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.

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.