if you're heading toward Tecate from Mexicali, on the right, if you're traveling in the opposite direction.
La Nueva Fama Panadería, Callejón Revolución 2391, Col. Simental, Mexicali, Baja California, Mexico. (686) 556-23-36.
Comments