South And Gulf Coast of Mexico Food & Traditional Cuisine

Oaxaca is widely held to have the most complex regional cuisine in Mexico, and this region as a whole is the country’s culinary heartland.

The foundation is maize, treated with lime in the ancient nixtamal process and ground fresh, in a range of forms — tortillas, tlayudas, tamales, atole — alongside beans, squash and chilli. Oaxaca grows dozens of native maize landraces, and the difference is tasted.

The complexity comes from mole: sauces built from many chillies, seeds, nuts, spices and sometimes chocolate, toasted and ground and cooked for hours. Oaxaca claims seven canonical varieties and in practice has many more.

Chiapas cooks Maya: maize, beans, herbs unfamiliar elsewhere, and its own cheeses and coffee. The Gulf coast is different again — seafood, Caribbean and African influence, and the Spanish inheritance of a port city.

Insects are eaten here as ordinary food rather than novelty.

Mole negro is Oaxaca’s masterpiece: upwards of thirty ingredients including chilhuacle, mulato and pasilla chillies, nuts, seeds, spices, plantain, chocolate and a charred tortilla, cooked down to something almost black and deeply layered. It takes days and is made for weddings and funerals.

Tlayudas, a large crisp tortilla spread with bean paste, lard, Oaxacan string cheese and meat, folded and grilled over coals — the city’s late-night food.

Chapulines, grasshoppers toasted with lime, garlic and chilli, sold by the bag in the markets and eaten as a snack or in a tlayuda.

Tamales oaxaquenos wrapped in banana leaf rather than corn husk, usually with mole.

Cochito horneado in Chiapas, pork roasted with adobo, and the Chiapas tamal de chipilin with a local herb.

On the Gulf: huachinango a la veracruzana, red snapper with olives, capers and tomato — a dish that is genuinely half-Spanish — and arroz a la tumbada.

Oaxaca’s markets are the region’s food culture in one place. Benito Juarez and 20 de Noviembre in the city, the latter with a smoke-filled corridor of grills where you buy meat by weight from a butcher and have it cooked in front of you with spring onions and chillies. The village markets on their rotating days — Tlacolula on Sunday, Ocotlan on Friday — are older and more indigenous, and worth planning around.

Mezcalerias in Oaxaca city serve flights by agave species and village, with salt and orange, and the good ones will explain what you are drinking.

Chocolate is ground to order in the Oaxaca markets with cinnamon, almond and sugar, and drunk with water rather than milk.

Comedores inside every market serve a cheap set lunch, and this is how most people eat.

Coffee from the Chiapas and Oaxaca highlands is excellent and often organic and cooperative-grown.

This region makes no wine — it is far too wet and tropical — but it is the world centre of mezcal, and that is a more interesting story.

Mezcal is made by roasting agave hearts in a stone-lined earth pit over hot rocks and hardwood, which gives the smoke; crushing them under a horse-drawn stone wheel; fermenting in open wooden vats with wild yeast; and distilling twice in small copper or clay stills. Oaxaca produces the great majority of it, and a village palenque making a few hundred litres a year is still the typical scale.

The range is enormous. Espadin is the cultivated workhorse; wild species — tobala, tepeztate, madrecuishe — take anywhere from twelve to thirty years to mature and produce spirits of real complexity. That slowness is also the industry’s problem, as demand has driven overharvesting of wild agave.

Pulque, the fermented agave sap drunk since before the conquest, survives in the highlands.

Tepache and tejate — the latter a pre-Hispanic maize and cacao drink with a foam of flower seeds — are the non-alcoholic traditions.