Let’s Dish About Mexico City’s Super Cuisine

One of our FoodTrients® team members, Amy Sawelson Landes, recently spent a week in Mexico City. You wouldn’t necessarily think of Mexico as a place to find foods that add to your health and quality of life, but you’d be wrong!

Most of us think of Mexican food as those combo platters oozing with cheese, rice, beans, and fried taco shells. Delicious, yes, but not as a steady diet and certainly not what we aim for at FoodTrients. Mexico City is a huge cosmopolitan metropolis. You can find almost any cuisine there. Mexico City residents seem to be especially fond of sushi. You’ll also find Spanish tapas, Eastern European deli, Chinese, Italian, burgers, and eclectic menus all over the city.

Here in Southern California, we tend to love Mexican food as well as fresh fruits and vegetables. As a nation, Mexico has talented farmers, a robust agricultural industry, and large exporters of fresh produce. Produce plays a huge part in Mexican cuisine. Typically, a Mexican meal features a lot of produce with modest (by American standards) amounts of meat, poultry, and seafood.

If you’re a follower of ‘The Blue Zones’ book and documentary series about certain parts of the world where citizens enjoy good health and longevity, you may recall the segment on Nicoya, Costa Rica. There, as in much of Central America and Mexico, the ‘Holy Trinity’ of vegetables consists of squash, beans, and corn. Eating these together (known as succotash), as the indigenous people of Mezzo America have for centuries, enhances the nutritional benefits of each of the ‘Three Sisters.’ Together, the complementary amino acids form complete proteins, virtually eliminating the need for meat in the diet.

With over 5,800 miles of coastline, seafood is a big part of Mexican cuisine. There’s also a more recent tradition of farming and ranching, so cattle, goats, pigs, and fowl are available.

Amy and her husband stayed in a bed and breakfast that was once a family mansion in a leafy neighborhood called Polanco. The imaginative breakfast menu was prepared to order by a chef each day, starting with urns of regular and Mexican coffee—a revelation! The Mexican coffee was pre-sweetened with plenty of cinnamon (an anti-inflammatory) and probably some Mexican vanilla added.  Breakfast items featured produce as unique garnishes or as key ingredients. Especially memorable was a melted brie sandwich with caramelized onions, jam, and berries with a side salad. Traditional chilaquiles are baked corn tortillas soaked in spicy green chile sauce, topped with burrata cheese and fresh cilantro. They offered the option of a poached egg or smoked salmon with it. A breakfast rice pudding was made with coconut, pistachios, rose petals, chai spices, and berries. Avocado toast boasted spicy cherry tomatoes, herbs, a poached egg, and sauteed mushrooms on the side. All great fuel for a long day of sightseeing!

While in Mexico City, Amy also took a cooking class (through Viator, a company that sets travelers up with experiences all over the world) in the trendy Roma neighborhood. She chose the class because she liked the menu of what they were going to prepare. All the recipes are from Aura Cocina Mexicana, the cooking school.

For Starters

Sopes with two Mexican salsas (red molcajete sauce and green sauce) and  Mextlapique Vegetarian Tamale without masa, filled with vegetables and topped with spearmint sauce.

The Main Dish

White Mole made with light-colored ingredients including pine nuts, almonds, peanuts, sesame seeds, and blonde raisins over chicken breasts.

And for Dessert

Corn Bread served with Mexican hot chocolate.

The class also included trips to a tortilleria (you can buy the dough!) and Mercado Medellin, a huge market selling all things culinary, from dried chilies to luscious fruits, to meat, fish, poultry, and flowers.

The finished dishes were delicious, and the cooking class was one of Amy’s favorite meals in Mexico City. Following is the recipe for the Mextlapique, the vegetarian tamale:  

Vegetable (or Cactus) Tamales

Makes approximately 8 tamales

 Ingredients

8 corn husks rinsed and soaked in warm water

1 15 oz. can black beans drained and rinsed

¼ lb. cherry tomatoes cut into quarters

4 Nopales (flat cactus leaves) chopped in small dices

2 sweet onions, chopped

1 Serrano chili, chopped

spearmint sauce (see recipe below)

salt to taste

Spearmint sauce

1 cup spearmint leaves

⅔ cup extra virgin olive oil

¼ cup onion

1 garlic clove

1 serrano chili seeded and deveined

salt and pepper to taste

Instructions for Spearmint Sauce

For the spearmint sauce: blend all ingredients until smooth and the oil is incorporated.

Instructions

1. Fill each corn husk with two Tbs. of each ingredient except for chili serrano (use sparingly).
2. Cover the filling with 1 ½ Tbs. of spearmint sauce.
3. Close the ends of the corn husk, with twine or strips of an extra corn husk, as wrapping a tamal
4. Place the filled corn husks on a rimmed sheet pan in a 350-degree F. oven until they turn toasty brown and the veggies are cooked, about 20-25 minutes.
5. Serve with spearmint sauce and serrano chili to taste.

Variation:

Use mushrooms or zucchini instead of beans.

Fun fact: Tamales aren’t necessarily a traditional Christmas season treat. It just seems that way because they take a lot of labor and there’s usually lots of family around the holidays to help.

The White Mole recipe is delicious and worth trying. Mole is always a complicated dish, due to the long list of ingredients. This mole blanco differs from how we usually associate mole negro — a dark sauce made with roasted chilies, spices, roasted nuts, and chocolate. The nuts and seeds in this version are very lightly toasted and it calls for ‘blonde’ (golden) raisins. The mole is rich, delicious, and can be served as a sauce for chicken or fish.

Mole Blanco

Serves 4                                                                                                                  

Ingredients                                                                               

4 chicken boneless, skinless chicken breasts poached with 1

onion, 2 cloves garlic and one bay leaf

4 cups chicken or vegetable broth

4 guero (yellow) chilies

3 Tbs. avocado oil

¾ cup diced onion

2 garlic cloves, peeled

½ cup raw, skinless almonds

½ cup peanuts raw, unsalted

¼ cup white pine nuts, raw

¼ cup raw, white sesame seeds

¼ cup golden raisins

½ slice white bread

1 tsp. anise seeds, ground

Salt and white pepper to taste

2 Tbs. untoasted white sesame seeds

Instructions

1. Poach the chicken: In a large pot, place the chicken breasts, onion, garlic, bay leaf, and 4 cups of broth. Bring just to a boil, then take the pot off the heat. Let the chicken sit in the hot broth while you prepare the mole. Remove the chicken and put on a plate after 15 minutes.
2. In a medium skillet, lightly toast the sesame seeds, almonds, peanuts, pine nuts, raisins, and anise seeds separately, taking care not to burn them. Remove from heat and reserve.
3. Roast the guero chilies in the oven at 400 degrees F. for 10 minutes; remove and let cool in a paper bag.
4. Once the chilies have cooled, remove from the bag, peel off the skin, cut chilies lengthwise, and discard the seeds.
5. In a blender, blend chilies with 3 cups of the broth. Reserve.

The Corn Bread was actually a cake worthy of saving room for, even after a delicious, filling meal. Hearty and not overly sweet, the recipe used five ears of corn and came together very easily. The cake contains amaranth, a high protein grain. The wedges of the moist cake were served with a tiny mug of Mexican hot chocolate to sip, which was a perfect accompaniment.

Mexican Corn Cake

Makes approximately 8 servings

Ingredients

2 lb. corn kernels (about 5 ears)

5 eggs (room temperature)

1 ¼ sticks unsalted butter (room temperature)

1 cup cream (Mexican style)

½ cup sugar

2 Tbs. rice flour

1 tsp. baking powder

½ cup amaranth

1 pinch of salt

1 Tbs. butter to grease the springform pan

1 Tbs. flour to dust the springform pan

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

2. Butter and flour the inside of a round springform pan.

3. Combine the corn kernels with two eggs in a blender; reserve.

4. Using an electric mixer, beat butter until soft peaks; then add cream and eggs one by one.

5. Pour the corn kernel mixture, the butter/egg/cream mixture and the dry ingredients into a large bowl and mix to incorporate.

6. Pour the mix into the springform pan.

7. Sprinkle amaranth on top.

8. Bake for approximately 40 minutes until golden and the cake is soft and moist.

9. Serve warm.

It wouldn’t be a trip to Mexico without a discussion of tacos. Though Amy and her husband didn’t go out of their way to try tacos, they were in a hurry one afternoon and stopped at a small stylish restaurant they had passed several times. Called Mar Brava, it specialized in seafood. The shrimp and fish tacos were light, fresh, and garnished with fresh herbs and a pile of sweet charred green onions. Simple, light, and healthy.

Finally, Amy visited the not-to-be-missed Museo Nacional de Antropología. Like most cities, there are frequently several museums clustered together. And not surprisingly, dozens of food carts clustered around them. Most offered very unappealing versions of hamburgers, hot dogs, and ice cream novelties. Not what the serious tourist wants to dine on after viewing the wonders of the Aztec and Maya civilizations! There was one cart that sold a street food Amy said she had never seen or heard of, so she had to try it. Her one regret was that she didn’t take a picture of it before consuming the tasty but extremely messy snack.

Called tlayudas, it’s an Oaxacan specialty sort of like a flat tostada, consisting of a large, coarse, crispy blue bolita corn tortilla, up to 14 inches in diameter, topped with slices of nopales (cactus paddles), fresh salsa, Oaxacan cheese, black beans, tomatoes, and cilantro. Again, contrary to what we think of typical Mexican food, tlayudas are prepared with fresh, light ingredients. And did we mention that they are incredibly messy to eat? Worth it, though!