Colorful, festive, spicy

Nothing beats food that's really colorful, yet comes entirely from plant and animal sources that never went near colorful artificial dyes with unpronounceable names. This is one such dish, a little-known (to gringos) wonder from Mexico called chiles en nogada. Except it isn't really, since I omit the walnuts. Maybe I should just call them chiles rellenos arco iris. 

The recipe has three parts that all come together holistically in a tricolor splash of colors looking as though they just came from a Mexican flag party. 

The chilis

I use poblanos (aka ancho or pasilla), but I suppose you could use any other type large enough to stuff. Preparation is simple: just blast the skin with a torch or blister it over a gas flame. For best flavor, do this outdoors right over hot mesquite coals - although I'm happy sacrificing convenience for flavor and remaining in my kitchen. Place the scorched peppers in a plastic bag or between two bowls to steam a bit, then scrape off the burnt skin with a knife. I don't wash the peppers, since this removes flavor. I don't mind a few charred bits of chili skin since they tend to add rusticity.

The stuffing

This is where things get more fun: diced pork shoulder, trimmed to remove excess fat gets sautéed with chopped onions, garlic, cinnamon, salt, pepper, cumin, toasted pumpkin and sesame seeds. When it's hot, add some raisins or other dried fruit, maybe even some chopped bits of apple or pear. If it's still a bit dry, add some water or stock, and taste for seasoning.

The sauce

Nothing could be simpler. Just combine heavy cream (or milk, if you must), soft goat cheese and a bit of mozzarella to thicken. This remains cold, poured over the hot chilis at the last minute just before serving.

Assembly

You have two options: chili lover's and milder. For chili lovers, slit the peppers down one side and spoon in the stuffing, leaving the seeds in place. Everyone else might thank you for carefully removing the seeds before stuffing in the filling. Place the stuffed chilis in a 350° oven with a bit of water in their pan for about 30 minutes, until everything is hot.

Place a hot chili on a warmed plate and immediately spoon on the white sauce, top with pomegranate seeds and rush to the table. Ideally, the first mouthfuls will be a mixture of hot pepper and stuffing coated with cool white sauce.

Chilis vary in heat, even when they're all the same variety. Some vary from pepper to pepper. You may find one underwhelmingly wimpy, while others are hot enough to make you drink hot sauce to cool your mouth. If potential heat issues loom, taste a small piece of the peppers when you slice them for stuffing.

Panchito's El Tepeyac Cafe departs Northern California

Apparently due to pernicious exhaustion of funds, Panchito's El Tepeyac Cafe has bid adios to Northern California.

For fans of this L.A. institution, it's back to the 400 mile drive to get a Hollenbeck Burrito or some good SoCal machaca.

Perhaps they'll find a solution and return north in a better location, bringing their unique burrito expertise. For now, though, it's back to Evergreen in Los Angeles.

Museo Maya-whatever

Part of culinary arts training is how to make people comfortable in your restaurant. The motive may not be so altruistic - comfortable people "contribute" more and come back more often, but still. The alternative is worse.

We tried Museo Mayahuel, or Mayahuel Cafe, or whatever they're trying to call it. It's across from the Imax theater, kind of, on K street. It's not even clear where the front door is.

We arrived, and were warmly greeted by a fellow who put together a table for us. The next person was also friendly and helpful.

Then our waitress arrived. It was all crash and burn from there.

We ordered a sampler plate, then a combination. Oops. One of the dishes- the one on the combination - was not being made. Not clear if it was not being made ever again, or just not that day, but in any case, it was still listed on the combination plate. Oh. They just swap it for something else, but the waitress was not in any mood to run to the kitchen and find out what exactly the substitution was. Obviously, she didn't find out before her shift, either.  Bad.

Then she asked what if we wanted drinks. In culinary school, you never ask an open, vague question like that. It's "Hey, we've got some great margaritas and Mexican beers, can I tempt you...?" I asked if they had aguas frescas. "No", she said, in an irritated tone, like why would a Mexican restaurant pretending to be authentic have something like that? Never mind that it would likely be present in Mexico. So, we ordered water - we'd never seen a drink menu, so we didn't even have a clue what they were capable of providing. Nobody gave me a better alternative, so I cheaped out. What did they expect with an "I don't give a shit" attitude like that?

Then the food. Many things were dinner only. Some things were listed, but MIA. I don't know why. Nobody explained it to me.

We ordered some kind of ancho chili bruchetta. Like braised chilis on toast, not much heat, no acid balance, underseasoned.

Then the main course. No cochinita pibil. No fish - that's dinner only. So, despite their claims to Mexico City or wherever gastronomic delights it basically came down to enchiladas, chile verde, the usual gang of suspects. Yeah, they did have grilled meat - but I'd just been to Gallitos Grill in L.A. where they do that kind of thing to perfection and wasn't inclined to try a local version.

Chile verde. Something I could make as well at home. Washed down with water, surveyed sporadically by a surly waitress who could not have been trained in her job.

I really don't get it. You see, the waiter at the table next to ours did things right. He proposed drinks, people ordered. They laughed. It was fun. Their tab was probably at least $10 per person higher than ours, money in his pocket and happy guests willing to return.

Our grumpy waitress asked what dessert we wanted, while one of us was halfway though the main course, without bothering to even give us a dessert menu or describe what was available. "Let me eat my lunch, dammit!" is not something a waitress should hear, not if she wants people to give her a decent tip and come back another day. Not if she doesn't want them to write things like this on a blog where they can be found by prospective clients of the restaurant or - worse - her boss. But then, it seems she's not too enamored with her job anyway.

Needless to say, we won't go back. I'll look through my Mexican cookbooks - Diana Kennedy will not let me down! Then again, I could just go to a great local place - Chando's, Palenque, Lalo's... and get friendly service with great food.

Too bad - I'd hoped to find a real jewel of a restaurant, something that whisked me away to Mexico City to dine on innovative food that I hadn't eaten in some other version fifty times before.

_______

August 2012. Time passes into the future, two months' worth. To date, these words have never been seen by human eyes other than mine, at least according to Google. The restaurant's reputation, if any, remains unchanged. Nobody was warned to avoid our waitress. People will still eat the chili verde here instead of somewhere better and cheaper.


Some blogs get thousands of hits per day, even more. Mommy blogs are apparently the shiznits. So are "simple recipe" blogs. Well, I'm screwed. I'm not a mommy, and nobody goes to chef school to make "simple recipes" although we can. It's just that it's easier to go from complicated and understood to simple than the inverse. Sigh. I shall fade into the ether, remaining forever anonymous.

Chili verdirojo burrito, old school tortillas

What do you call it when you replace the tomatillos in a chili verde with red tomatoes, but leave the green chilies? It's not really chili verde, since in addition to be sin tomatillos, the other spices are different - no cilantro, for example. Nor is it chili colorado since no dried peppers are used. Whatever it is, it tastes good.

My idea came from a restaurant that makes this stuff, but they call it chili verde. Theirs is more chili anaranjado than verde, thanks to the tomatoes. 

The nice thing is that I didn't have to sneak into their kitchen disguised as a giant piñata to pilfer their secret recipe. They pretty much gave away their process on a food show, right in front of the camera. Then I thought of some tweaks. Cook the meat differently. Use frozen Hatch chilis instead of canned, play with the seasonings...

Now, if I'm ever tempted to open a Mexican restaurant I've got a good, scalable recipe that will work for any color of chili.

Since I'd fussed around making the meat, I decided to go whole hog and make a burrito from scratch. That meant tortillas, too. Old school tortillas, the kind they used to make before people became more afraid of rendered fat than chemical additives*.

Yes, old school. Unbleached enriched wheat flour, salt, baking powder, pork fat.

I don't really get the hypocrisy about tortillas and pork fat. Somehow, it's healthy if there's no pork fat in the tortilla, even if it's wrapped around fatty morsels of carnitas. So, the pork fat is OK when it's in the meat, but put it in the tortilla and it's taboo?

These are my tortillas, from scratch, my way. No canola oil here! I just took the fat that rendered out of the meat during cooking and set it aside. When it was time to make the tortillas, it was cooled down and ready to go. Mix salt and baking powder with flour, cut in the fat, add enough water to create some non-sticky dough, give it a rest, and it's ready to go.

So, the verdict? Was there a flavor payoff? Yes. There really is nothing like slow-cooked pork wrapped in a porky tortilla accented with savory avocado slices. The white rice was there to soak up the sauce, and because I wanted to highlight the flavor of the meat with something neutral.

* commercial flour tortilla ingredient lists can be long and difficult to pronounce: enriched bleached wheat flour, water, salt, palm oil and fractions with BHT, BHA and TBHQ (preservatives), rice flour, mono & diglycerides, fumaric acid, calcium propionate, potassium sorbet (preservatives again), methyl and propyl paraben (preservatives again), sodium meta bisulfite. Oops, that's potassium sorbate. Good. That would have made a horrible dessert.

National Margarita Day

Somehow, people manage to make every day National [your thing here] Day. Like margaritas. If they're really ambitious, they'll make an entire month commemorate their cause. I would have loved a National Margarita Month, but I probably wouldn't get much done. I would use up all those bottles of not-so-great Tequila that are currently sitting on the back of the shelf, though.
As near as I could tell, it's only Margarita Day here in the USA. A quick search on the South of the Border Internet didn't turn up anything about a Mexican Margarita day (Día Nacional de la Margarita). One site did say that since we're celebrating Margarita Day here, there's no reason for Mexicans to miss out.

This margarita used lime, Meyer lemon, Citronge, Jose Cuervo Tradicional Reposado Tequila (100% agave), with agave sweetener and ice. That's it. It worked well, although the Meyer lemons have less of a citrus bite than pure limes.

Five star huevos rancheros

This was going to be normal huevos rancheros. But no tortillas in the freezer, no masa harina in the cupboard and no desire to go out just for some stinkin' tortillas led to this upscale version of the dish.

The cup is made from arepa flour - precooked corn meal - that's baked blind in the ramekin for about 20 minutes with a small pat of butter in the bottom. After that, simple. Just break an egg into the dish, add a dollop of ranchero sauce and some cream cheese (I was out of crema, too). Bake another 25 minutes or so, until the yolk just films over. Unmold (or not) and there it is. Fancy!

This could be made from masa harina, too. The flavor of the cup would be a bit stronger because there's lime left over from the nixtamalization of the corn. It would also be a bit more nutritious for the same reason - nixtamalization supposedly frees up more healthiness.

August, 2012. Zero reads. Looks like nobody gives a shit about transforming huevos rancheros into anything different. Until some asshole in a fancy restaurant comes up with something like this, and I'm sure it will be more popular than seamless underwear.

¡Tortas!

Sometimes inspiration comes from several places, all hitting you within the space of a few short days. The Oak Cafe at school is doing a Mexican street food menu this week. I've been sort of craving tortas. I was curious about making a version of bolillos, the rolls used for this sandwich. Then, a Mexican friend tried some bread that I'd made and said it tasted like the bolillos she had as a child in Mexico.

My bread was sourdough, so I started thinking. Maybe bolillos, like most food in Mexico, taste different than our version. Maybe they've got more flavor, more complexity. So, why not use a light sourdough formula from a poolish and see what happens?

The other ingredients - carnitas and chile colorado - are simple enough to make if you have time.

For the carnitas, I cut some pork shoulder into 2" cubes, added a quartered lime, some salt and some garlic and braised it for about three hours. The fat slowly renders out as the water evaporates, so in the end the meat can fry a bit and brown in its own fat. You can also take the meat out, increase the heat to high and boil away the water. When you're down to the fat, reduce the heat and brown the meat. Done.

The chili colorado was a bit different. I thought I had a great stash of chilis, but only had cascabels, moritas and some hot New Mexico Hatch peppers I'd dried last summer. Chiles negros, anchos and guajillos are now on my shopping list, so I can get more chili flavor without the heat. I had all the other ingredients: brown stock, fresh garlic, a bit of ripe canned tomatoes, salt, black pepper, onion, celery, carrot, cumin and coriander seeds.

The chilis get seeded, then sautéed in a bit of vegetable oil after the spices, onions, carrots and celery. The trick is to heat them up without scorching them, to release their flavor. Then the chopped garlic, and finally the stock and tomato to cool things down. After that, a bit of simmering and into the blender for a quick purée. The sauce gets returned to the pan, and dosed with red wine vinegar according to how tart you like things. Finally, adjust the salt and everything is ready to go. One local restaurant goes fairly heavy on the vinegar, but it's safer to add in increments while tasting to find the level you prefer.

When everything's ready, cut a bolillo in half, toast it lightly, add a layer of salsa, some carnitas, some more salsa or cilantro and sliced avocado. I never get enough avocado in restaurants, so this transforms the torta into a real luxury.

You can serve tortas open faced, covered or wet. If you like them wet, completely drowned in salsa, make the salsa more liquid, almost soupy, by adding more stock.

El Tepeyac Cafe arrives in Northern California!

El Tepeyac's logo, enjoying a burrito

I've been going to El Tepeyac Cafe since 1978 (more here), when I started college and was introduced to the place by a burrito-crazed friend. I try to eat there at least once every time I go to Los Angeles, 400 miles away. This was a good, safe distance since eating burritos that weigh almost as much as the typical house cat does not qualify as dieting. More like a burrito binge. Safe, if only done a few times per year.

The owner, Manuel, did mention something about an El Tepeyac opening in Northern California somewhere around Sacramento, but that was probably a year ago, and since the place didn't exist I figured that they'd changed their mind. Until last week. There is was, in letters big as the Internet: Panchito's El Tepeyac Cafe now open in Rocklin.

Rocklin? OhmyGodImgoingtobloatuplikeawhale! Three hundred eighty miles closer. A mere 25 minutes. A granny on a bicycle could go there and back in a day. Jump in the car, five stomach growls and I'm there, ordering a Hollenbeck or a Machaca burrito or taquitos or...

Saturday arrived, and I couldn't restrain myself any longer. As the lunch hour arrived, we sped to Rocklin, anticipating a significant wait. I thought we'd hang out in line with other fans, swapping burrito stories (...Remember the time you dropped the tray and scattered exploded burrito bits all over the patio..."). We arrived. Empty. The open sign glowed in the window. We approached the door. Unlocked. We entered. "Sit wherever you like," said Amanda, the waitress. One table was occupied by a couple. Everything else was a surreal emptiness.

In the L.A. restaurant, the wait is part of the ritual. Nobody just walks into an empty El Tepeyac Cafe and sits down. You stand in line, maybe say, "hello" to Manuel, chat.

Yet, here we were, in a booth,with menus in our hands, Panchito's El Tepeyac Cafe written on them. We were indeed in the right place.

I managed to avoid saying, "I don't need no stinkin' menu". Good thing, because Pancho added a burrito! Aptly named Pancho's Nightmare, it's picante. Five chili variety picante. I didn't order it, though. I wanted to compare So Cal to Nor Cal, so Hollenbeck it was.

When the luscious, steaming mound arrived, dripping with chili verde sauce, its tortilla bulging to the point of bursting, it was instant flashback to L.A. This is indeed a Hollenbeck! I sliced through the tortilla, its thin flesh yielding to the knife, exposing the first layers of flavor. Subsequent bites reached the bright green guacamole, the ingredient that really makes these things blast off. I popped a morsel of tender pork into my mouth. Heat. This burrito has a bit of chili in it. Could it be?

Thirty years ago, one friend would eat about a third of his burrito and begin to sweat. As he ate, his forehead transformed into a shower head as the chilis affected his metabolism. He hasn't sweated like that in years, and I found the East L.A. Hollenbecks tamer, too.

Now, here I was feeling the old bite like the Hollenbeck of the seventies, the once familiar tang of capsaicin-infused peppers returning like a long-lost friend. This was more like the burrito of my youth, a bit fiery yet balanced by cool guacamole and other ingredients into a whole that more than equaled the sum of its parts. This was the burrito I dreamed of while living in France, savory spicy cool and rich all bound together by a thin membrane of tortilla.

When I was twentysomething, I found that eating at Manuel's more than once per week leads to a noticeable increase in mass. I suppose I could have ordered lighter things than massive burritos, but I didn't. They were my first love, more faithful than that girl with the long hair who drove a two-tone Datsun 510. I probably went there with her, though. I probably went there with just about everyone I know in L.A.

Most of those people are forgotten, but Hollenbecks are eternal. They're not Mexico authentic, since they were invented in Los Angeles by a true master of the burrito craft. Authenticity? Who cares? I can get tacos al pastor, carnitas, buche, carne asada, chili verde and the usual gang of suspects just about anywhere nowadays. What I can't get is a Hollenbeck, unless I go to El Tepeyac. Only one restaurant on the entire planet where I can eat this. That's special.

It's funny though. Every Mexican restaurant has a combination burrito. Many have rice, beans, meat, and even guacamole, yet none come close to the flavor of a Hollenbeck. Maybe it's the sour cream, that Hollenbecks don't have. It's not something I generally want in my burrito anyway. It's cold. It takes up space better reserved for a big ladle of guacamole. Yeah, the guac is also cold, but it adds a lot more flavor and has a better mouthfeel than sour cream. There's also the chili blend, another unique to El Tepeyac flavor profile that happens to marry incredibly well with the avocado.

Don't get me wrong - I like sour cream. I just don't want it in my burrito, competing with an excellent dose of guacamole. It's fine on nachos, whatever. Just spare me the creamy stuff in my burrito.

Time will tell if Northern California, or more specifically Rocklin, will embrace this food as their new icon of delicious. They should, but then we're a long way from East L.A. If good food is indeed universal, they should be full in a month or two and packed soon thereafter. I certainly hope so, because I really don't want to drive 400 miles every time I'm jonesin' for a burrito.

Panchito's El Tepeyac Cafe. 6835 Five Star Blvd, Rocklin, CA 95677
(916) 625-0165

You can visit their web site here.

Thirty-three years of burritos

All that fancy gourmet stuff is fine, but sometimes you just have to go back to your roots, bathe your tongue in thirty year old memories, remember the times you spent in that very spot, and wonder what happened to the people you knew back when...

We'd stop by El Tepeyac on the way back from school in 1978. I'd just started college, and my friend Mike decided to give me a valuable education in burritos. We'd go in his beat-up gold Chevy Nova, its black cloth seats smelling of time in the sun, early morning fishing trips and stale tobacco smoke. We'd inch forward in line, awaiting our turn at the order window, then the pick-up window. With a shout of "Hollenbeck! Machaca!", our burritos were handed out, creaking on sagging cardboard trays, rapidly passed out the window in a frantic moment where the price of failure would be the splat of several pounds of burrito hitting the concrete. Balancing them as best we could, we'd return to our table to devour them in the reddish-gold light streaming through the colored glass of the patio. All this fit well within a student's budget at around four bucks per burrito.

Phil and I loved the Hollenbeck, even though it made his forehead drip sweat. Mike's favorite was the machaca burrito, from which he'd carefully remove every trace of green lest a fiery jalapeño leave him gasping. We even tried a Manuel's special, a sleeping bag sized invention of the restaurant's owner. Once. One burrito, three people. I think we might have even finished it. Maybe. Then there was the machaca burrito. Shredded beef, eggs, sautéed onions, cheese and chunks of those incandescent jalapeños, now bred out of existence.

My friend Mike is now departed, but Manuel is still at the door greeting people. There have been some changes at the restaurant, too. The menu is a bit longer, and the Hollenbeck burrito is available with chicken and asada along with the traditional pork. The Hollenbeck runs almost ten bucks, the machaca a bit more. The silly little pile of lettuce no longer comes with the Hollenbeck. The machaca burrito now adds rice and beans to its former meat, onions, egg, fresh jalapeños and cheese. Those screaming hot peppers are but a memory.

What's in a Hollenbeck? Mass, and lots of it. Take a tortilla big enough to cover your entire head and face. Throw in some slow-cooked chili verde pork, then some freshly made guacamole, some rice, some beans. Wrap everything up like a small pillow, then pour some tomato-chili sauce over the top and drop some more chunks of the pork on top. Serve steaming hot. Eat fast, before your stomach realizes what you're up to. Don't drink large amounts of fluid for at least an hour - your stomach needs to work uninterrupted.

As for the Manuel's Special, just imagine the Hollenbeck. Double it. No, bigger. Triple it. This burrito is indeed larger than the average human stomach. The last time we ate one, it took four people. Just seeing a burrito that large is something that should be on everyone's bucket list. Put it last on the list if you plan on eating the whole thing at one sitting.

When we go, we look at our shadows, reaching back thirty years across the worn concrete of the patio. We have wives, families, responsibilities, retirement. We talk about old friends who've disappeared from sight. Mammon is more likely to be the focus of conversation than Venus. We think of playing outside under the sun instead of on computers, talking instead of texting; of times when driving a car meant freedom instead of obligation.

We don't bring our wives. They don't approve of this kind of mass consumption.

El Tepeyac Cafe is so famous that I probably don't need to even list the address, but journalistic integrity requires that all the information be here: 812 North Evergreen Avenue, Los Angeles.

It's that time of year again... chiles en almendra

Chiles en nogada are a seasonal recipe made during the overlap of pomegranites, chiles poblanos, and walnuts - as well as apples and pears.

I make them with almonds, pumpkin seeds and sesame seeds instead of walnuts. The chili stuffing is small cubes of beef, onion, garlic, apple, pear, pluot, raisins, more almonds, a bit of cinnamon, salt and black pepper. I was out of Sherry, so I splashed everything down with a bit of Calvados. It was supposed to have acitrón (candied cactus) too - it's traditional, but I didn't have time to get down to the supermercado to pick some up. I've also made them with pork, but the beef seems to hold up a bit better and is more assertive where pork tends to blend in with the other flavors.

The white sauce is crème fraîche, goat cheese, toasted almonds, sesame and pumpkin seeds - and a bit more Calvados. The whole thing is topped with pomegranite seeds and fresh flat leaf parsley.

Except for the switch between walnuts and my mix, this is a traditional Mexican dish, a variation on chiles rellenos from Puebla. There's some controversy about whether the stuffed chilis should be fried in egg batter like regular chiles rellenos or not. Obviously, I'm on the side of "not". I think the sauce is rich enough not to need the batter, and there's no tomato sauce for it to soak up as there is with normal chiles rellenos.

February 24th: National Tortilla Chip Day

Yes, there really is a day officially dedicated to tortilla chips. I suppose this means there is also a day dedicated to tortillas. Maybe two days, one for flour and another for corn. Maybe even blue corn, white corn and yellow corn.

Catastrophically, I was out of tortilla chips. Yet, there were lots of perfectly good corn tortillas, yellow, in the freezer. So... a little fooling around and tortilla soup here we come!

Tortilla Soup (sopa de tortillas con ajo)

Serves four

The soup

• About 1 quart chicken broth
• 6 cloves of garlic, roughly chopped
• about 1/2 tsp cumin
• about 1/4 tsp allspice
• 2 large ripe avocados
• four springs of cilantro
• 1 stalk green onion, chopped
• salt to taste

The tortilla strips

• 2-3 Corn tortillas
• oil for frying
• 2 cloves garlic, chopped
• salt
• green onions, chopped

Process

1. Pre-heat oven to 375° F.
2. Place the garlic, onion, cumin, allspice and salt into the broth. Blend to a smooth consistency and simmer for about 30 minutes.
3. Cut the tortillas into 1/4" strips. Set aside
4. Heat the oil, add the tortilla strips, toss to coat with oil. Fry a couple of minutes until they take a hint of color. Add the garlic and onions, toss around to distribute the flavor.
5. Remove the strips from the pan drain on a paper towel in a plate. Place the strips in an oven proof dish and crisp in the oven, about 15-20 minutes.
6. When the strips are ready, remove from oven and set aside.
7. Remove stems from cilantro, set aside.
8. Slice the avocado into thin slices, set aside.
9. Taste the broth for salt, spices. Adjust as needed.
10. Ladle the broth into four bowls. Add avocado, tortilla strips, cilantro.
11. Serve immediately.

Torta de carnitas

 

French baguette à l'ancienne...

...meets Mexican carnitas. The world will never be the same.

Before I really get started, I'd like to say one thing. Carnitas has ONLY three ingredients. Pork, Salt, Water. The water doesn't really count since it evaporates during cooking, leaving really only two ingredients. Any more - even a little hint of pepper, citrus, garlic - is overkill. The other secret is to use very low heat to coax out all that porky goodness.

So, as everyone knows by now with torta madness sweeping the land, a torta is a Mexican sandwich. There are a lot of variations beyond the traditional bolillo bread.

This is my take on what is fast becoming as ubiquitous as tacos. Instead of a bolillo, I used a French baguette à l'ancienne. This is a complex, slow fermented wonder that transforms the lowly torta into something worthy of passing up a meal at the French Laundry. The meat: carnitas, slow braised then delicately fried in its own rendered fat. The salsa: cilantro, pineapple, serrano pepper, green onion. The pièce de resistance: fresh slices of avocado.

Just FYI, I've never seen a baguette à l'ancien outside of France - but they can indeed be made here with American flour, yeast and a good formula. And a fair amount of time.

¡Cemitas!

¡Que rico!

A trip to Los Angeles just wouldn't be the same without a cemita for lunch. Here in Sacramento, nobody seems to even know what a cemita is, let alone where to actually get one. Well, the answer to the second part of that question is simple: drive to L.A.

You can make your own cemitas, if you can find a source for papalo or Papaloquelite. Papalo is the herb that gives a cemita its unique taste, although the chipotle sauce has a bit to say about the flavor, too. It's like precolumbian cilantro, but from a totally different plant family.  I suppose you could substitute cilantro for papalo, but enough substitutions and you'll have a carnitas burger with chipotle sauce and not a real  cemita autentica.

Making a cemita should not be too difficult, if you already know how to make bread and chipotle salsa - just follow the sketch above. The buns are more of a French style lean dough than a fluffy, puffy bun style dough or or bolillo like they use for tortas. I would start by adding tomato paste to canned chipotle to reduce the burn factor, then experiment a bit by adding perhaps a bit of cumin, a bit of garlic, a bit of Mexican oregano. Quesillo is a type of string cheese. The meat is relatively simple, and all that's left is some hefty slices of avocado.

You can vary the meat, too. Although I like carnitas, you can also use milanesa (pounded, breaded chicken or veal). There are so many ingredients, you could probably even leave it out for an ovo-lacto version.

If you're not going to make your own, and you're in Los Angeles, my favorite place to get this things is at Cemitas Poblanas Elvirita, 3010 East First Street, across the street from the cemetery at Evergreen. You may not see the place at first; it's kind of nondescript. It's pretty Spartan inside, too. Some tables, a big menu on the wall, a counter, a cooler along the wall and someone to take your order, preferably in Spanish. You can get the chipotle sauce on the side to let people unaccustomed to this sauce ease in gradually. Better yet, if they don't like it that leaves more for you. Beware, though. Some people's intestines don't take kindly to this kind of shock. For seasoned chiliheads, it should not pose any problems. I like the carnitas because it's moist, but the chicken - breaded like milanesa - is a good choice, too.

Alas, there don't seem to be any cemitas served in Sacramento restaurants.