I’ve talked about the history and health benefits of beans. However, some people can be intimidated when it comes to dried beans. I was one of them a few years ago. Other people avoid beans because they can cause gas if they’re not cooked properly. But beans can be easily stored and cooked following some simple tips. Here are my personal tips when it comes to buying, storing and cooking beans.

Read the rest of How to cook and store beans

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Post tags: Beans, Cooking tips, Kitchen tips

I’m not a vegetarian, but it would be very easy to be one here in Mexico. Like I mentioned in this maize post, the diet of pre-Hispanic Mexican civilizations didn’t contain a lot of meat. Their main ingredients were maize, squash, chiles, amaranth, and wild greens among many others. One of the of most important ingredients was beans. When mixed with the other ingredients already mentioned they created a healthy and balanced diet that allowed civilizations to thrive for thousands of years. 

Read the rest of Beans Health Benefits and Bean Stuffed Zucchinis

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Post tags: Beans, Chipotle adobado, Healthy food, Mexican food, Scarlet runner beans, Zucchini

Read the rest of Risotto with Ayocote Beans and Beans in Pre-Colombian Mexico

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Post tags: Ayocote beans, Beans, Italian food, Mexican food, Mushrooms, Pumpkin blossom, Rice, Risotto, Scarlet runner beans, Squash blossom

In the past I’ve written a little bit about beans. In this post I stated that the word bean has a broad meaning. It applies to seeds of several different plants throughout the world. They come in hundreds of shapes sizes and colors, are versatile and amazingly convenient because they can be dried and stored for years.

Read the rest of An Introduction to Beans

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Post tags: Beans, History, Legumes, Mexican ingredient, Mexico

Of course, the journey doesn’t end here. As I’ve stressed it in every post of this series, maize is the most important crop in Mexican cuisine, culture and religion. There’s always something new to learn about it. I tried to cover the basic information about its history, uses and importance and I hope I fulfilled this goal.

Now I want to ask for your opinion about these posts. Like I mentioned before, my goal is to highlight a Mexican ingredient every month or so just like I did with corn and your feedback is very important to improve the information I share on this space. Don’t be shy and please leave a comment with your opinions and suggestions. I’ll greatly appreciate it. Now to the recap of what we learned about corn:

• Maize was domesticated in what is now Mexico around 7,000 years ago.
• Maize it’s very important in Mexican celebrations (past and present). A great example is making tamales for Dia de la Candelaria.
• In pre-Hispanic Mexico maize was a central element in the cultural and religious life.
• The native people of Mesoamerica invented nixtamalization, an amazing technology to cook corn that is still used today.
• Maize production is threatened by several external factors, but there are movements in Mexico to save this important crop.

When it comes to eating corn we learned:

• About tamales
• How to prepare esquites and a delicious squash and corn soup
• Tortillas are the mexican bread
• Pozole is a ceremonial dish

For more information and recipes about corn, please visit the archived posts tagged with corn. Some of my favorite ones are:

• Tostadas de pollo
• Flautas de papa
• Fried Quesadillas
• Piloncilla Gorditas
• Bean enchiladas
• Pastel Azteca

Thanks a lot for following me and I hope you enjoy the next featured ingredient. Can you guess what it is? Hint: Look at the header image.

¡Buen provecho!

© Ben for What's Cooking Mexico, 2012. | Permalink | 6 comments |
Post tags: Corn, Maize, Mexican food

I believe there are foods that come embedded in our DNA because our ancestors have consumed them for thousands of years. You would recognize those foods even if you had never tried them before. Does it sound crazy? Maybe. But when I eat certain Mexican dishes it feels like I’m not only satisfying a physiological need, but that I’m being part of something bigger. That I’m part of a culinary ritual that started many generations ago and was carefully handed down to the cocineras (cooks) of today.

One of the dishes that makes me feel this way is pozole. For the past weeks I’ve been writing about Mexico’s most important crop, maize, and pozole is just the perfect dish to wrap up this journey. Pozole, from the Nahuatl potzolli which means foamy, is a soup or stew that was a ceremonial dish in pre-Hispanic Mexico. Pozole is made with nixtamalized cacahuazintle corn, a variety of corn with large, tough kernels.

Read the rest of Pozole and Mexico City’s Best Kept Secret

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Post tags: Corn, Findings in Mexico, Maize, Mexican food, Mexico City, Restaurant review

“All this land used to be worked by local people”, my dad would say every time we visited his home town in the state of Puebla. “You could see milpas all over those cerros,” he would point to some hills that, to me, didn’t look any different than the rest of the hills of the sierra where his town sits. “But now just a few people still work in the fields.” I could see melancholy in his eyes as he talked about growing up in that part of the country, that didn’t mean much to the younger me, and while trying to explain the process of working the milpa.

Read the rest of Sin Maíz No Hay País

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Post tags: Corn, Maize, Mexican ingredient

We have learned this month that corn is a man-developed crop that first appeared in Mesoamerica about 7,000 years ago. We’ve also learned that maize was a quintessential part of the religion, culture and cuisine of all the region’s civilizations. In modern Mexico maize is still our main crop and we observe many of the rituals (with Christian names now) that involved maize in the past. Most importantly for this blog, modern Mexican cuisine still orbits around maize (squashes, beans and chilies are as important and I’ll write about them in upcoming months).

Read the rest of Nixtamal and Tortillas

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Post tags: Corn, Maize, Mexican food, Mexican history, Nixtamal, Tortillas

The adaptation of these societies in relation to corn was not limited to its cultivation. Techniques and instruments were developed in order to store and process it. Some examples of this are the metate (mortars or grinding stones usually made from lava rock), an efficient tool used in most Mexican households until relatively recent times; ceramic pots, usually clay, that were essential in the evolution of culinary practices; and the comales, griddles used to cook and reheat tortillas and other maize dishes.

Maize, however, was part of those civilizations in a more profound way. It became a central part of their religion, culture and society. The Mayan creation story, the Popol Vuh, tells the tale of the creation of man. The Maker created Earth and the mountains, rivers, lakes, trees, animals and birds that populated it. However, he also wanted to create beings in his likeness. He created a human using dirt, but it didn’t look right. Dry, it crumbled and wet, it softened. It only spoke nonsense and it couldn’t reproduce. So the Maker tried again using wood. The results again were unsatisfactory. The Maker then had a better idea, the story continues:

The Maker sat and contemplated the ears of corn, the kernels of the ears. The Maker thought, “What come from this nourishing life will be my people,” and the Maker ground the corn, ground the corn and formed Man and Woman. On the first day, when Man and Woman, formed from corn, awakened, they rose up praising the Maker’s name and giving thanks for their lives. They bore children and praised the Maker as they planted corn and tended the crop. They were made in the Maker’s image, born from corn. The Maker and his people rejoiced in one another.”

Picture by arosadocel

Maize was important in the religion of all Mesoamerican cultures, from the Olmec, the oldest known complex civilization in Mexico (around 1200 B.C.), to the Mexica (Aztec), Mesoamerica’s largest empire until the arrival of the Spanish. Life was closely tied to the life cycle of corn. In the cosmovision of the peoples of pre-Hispanic Mexico the different stages of the development of the grain (from sowing to harvest) was similar, in the mythic sense, to the development of their societies.

The interdependence that existed between man and maize shaped this view of the world. Maize couldn’t exist and reproduce without man’s intervention, and maize was their most important crop, making it vital for their economy and gastronomy. Its cultivation dictated their calendars, from festivities to wars.

Such was the importance of maize for those civilizations that many of the rituals, beliefs and, most importantly, gastronomy related to it survived the Spanish conquista. Modern Mexican cuisine is the perfect representation of the amalgam created when the Old and New worlds collided. Our most important crop is still maize. We eat pre-Hispanic maize dishes every day with ingredients that were brought to the Americas with the Spanish. Tamales now have lard that makes them fluffy and of lighter consistency. Tlacoyos are filled with cheese and topped with onion and cilantro and tortillas are used for tacos filled with chicken, pork and beef. In the same way, rituals where maize was very important were “Christianized”, dia de la candelaria and día de muertos for example, but the essence of the original ritual remains untouched.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In pre-Hispanic times, as well as among contemporary indigenous peoples, there are strict rules on the adequate ways to treat maize in the different stages of its reproductive cycle. If those rules are not observed, consequences are grave: the spirit of maize will leave and people will become impoverished and will suffer from hunger.

In a couple of days, I’ll write about nixtamalization, the process to cook dry maize for the preparation of tortillas and other maize-based dishes. This process has been used in Mexico for thousands of years and the corn masa (dough) that comes from it has one of the highest nutritional values of any food. It made tortillas a culinary engineering marvel.

Picture by Rene Ortega

¡Buen provecho!

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Post tags: Corn, History, Maize, Mexican crops, Mexican history, Mexican ingredient

Read the rest of Elotes and Esquites

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Post tags: Corn, Easy recipes, Maize, Mexican food, Street Food