Street Food Tour

One of the really interesting things we did while my husband was visiting was take a street food tour. Our tour was with Eat Mexico, which I highly recommend. It was a four-hour tour through typical Chilango street food; our tour guide, Natalya, explained that they chose the tour area - Colonia Juarez and the Zona Rosa - in part because it's where a lot of Chilangos themselves eat. I'm going to go through as much as I can remember; unfortunately, we tried so many things that I've forgotten what many of them were!

We started the tour with a traditional Mexican breakfast: tamales and atole. As many of you know, I am slightly tamale-obsessed, so this part wasn't anything new to me, but I have to say they were absolutely delicious. Atole is a Mexican masa (ground corn flour)-based drink, sold in rice and chocolate flavors. We had the chocolate, and I'm definitely a fan. It tasted like a slightly less sweet, thicker version of hot chocolate. In the picture, you can see the vendor putting a tamale into a loaf of bread. This is how many Mexicans eat their tamales; Natalya explained that this is because many people are so poor that this will be nearly the only meal they get all day, and putting the tamale into bread makes it that much more filling, inexpensively. All tamale vendors have pretty much the same basic set-up: several large metal containers on a pushcart/bike. Despite the mobility of their stands, they're generally fairly stationary, returning to the same corner or area pretty much every day. I should mention, too, that I've really come around on the idea of tamales as breakfast food. At home, I'd typically eaten them for lunch or dinner (and for C., who told me that if she knew I liked tamales so much she would have asked her mother for some for me: please please?), but they make a nice breakfast. They're filling but not overly-so, unlike some of the other traditional morning meals, which we'll get to in a minute.

Our next stop was a tortilleria, which is precisely what it sounds like. Tortillas are both a stable of the Mexican diet and really cheap, so everyone buys them fresh from the local tortilleria each day. Having eaten traditional Mexican tortillas, I'm more than a little disappointed in the ones we get in the states - they're nowhere near as good. As you can see in the picture, there's a sort of assembly line process. The tortilla dough is mixed and the tortillas are shaped by hand or using a machine that kind of looks like an overly-large pasta press (and follows the same basic logic). Then they're dropped onto the conveyor belt over what is essentially a stove, until they're cooked. At the end of the belt you can see the reject tortillas. The owner introduced us to what Natalya called the Mexican equivalent of a pacifier: a warm tortilla, sprinkled with salt, and then rolled into a tube. Apparently Mexican parents give these to their children to keep them quiet prior to meals, among other things. It's delicious - I've now begun doing this with all the tortillas I'm served at restaurants.

Our next stop was for quesadillas. Mexican quesadillas are generally not what we think of as quesadillas in the states. Rather than two tortillas with filling, it's one tortilla in an oval shape (that's actually the definition of a quesadilla here - an oval tortilla), with the same basic filling options as a taco. Ours came with beans, cheese, and nopales - cactus leaves, which I've discovered I like when they come from a can or jar, but not so much fresh. Fresh nopales have a gooey coating, rather like okra, that I don't enjoy. The canned or jarred variety, which is what you get in most taco joints and street stands, doesn't have that coating. And, like everything else in Mexico, quesadillas are improved by salsa. The standard Mexican red salsa - spicy but delicious - seems to be made from the chili de arbol, or tree chili. Green sauces are often, though not always, habaneros, and generally less spicy.

Following the quesadillas, we had tacos de canasta, or basket tacos - so called because they're made in the mornings, partially steamed, and then put in a basket lined with plastic bags to finish steaming. They're sold from the basket, and are generally not good after about 3 p.m., because they're over-steamed by then. Most tacos de canasta are sold by men on bikes, with the basket in the front; ours, somewhat unusually, were from a street stand, La Abuela, which is well-known in the DF. La Abuela has even been featured in a couple of magazines here, and looking at the vendor - that would be El Abuelo ('grandfather'; his wife is the titular Abuela, who makes all the tacos) - can you blame them? This man is the absolute epitome of grandfatherly-ness. Anyway, we had the cochinita pibil taco, which is a type of marinated pork and quite good.

Next up is what might be my very favorite part of the tour - the Mexican take on fruit cups! This is a large plastic cup of cut-up fruit, usually mango and papaya, though most of the vendors have a couple other options as well. They cut the fruit up into bite-size chunks, then sprinkle it with chili powder (there is chili in some form in just about everything I've eaten here, with the exception of smoothies - and I'm certain that's an option if you want it), salt, and fresh-squeezed lime juice. It's amazing; since the tour, I've had this probably four times, because I'm basically obsessed with it now. The liquid that forms in the bottom is also delicious; according to Natalya, many people buy the fruit for that liquid alone.

We also had a squash flower burrito. Burritos are actually relatively rare in Mexico City; they're not really a food from central Mexico. This is still the only burrito stand I've seen here. Squash flowers, however, are quite common here, and very delicious when mixed with cheese and salsa.

Now, I've left out quite a few of the stops on our street food tour - for instance, I don't have pictures from the taco de pastor stand, which is basically a Mexican take on the ubiquitous Arab and/or Turkish kebab joints. Back in about the 1970s, a sizable Lebanese contingent came to Mexico City, fleeing political unrest in Lebanon (fun fact: my landlord is part of that contingent). Among other things, they brought the concept of a bunch of meat shoved on a vertical spit and roasted over the course of the day. In Lebanon, this was served in a pita - I've had a few myself. In Mexico, naturally, it comes in a tortilla. They also put a pineapple on top of the spit, for sweetness. Many taco joints have a de pastor set-up facing the street. Anyway, like I said, I don't have pictures of that, or the orange-carrot juice we had, or what I'm pretty sure were at least three more kinds of tacos. But I'm going to leave you with one more very Mexican consumable, though not from the tour:

This is tequila and sangrita. Tequila in Mexico is a sipping drink, not a shooting drink. I've actually never had straight tequila before - I'm a margarita drinker myself - but I found the alcohol itself decent, but not terribly exciting. What I did find exciting, though, was the sangrita. This is something vaguely akin to Bloody Mary mix but with far less tomato (and possibly using clamato juice instead; I chose not to inquire too closely on that front). It is, naturally, spicy. It's delicious, and cuts the kick of the tequila nicely. As it was explained to me, the proper way to drink sangrita and tequila is to take a sip first of the tequila, then of the sangrita. It's possible I've got that slightly wrong, since it was explained to me by my taxi driver, while driving, and I could have sworn he was describing actually drinking out of a hollowed-out tomato (which would be awesome, by the way), so I experimented with the order. And I'm not sure whether it matters whether the sangrita is first or second, but it's definitely good. I do think (this may be heretical) that it would be better to mix the sangrita and tequila, and may experiment with this once I'm back home. Or, alternately, I might skip the tequila entirely and just drink the sangrita - I'm that kind of person.