Travel

Getting to the Heart of Mexico, One Chile at a Time


The fruity chile odor filled my nostrils as I took a sip of the mezcal that Juana Amaya Hernandez had poured for me. I was drinking it out of a chile de agua, a large lime-colored chile local to Oaxaca, its rim dipped in homemade sal de gusano, a spice made with ground agave worms, and it tickled my tongue with its tinny flavor. “This is how we drink mezcal in the countryside,” Ms. Hernandez said.

My friends and I were in the courtyard of a restaurant in the sleepy Oaxacan town of Zimatlán de Álvarez, on a lip-burning two-week trip to get to the heart of Mexican chiles. We were the guests of Ms. Hernandez, 67, a stout woman wearing thick glasses, a colorful dress and earrings made of strings of dried blue-corn kernels. Once a criminal lawyer, Ms. Hernandez had changed course to spend her days at her restaurant, Mi Tierra Linda, steeped in her grandmothers’ recipes.

I spend my days documenting war crimes for Human Rights Watch in Ukraine. But I spend my free time on food — cooking, reading about it, watching TV shows about it and planning trips around it. After grueling trips to the front line, with days spent interviewing dozens of victims of the worst abuses that wars foster, I know I can come home to Kyiv and find some relief in the kitchen, preparing food infused with love, as Ms. Hernandez does.

In 2018, my husband and I visited the Mexican hill town of San Miguel de Allende, where we discovered a museum housing a staggering collection of ceremonial masks. The museum owner said he had traveled to every corner of the country to witness the ceremonies they were used in and then buy them for the museum.

His story inspired me. I had an upcoming three-month sabbatical, a break that Human Rights Watch gives all employees for every seven years of work. I knew food would be part of that chance to recharge, so I began to plan my own journey through Mexico, following not masks but chiles.

One of my earliest food memories is biting into a Chinese noodle dish at a fair in Zurich, where I grew up, and bursting into tears because of the burn. For years, I avoided spicy food. But in my early 20s, I decided enough was enough. So I began to force myself to eat chiles to learn how to handle the heat.

And once I could stand the burn, I began to taste thrilling flavors that had been hiding behind the spice: fruity, sour, bitter, bright or smoky notes, sometimes in stages, sometimes all at once.

In class, I quickly realized I still had a lot to learn. On the first day, when my professor was explaining a recipe we would be making with dried chipotle chiles, I asked him whether any recipes ever call for fresh chipotles. “You mean jalapeños?” he replied. My cheeks went as red as a ripe mirasol chile. I was the only one in the class who had not known that chiles often have different names when they’re fresh and when they’re dry.

Mr. Ramirez explained that “real” poblanos are germinated in February but aren’t ready to pick and eat until July or August, so if you have ever eaten fresh poblanos outside of those two months, they are impostors. Up to 80 percent of the poblanos being consumed in Mexico were grown in China with pesticides, Mr. Ramirez and Ms. Andrade said, resulting in thicker-skinned chiles that lack the true poblano flavor, much of which comes from Puebla’s volcanic soil. The importance of these chiles in this region cannot be overstated: Men with guns have come in the night around harvest time to load up trucks with stolen produce, Mr. Ramirez said.

If you’re unable to visit Puebla during that small summer window, you can enjoy real poblanos only in their dried form, as either ancho or mulato. But, Mr. Ramirez said, contradicting my culinary professors and internet research, you don’t know whether you’ll get the dark red, slightly bitter ancho or the richer, chocolaty brown mulato until the chile has a chance to lie out in the sun and shrivel.

The next day I went from stall to stall in Puebla’s food market, asking if anyone had poblano seeds for sale (Mr. Ramirez had germinated all of his and had none to share), in the hope that I might be able to take some seeds with me and grow them in Kyiv. Time and again I was told all I could find were seeds from China, and eventually I gave up my search with a disappointing thought: I had never tasted a real poblano, and most likely never would. Its ephemeral nature, I realized, is what makes the poblano so special.

I was able to endure only a few bites of the manzano. It felt as if a forest fire were blazing in my mouth and throat. I had to admit defeat, and took tiny sips of agua fresca, holding each in my mouth to quench the blaze. When I finally tried the battered jalapeño, it was telling that I found it sweet and not the slightest bit spicy.



Sahred From Source link Travel

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