New Mexican Food
In a state so beautiful that it daily makes visitors abandon their regularly scheduled lives and relocate here, understanding New Mexican food is a litmus test that separates the newbies from folks whose roots go back centuries. An important tip: never spell it "chili" unless you'd like someone to tell you to go back to Texas.
--- (paraphrased from Candace Walsh in New Mexico Magazine, January 2015)
It's Thanksgiving! While we enjoy turkey and stuffing and traditional dishes, I'll take you through the traditional northern New Mexican foods that I have learned to love in the two plus years we've been here. Ready for some good norteño deliciousness?
Here we go ---
Enchiladas
The word in Spanish means "in chile" -- seasoned or covered with chile sauce. It's a corn tortilla (best with blue corn) wrapped around a filling (shredded beef or chicken) topped with melted cheese and smothered in chile sauce. Usually small enough that three are lined up on a plate, and too immersed in cheese and sauce to pick up, so they are eaten with fork and knife.
Burritos
The word means a small burro, I guess. A little donkey. It's a soft wheat flour tortilla wrapped up with the ends folded and stuffed with meat, cheese, vegetables or whatever. Because it is portable and easily eaten on the road, it was a food norteño people ate as they traveled with their burros. That's one theory about the name.
They are a hand-held food, but you can also put them on a plate and cover them in sauce like an enchilada. That always works. Burritos in much of America have become immense things, wrapped in foil and eaten as take out breakfast food.
But in northern New Mexico you are just as likely to see them on a plate smothered in what else -- red or green chile sauce.
Fajitas
The word comes from faja in Spanish meaning "strip" or "belt". It describes the meat -- cut into strips. This is the same idea as enchiladas or burritos, it's meat and vegetables wrapped in a tortilla. But fajitas use strips of grilled meat, not shredded, as the filling and they include seasoned onions and pepper strips. They sometimes come to the table sizzling on a hot iron skillet.
Fajitas were originally made only with skirt steak strips, but fajitas are now stuffed with other meats, often chicken, and in New Mexico the mix of meat and onions and peppers includes Hatch green chile peppers of course.
Sopaipillas
Big pillow shaped fried dough pockets, very light and puffy, hollow inside. This is one food that originated in New Mexico, not adapted from Mexican or Spanish influences. In New Mexico they are a side dish with every meal, and a dessert. You tear off a corner of the hot sopaipilla to sop up the last of the chile sauce on your plate or the liquid in the soup bowl.
Then you coat the rest of the dough pocket inside with honey (there is always a squeeze bottle of honey on the table), ceremoniously roll it around to coat the inside and then enjoy a hot, sweet dessert.
Sometimes sopaipillas are an entree, stuffed with meat, cheese, and vegetables and smothered in, yes, red or green chile sauce.
Tamales
These come from ancient Mexico; the word tamal is Aztec. They are little Christmas present packages that you unwrap like a gift -- meat or other stuffings in masa (corn dough) is steamed inside a corn husk wrapping, nicely tied up. You don't eat the wrapping, just the insides.
Chiles Rellenos
It's a stuffed pepper. Relleno means stuffing in Spanish. In this case a green chile pepper is roasted to remove the skin, stuffed with cheese usually, and then coated in thick batter and fried.
You can get it smothered in chile sauce if you want. And you know you do. You do want chile sauce on your meal.
Pork Adovada
Adovada means marinated in Spanish. This is is just pork chunks simmered in smoky hot red chile sauce until tender, then served over a tortilla or scrambled eggs. It's oddly a popular breakfast dish in northern New Mexico, perhaps because red chile is supposed to be a hangover cure. We eat adovada for dinner over rice because we're Anglos.
Green Chile Stew
This is a norteño soup that is simple and the essence of northern New Mexican food. It's pork chunks in a clear broth with green chiles and potatoes. No one seems to mess with variations of this, adding in other things, it's always the same simple ingredients and it's good.
New Mexico Posole
Corn soup. You use hominy (corn kernels with the germ removed), and simmer chicken or pork or vegetables in it. It's a brothy soup and you sprinkle it with radishes, onions, cilantro, limes, or whatever tangy topping strikes your fancy. Peasant food.
There are lots of foods typical of southwest cooking and in a modern city like Santa Fe you can get tacos, nachos with salsa, chimichangas (deep fried burritos), tostadas (deep fried corn tortillas), quesadillas, empanadas (stuffed turnovers), Mexican elote, pico de gallo and all kinds of tortilla / corn / pepper / avocado / bean combinations. You can get guacamole. And mole sauce. Most are recently popularized southwest foods that come from Mexico or California.
Or Texmex. Refried beans, Frito pie, lots of beef, lots of cheese, chili con carne.
But norteño cuisine is its own thing. It is totally based on chile as the main ingredient in ways other spicy southwest foods, which use hot peppers as one of many supporting elements more for heat than flavor, are not.
New Mexico's high altitude climate produces hotter chiles than elsewhere and chiles with deeper, greener color and with such distinctly rich flavor that few other spices are used. It's a clean, simple cuisine, without the heaviness of Texmex or the complexity of Mexican food. With the tang of chiles, few other seasonings are used -- not much salt, no black pepper and little onion or garlic or tomato. Only a few herbs. Just clean chile taste and something to put it on.
Green chiles are used fresh, roasted, chopped, or made into chunky sauces. When green chiles ripen to red, the skin thickens and fuses to the inside meat of the pepper, so in order to use it, ripe red chiles have to be dried, then powdered and reconstituted with water into thin sauces. Or dried red peppers can be flaked as you see in the spice jar aisles. It's never served whole or fresh.
I'm going to paraphrase Candace Walsh again, from the same January 2015 article in New Mexico magazine. It's the best description of green vs. red I've seen:
If green chile is like a zippy, fun sauvignon blanc, then red chile is like petite Syrah: earthy, extracted. Not only does it eat off a woman's lipstick, it replaces it with its own rusty stain. Red chile is the mature form of green -- its smoky ballast is the yang to green chile's yin.
You want red or green with your meal? Blue corn tortillas or yellow? Pass the honey, the sopaipillas are still hot.
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