We are back with Season 2 of Counterjam, the show that celebrates culture through food and music.
We are kicking off the new season by looking at one of the most diverse cultures out there: Mexican culture.
You'll hear about the anatomy of a perfect taco, what it was like when Grupo Enrique Olvera chef-owner Enrique Olvera first encountered "Mexican" food in the U.S., and comedian Felipe Esparza's love of fideo and mafiosos. Music is by the incredible electronica-norteño ensemble Nortec Collective.
Keep the party going by checking out the Counterjam playlists on Spotify, while you try chef Enrique's recipe for Frijoles Puercos.
Peter J. Kim: Yo yo! I'm Peter J. Kim on the Food52 podcast network, and we are back with season two of Counterjam, the show that celebrates culture through food and music. Whoo boy am I excited, because we are kicking off the new season by looking at Mexican culture, and if I had to describe the culture in one word, it would be rico, which is Spanish for "rich." Mexico is rich with history, rich with tradition, rich with ingredients and flavor, and rich with creativity. We're going to go on a little trip from Mexico to California with Felipe Esparza, one of the funniest comedians in the game, and chef Enrique Olvera, who is one of the world's most well-known chefs. We're going to talk salsa, bugs, tortillas, and I'll even stick my foot in my mouth by professing to chef Enrique that I love Taco Bell. (laughing) I'm sorry, what can I say? The crunch wrap supreme holds a fond hexagonal place in my heart. This groove you're listening to is a tune from the Nortec Collective, a group of producers from Tijuana, Mexico who, back in the early 2000s, created an entirely new genre of music called nortec, which is a portmanteau of Norteño, for northern, and techno. They take Mexican banda music, which features bright brass hooks over chest-rattling tuba lines, and weave that into irresistible house rhythms, and as you can hear, it's crazy how well it works. I particularly enjoy the jazzy, deep house chords and driving rhythm of this track. I recommend turning it up and letting the hypnotic groove just wash over you. It's called "Almada" from the Nortec Collective.
(musical interlude)
Peter: That was "Almada" from the Nortec Collective. For this episode, we're going to start in Mexico and hear from Enrique Olvera and Felipe Esparza about the diverse facets of Mexican food culture. And then we're going to hear Felipe's incredible story of coming to this country as a--gasp--illegal immigrant. He then grew up in southern California, and we'll hear about how Mexican traditions did and did not come with his family to the U.S. I'm excited for you to come along for this ride. And what better place to start in Mexico than with the taco? Here's Enrique's take on what makes a perfect taco:
Enrique Olvera: Obviously the quality of the tortilla is, uh, is very important, uh, and then understanding how the tortilla interacts with the filling. If you have a dry filling, you might have a thinner tortilla, whereas if you have a soupy or a more liquid filling, you might need either two tortillas or a thicker tortilla like they do in Michoacán. Uh, and then something that to me is very important, and--and I always, whenever we're working with the chefs at the restaurants, I always tell them, make sure that the taco has a good proportion. I don't like oversized tacos because then you can't close them, they break up, they break. Uh, no, so I think that is also super important that the eating experience is uh--even if it's soupy and you might need to fold the back of the tortilla to contain the liquid, the tortilla shouldn't break as easily. And then obviously to me what gives a taco most of it--of the flavor is the salsa. A lot of Mexicans say that good taqueries are known for their salsas, not necessarily for their tacos, no, because the salsa is what brings everything alive. I think the most--I wouldn't say important, but it's what brings everything together. Because most tacos tend to be simple if you think about them. No? Like, I mean, you can have just like a--for example, a tortilla with rice, which is a rice taco, and then if you add like, good, like a really salsa, you're in a good place.
Peter: Absolutely. You know what I love about tacos? I just realized this actually, it's the same thing I love about sushi. It's that a taco, when done--for me, done really well--it's a composed bite. It's something that you don't really have to even think about or, it's just--it's like, the chef has made a perfect bite for you, essentially, and you just put in your mouth. Um, and I love--that's one thing I just love about sushi is like, you know, when you eat a nice sushi meal, it's just like, bite after bite of composed bites, where everything is just so perfect, (laughing) and, you know, when it's done well, and I feel the same way about tacos. I just, I love the fact that it's this perfect little bite all wrapped up perfectly.
Enrique: Yeah, and ideally it's served also like sushi, no? So it's served from the taquero to you, because most, most restaurants that serve tacos, it's really hard to keep the tortilla warm, that the tortilla doesn't get soggy. I think like, like you said, like sushi, most tacos are also very personal in small taquerias, and the way you eat it is also important.
Peter: Yeah. One of the things I feel really, from an outsider's perspective, defines Mexican cuisine as a whole is just the incredible diversity of ingredients available in Mexico. And I think it's just due to there being so many different environments within Mexico, and so many different traditions. What are some of the most compelling ingredients that you've come across?
Enrique: Well, uh, to me, uh, for example, all the, all the insects, uh, more than the novelty, have a lot of flavor.
Peter: Oh yeah.
Enrique: Uh, if we--like I said, I was in Oaxaca this weekend, and we had a michelada and they put uh grasshopper salt on the rim of the michelada, and it was just a completely different michelada, no? And the same with ants and the same with worms. The intensity of the flavor of the insects are incomparable. Obviously, uh, all the, the varietals of corn is also something that never ceases to amaze me. I don't know if you're familiar, but every little stem of corn is different, no? Every, every little grain is different. So like, it brings a symbol between humanity and corn, no? Because not only every kernal is different but every little grain. And I think the beauty about Mexico and its diversity is not only the ingredient-wise, but also the cultural aspect. Uh, cuisine in Mexico doesn't have an author. No? There's no--nobody, uh, I mean you would have to be crazy to say that you invented the mole, no? Probably somebody at some point started some kind of adobo. But all the, all the recipes were developed by communities, and they belong to the communities. That gave them a lot of diversity, no? Because every family had a little bit of variation on the same recipe. And that also gives, you know, I think a stronger cuisine.
Peter: When you were talking about insects, it brought back this memory for me. So I lived in Cameroon in central Africa for two and a half years. And there were these insects, these termites, they're flying termites, and on like the--when the rains would first come out, these, like, a whole cloud of these termites would go flying out, and males and females. And the crazy thing is that their wings were programmed to like, fall off at a certain point. And what would happen is the wings would just fall off and then they would hit the ground. And I guess what would happen is, if a male and a female landed together, they would just mate and maybe create a new termite mound. But the reality was, all animals and humans were like, waiting around for this to happen. And so when the wings fall off and they hit the ground, everybody's like, grabbing them, right? Um, I had a light on when this happened the first time I experienced it, and they all fluttered around the light, and then their wings all fell off and they hit the ground and I gathered them up and I happen to remember, my friend told me that you should save those cause they're delicious. So I saved them, and then I fried them up, and all this fat came out! And the thing is they're really fat because they need to have all this energy for the trip and to start a new termite mound. And the best way I can describe it, is it was almost like insect bacon, and it was just so delicious. (laughing) And I was--my mind was blown, and I really think that winged termites would be a really great entry point for anybody who's like, kind of squeamish about eating insects, because they're like, fatty and just umami and delicious.
Enrique: Yeah, that sounds very similar to the chicatana ants tradition in southern Mexico.
Peter: Aha!
Enrique: Maybe they're relatives, the, the termites and the chicatanas from Mexico. It's a very similar traditional with the first rain of the season. The chicatanas fly, all people from the community collect them, children, women, men, adults, and they're precious. They're--sometimes they can reach a couple hundred dollars per kilo.
Peter (voiceover): As I noted at the beginning of the show, Chef Enrique is one of the most well-regarded chefs in the world. Within Mexico, he is widely credited with having pioneered the fusion of traditional Mexican techniques and indigenous ingredients with the rigor and art of fine dining. His flagship restaurant, Pujol, is known for its innovative presentation of classic Mexican food culture. So just by way of example, one of the restaurant's most well-known dishes is a dish called "mole madre." It's simply composed of two things: on the one hand, a circular pool of mole nuevo, or mole salsa, has been recently made. And then a pool that surrounds this pool of mole madre, which is Spanish for mother mole. And this is a mole sauce that is quite old. At this point, it's over 2000 days old. It's served with tortillas and that's it. Boom. Tradition on a plate. This dish perfectly represents Chef Enrique's passionate dedication to what makes Mexican food so special. Straight up, there are very few people in Mexico, I'd say, who have seen and studied the sheer breadth and depth of Mexican cuisine in the way that he has. And yeah, I gotta get myself to Oaxaca and get me some of those chicatana ants. (laughing) So let's turn for a second to Mexican music. Here's what Felipe Esparza had to say about the music of Sinaloa, which is the region where he was born.
Felipe: My family listened to um, Norteño music.
Peter: Is it like, is it like banda music, like with, like a lot of brass?
Felipe: Yeah, mostly, uh, lotta tubas. Mostly like big bands.
Peter: This is the kind of music where like, you hear the tuba that's kind of like, (singing) "Womp, womp, womp"?
Felipe: Kind of like, um, you ever heard polka music?
Peter: Yeah.
Felipe: You know, just add lyrics and that's Norteño music. (singing) "Bum bum bum bum, bum bum bum bum, bum bum bum bum, ba da rum bum bum. I had a truck full of coke, got busted in Mexico." You know what I mean?
Peter: (laughing) Yeah.
Felipe: That's one of my jokes I said in Tampa in Florida last week, I said that I'm a big fan of crime books like The Godfather, Italian mafia, Japanese yakuza, um, northern Italy, 'Ndrangheta, all that mafia. But what's different is that when you, when you learn about Al Capone, there's no--no one wrote a song about Al Capone.
Peter: Right.
Felipe: But when you, when you, when you listen to Mexican mafiosos, you can look up any, any mafia guy, from Pablo Acosta to Chapo, and you'll find a song related to what you're reading.
Peter: (laughing) It's so funny because when you listen to it and you don't know--I mean, I speak Spanish so I can understand a lot of lyrics. But for somebody--if you're just listening to the music, you would think that the music, it must be about something really innocuous, because it's so, well, it's like, very friendly, right? But no, it's about gangsters.
Felipe: Yes. I explain it like, "You guys might have a country song about your truck breaking down and your dog leaving and your wife leaving you. But nah, in a Mexican song, we're singing about that truck taking us to paradise with a bunch of coke. (singing) "Salieron de San Isidro..." (laughing) "...loves the coca."
Peter: (laughing) Just like, imagining like, parents sitting around their lawn chairs and watching the kids play and listening to this.
Peter (voiceover): Felipe also spoke to one Mexican ingredient that I certainly had never heard of. I should note, Felipe is vegan, so he's particularly keen on his fruits and vegetables.
Felipe: I want to tell you something about that I grew up eating, grown in Mexico that they don't have here in America. I grew up in a town called Guamúchil, in a region of Sinaloa. There's a gum-based candy that grows on a tree, and you pick it out and you chew on it, and it takes exactly like gum, but it's a fruit. And then a lot of those natives in that area, they wait for it to dry up and they make little, little dolls. Little white dolls of men sitting in a hat, that they, they stretch it out and they make hats. But if you eat it just like that, it tastes like a rosy--like a rosy, flowery, sugary taste, man, it tastes delicious.
Peter: So you chewed that when you were a kid, then?
Felipe: Yeah, we were chewing that as kids. It's like the poor man's gum.
Peter: And have you had it since?
Felipe: No, they don't have it over here. Like my mother, my grandmother, my, my grandfather, they'll, they'll be walking in the street, like, "Guamúchil!" And my dad--my grandfather would get on top of the tree and grab a branch, and then start picking it out and giving it to us like it's spearmint gum.
Peter: What? Sounds pretty amazing.
Felipe: (laughing) You know what it tastes like? Imagine what a, what a goji berry would taste like if it was fresh, not dried.
Peter: Now, watch out--like, if you put this on Tiktok, everybody's gonna be all over this, and like...(laughing)
Felipe: Oh, bro, I'm gonna be the guamúchil king, bro. I'm gonna have a guamúchil raspado, guamúchil everything, dog. (laughing)
Peter: (laughing) Follow, follow, follow, follow, follow, follow, follow, and then...
Felipe: Yeah, man, get my guamúchil taffy. (laughing)
Peter: And then, that's how guamúchil stopped existing in Mexico. The end.
Felipe: Yeah, man. I bet you guamúchil makes it to America. They will, they will write legislation, bro, to keep the plant out of the United States, because it will compete with gum base to make gum.
Peter: Oh my God, that's what they're gonna say, is like, this Mexican gum is coming in here, stealing customers from good old American gum, right? Taking our money, sending it all back home.
Felipe: Yeah.
Peter: Huh. Well, one day, one day Felipe, you're going to be the mob boss of the--
Felipe: Of the guamúchil.
Peter: Yeah, exactly. And there's going to be a song about you. (laughing)
Felipe: Yeah, you got it, man, you're paying attention. (laughing) A three piece band.
Peter: (laughing) Yes!
Felipe: (singing) "He brought it, man, guamúchil." (laughing) That'll be my next show, bro, guamúchil kingpin.
Peter: Yeah, yeah. (singing) "So long, our vegan guamúchil kingpin. Adios."
Peter: (voiceover) Coming soon to a grocery store near you, Don Filipe's guamúchil gum. I'll be the one singing the gum's jingle. (laughing) Bringing things back to Enrique, he was born in Mexico City and one of his grandmas is from Tabasco, which is in the south of Mexico. Speaking of Mexico's rich history, Tabasco was once the seat of the Olmec civilization. We're talking like, four millennia ago. Many considered Tabasco to have one of the cuisines that is richest in pre-hispanic traditions. I asked Enrique what kinds of food his grandma cooked.
Enrique: The one that I like the most that she prepared is frijol con puerco, which translates to pork and beans. They use very small pinto bean that looks like a little cow. So those beans are very precious, and you would serve them with dry aged pork. So the pork gets sliced into very thin sábanas, no? Like a blanket, and those get dried and they get cooked inside of the, inside of the black beans, and they're served with--I'm starting to salivate. (laughing) And they're, they're served with a little salsa that is my favorite salsa, which is just in a molcajete to you do a little salt. Then you have the machito chili, which is a wild chile, and then add a lot of...
Peter: So does the beef have--or the pork have a kind of chewy texture from being dried before cooked?
Enrique: Yeah, so it has--because it's dried and then cooked inside the beans, it has like a chewy, uh--and it has a lot of salt.
Peter: Yeah.
Enrique: It's on the salty side. And, and that normally also gets served with radishes on the side. And something that she also did a lot is that she always had uh, some kind of banana or plantain for whatever you ate. So if you had like breakfast cereal, she would have banana. If you're having pork and beans, she would have fried plantains. Uh, whatever she cooked, there was always fried plantains, or kind of like a tostone. Not, not the Venezuelan style that is smashed green plantain, but actually a very mature plantain that just gets like, barely squashed and then fried.
Peter: Chef, you're making me realize there's a really hard question, which is, is there a food or a dish that exists in the world with which either a banana or plantain would not go well with it?
Enrique: (chuckling) Um, I'm sure there is, I can't think of one. Maybe, maybe a hard boiled egg.
Peter: I think a hard boiled egg on some like fried plantains would be really delicious. (laughing)
Enrique: Maybe it's because I don't like hard boiled eggs that much. Maybe that's why.
Peter: Fair enough. (laughing) Okay, if you take something you don't like period, then nothing is going to go well with it. Of course.
Peter: (voiceover) Maybe Enrique's grandma was onto something. Maybe everything goes with bananas or plantains. Have we just stumbled upon a culinary theory of everything? Can you think of a food that wouldn't work with one or the other? Okay, okay. I mean, in the time since during this interview I thought of plenty of things that don't go well with either, but still, super versatile. I asked Enrique about holidays and celebratory meals in Mexico.
Enrique: For my birthday, my mom always did octopus, and that's one of my favorite dishes. So it's an octopus just cooked on its ink with red wine, lots of onion and bay leaf, and that normally was served also with rice, with white rice, with some uh, some peas on the rice. So that that was always very special. Of course, around Mexican Independence Day, a lot of people made chiles en nogada. My mom likes to make them only once, so that was also a special occasion.
Peter: So actually for the--our listeners who aren't as familiar with these dishes, the dishes you mentioned for the Independence Day, the chilies and the posole, could you just describe what those dishes are like?
Enrique: Yeah. So the chiles en nogada is a dish from the conventional ages of Mexico. So it was created by nuns. It's a poblano chili that is stuffed with ground meat. Normally a mix between beef and pork, sometimes only pork, and then the fruits of the season. So it has apples and--and this this dish comes from the Puebla region. All the fruit that grows locally here in Mexico tends to be smaller. So apples are really small. Peaches are also really small, and those get served with sauce made with, with walnuts. That, that's why it's called nogada. The sauce is basically--depending on who you talk to, no, it could be cream, goat cheese, the walnuts, and then sherry, sherry wine. And that covers the stuffed poblano pepper with the minced fruits, and the mince, the mincemeat. Purists say that it shouldn't be ground meat, but actually chopped meat, and then on top they put pomegranate. So it's the three--
Peter: Wow.
Enrique: It's one of those dishes that has the color of the flag, which I would normally say that's kind of ridiculous. But in this case it's actually delicious. And there's also, uh, every, every season of chiles en nogada. There's a competition in Puebla, and people that decide to capearlos, which means that they get fried into, like a little, a little egg wash. Uh, some people say they're hot, some people say they're cold, some people say they have the egg wash, some people say they don't. I personally like them lukewarm without the egg wash. That's my favorite, no? But some people might say it's not.
Peter: (laughing) I was expecting like very, just a few words, and like, what shines through when you're talking about it is that this is clearly a dish that you liked. (laughing) You wouldn't talk like this about a hard boiled egg.
Peter: (voiceover) Next up, we'll hear from Felipe about his you've-got-to-hear-it-to-believe-it journey across the border, and we'll hear from him and Enrique about Mexican food in America, right after this.
(midroll)
Peter: (voiceover) Now that we've gotten some insight into Mexican food on the Mexican side of the border, it's time to go to the states. Let's hear from Felipe about how he came over to the US.
Felipe: My father's family, most of his sisters, always say the majority of his sisters, migrated to Los Angeles before my dad, and they all had jobs at Warner Brothers record company distribution. Before CDs, before cassettes. So the national record, a LP, 33". And my dad's sisters, they used to work at the place where they put the records in a box and seal them. So they were they were putting, they were putting the album, and they shoot them out into the machine, and the machine will wrap them, and they did that all day. So when my dad came over and--to America, he lived here for like two years, and we were living in Mexico. My dad said, "You guys should come over here. "We went to the--we crossed the border the first time, like, I don't know, we were in a car with a strange man, and we get pulled over, and I guess the man kept driving, and we had--we were on the side of the road and we got arrested. We went to uh, the border patrol, I guess, the check-in place, and we were released back into Mexico. And then the second time, we made it all the way through, but there was like um, I guess minutemen, I don't know. And we already made the border, but I guess uh, conservative people in that area decided to have like a second border patrol, a second border check that they made up on their own. So uh, deputy sheriffs, they will stand right there in San Clemente on the freeway and do um, randomly, checkpoints on their own.
Peter: Oh my God.
Felipe: Just stopping cars, and they stopped us and they sent us back.
Peter: Oh, man.
Felipe: I learned from another comedian who was crossing at the same year that I was. He said that you could have told the border patrol that we're going to Disneyland, and they will let you in.
Peter: (laughing) Really?
Felipe: Because they were expecting them to come back home, come back to United States right after.
Peter: Right, right.
Felipe: But there was too many people not coming back from Disneyland and going out to Magic Mountain.
Peter: Yeah, and you've got all your suitcases with you, and like, all the bags, everything. "Oh, we're just going to Disneyland, you know." (laughing)
Felipe: Where the suitcase says, guys! We got to dress up like costumes when we get there! We're Mickey Mouse, and that's Goofy, with the chipmunks. When they finally caught us the second time, we're in Mexico. And then by that time it became a joke that they caught us again. So my aunt said, you know what, I have a good idea. We're gonna have our cousins from United States come visit us. So she, she went to United States and brought back their passport with her. But there were like three passports. We were three boys, and one of the passports was for a girl, like a baby girl. And I said--and we were little kids, so obviously my mom made my little brother dress up like a girl.
Peter: Oh my God.
Felipe: She didn't tell him. She just one day started dressing him up like a little girl. Nobody asked why. My brother walking around, dressed like a little girl, like with a little skirt, a dress, peeing standing up. He has no idea what's going on. So finally, two days before we go to the border, my mom is prepping my brother. "When we get there, your name is Patty, you tell the cops Patty." So for a day and a half, we were just referring to my brother at Patty.
Peter: Wow.
Felipe: Yeah man, he was a method actor.
Peter: (laughing) Like Daniel Day Lewis at like age...whatever.
Felipe: We get to the border. My brother has a little skirt, brand new little baby socks, um, pigtails, a little bit of makeup. Put it this way, man. My brother looked like a little girl ready to do a silent movie.
Peter: Yeah.
Felipe: We get there, they asked my brother, "What's your name?" "My name is Patty." And to this day, my brother is still Patty. He's gay now. He didn't come out of the closet. He came out of the country.
Peter: (laughing uproariously) You know, you got to wonder whether an experience like that early on just sort of like, unlocked, unlocked the possibility to be like, "Maybe I am, like, a little different."
Felipe: I know, right? It was meant to be.
(musical interlude)
Peter: (voiceover) Wow, that is one hell of a story. Let's not forget that the process of trying to make it across the border can be a terrifying and dangerous experience. I'm sure it wasn't easy for him or his family. Felipe preserves this memory through humor. I mean, this is what he does so effectively: he takes the darkness of a lot of life experiences, and makes them shine by turning them into jokes. But I can only imagine that many would prefer to forget their experience crossing over. It's on that note that I want to play for you this song by the Nortec Collective: "Olvidela Compa," which translates to "forget her, friend." I have to say, on a side note, it's really quite meaningful for me to share this music with you, because the Nortec Collective holds a special place for me. It helped me get through some tough times in my life. Some of their songs like this one are more meditative and downtempo, and they can transport you to other worlds. So here's "Olvidela Compa," by the Nortec Collective.
(musical interlude)
Peter: (voiceover) So we left off with Felipe arriving in California. His family may have been poor in certain ways, but they were damn well rico in others.
Felipe: When I was a little boy, we--we never starved, man. We might have been like, considered poor to some people, but we ate good.
Peter: Yeah.
Felipe: We would go to my aunt's house in the west side of Los Angeles. My aunt had this big kettle like this, huge kettle. And she would put like these two blocks of fat, of lard, and then they start bubbling up, man, like it's, like, oil, and then they start throwing in all the meats and other fat, and we're eating like, pork rinds, and uh chicharrón, and big old carnitas, like real chuck carnitas, and we're eating tacos there all day long. Even the dog got a bone.
Peter: Yeah, yeah. (laughing)
Felipe: I mean, we're eating all day, like, I don't know if you ever had chicharrónes.
Peter: Oh yeah. I've eaten a lot of chicharrónes.
Felipe: It's barely like--they barely come out of like, the oil. There's maybe like, uh, one little strip of meat, but the rest is all fat. Let me tell you man, like when you bite into it, you can taste that it's just fat, and then, like, if you don't--it burns your throat. But man, it is fucking delicious.
Peter: There was a time I went to Juárez, and I went into the market there, and I discovered something called colitas de pavo.
Felipe: Oh, turkey tails? I've never had that, what is that?
Peter: Yeah, turkey ass. You know, in the US, we never see turkey tails. You just get the turkey. But the tails that they--like, where is the turkey tail going? Well, they're going to Juárez, apparently, because they're like--you see like, a mountain of these, like fried turkey tails, and um, they're fried crisp, and then when you pop it in your mouth, I mean, it's just an explosion of fat and juice. Like when you bite into it, when you get into that like, zone where you're like, getting the sweats and you're really feeling it. Like, I'm just like popping these tails one after another and I'm just like, there was a turkey per tail. So if I like a dozen of these, I've like, gone through 12 turkeys. (laughing) Um...
Felipe: I've never heard of that, man. Cola de pavo.
Peter: Yeah. Colitas.
Felipe: Colitas.
Peter: Yeah.
Peter: (voiceover) I asked him about day to day eating at home. With six kids and two adults at home, Felipe's mom had her hands full.
Felipe: When I was growing up, we would buy a ground beef, but never had a hamburger. We would buy sliced bread, but never had grilled cheese or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Yeah man, fuck. My mom would buy--I don't know how many pounds of ground beef it was, but she'd break it down in five meals, and all the five meals sucked. So she would get like a can of vegetables, Libby's. Oh yes.
Peter: Yeah yeah yeah yeah.
Felipe: The one that had, um, corn, green beans and carrots in it, and potatoes, those tiny ones. She'd get two of those cans and mix it up with a pound of ground beef. And then on the side we would eat white rice. So that ground beef with vegetables with white rice. Or if it wasn't that, it was the ground beef with vegetables with beans, side of beans. Or we would also eat a lot of potato tacos. My mom would make that ground beef and mix it up with potatoes and just fried tacos till her hand got tired.
Peter: Oh wow.
Felipe: And one thing I love it is flour tortillas. My mom would make flour tortillas every week. So every week we had like around five dozen tortillas.
Peter: Wow.
Felipe: We ate flour tortillas in the morning, at night, sometimes with butter and sugar for dessert. It was like a Mexican crepe. Mexican crepe.
Peter: (voiceover) Felipe noticeably lit up when he talked about one of his childhood favorites, a dish called fideos.
Felipe: Just try Italian pasta, like either alphabet, but it's, it's kind of like, like the Chinese version of fried noodles. So what we do is we um, we fry the noodles first with oil, then add tomato sauce, onion, and then chicken broth and then more water, and then we serve it in a bowl with--on the side, with either a drumstick or some people like my dad, we would put a hardball egg inside. But it didn't finish unless you put mayonnaise inside.
Peter: Oh yeah.
Felipe: I don't know where that came from, but we love it with mayonnaise.
Peter: I would be hard pressed to find foods that are not made better by mayonnaise. So you know, um, is that something that would be like typical from Sinaloa? Do you know?
Felipe: I think so. Or like, I think, I think at a restaurant with a salad, people will buy it like a comfort food. Like uh, when that man in that movie Ratatouille. When he ate that ratatouille. I was doing a comedy show in Tucson, Arizona with Paul Rodriguez and a bunch of um Mexican American Chicano bands that play rock from the seventies. And it was a big old quart, like a little half quart of fideos in a tupperware. It was fideo with chicken inside of it. And on the side, there was a little bit of mayonnaise and lemon and onion and tortillas. And I asked before I touched it, I said, "Who is this for?" He goes, it's for the lead singer of War.
Peter: Oh wow.
Felipe: He has, he has a rider that he has to eat fideos before the show.
Peter: (laughing) That's great!
Felipe: So this is, this is an African American man who grew up in Los Angeles and has a taste for the Mexican soup.
Peter: I love it, I love it. So you just like, mix the mayonnaise into it?
Felipe: Yeah. One little scoop, you bite your tortilla and you get a scoop of that mayonnaise with the soup and the noodles and the chicken and you eat it like that.
Peter: (voiceover) If you followed recent food trends, you probably know about the birria taco. Tacos dunked in a meaty adobo broth and then pan fried until they're crispy. For who knows what reason, they blew up on social media in 2020. But yo, Felipe's family, they were rocking birria tacos before the internet existed.
Felipe: Birria, it was something that you look forward to eat on, on Christmas--on weddings, or like, like if you went to a wedding for like a Mexican man when I was a little kid, the whole wedding was catered by birria. Like, they killed three goats. And most of the birria that we ate growing up was made out of goat meat. Now it's beef or whatever, but--wanna hear a funny story? When I was like three years old, we went to this place in Rosemead, California. Rosemead, by the way, is a city. It's not a ranch, it's not a countryside. But there was a house there, and they slaughter animals there. Illegally, I guess, I don't know. But they had chickens, they had pigs. We didn't know this. My little brother and I were playing with these three goats. We're like, feeding them. We're little, we don't know. I thought it was a petting zoo. So I'm feeding these goats. Next thing you know, this, this um older Mexican guy grab our goats and they slit their throats right in front of us.
Peter: Oh my God.
Felipe: And they just run around screaming with no heads, with their head hanging. But they're squirting blood everywhere.
Peter: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Felipe: Just sad, man.
Peter: Yup.
Felipe: And the next day we baptized my little brother and we ate 'em.
Peter: And they're like, "And that is how your tacos are made."
Peter: (voiceover) Now what Felipe ate growing up in the US is a far cry from what many of us grew up eating and understanding as Mexican food. I asked Enrique to talk about his first experiences eating Mexican food in the US.
Enrique: I think the first--maybe our first encounter was in a, like a Taco Bell in a shopping mall whenever I had--whenever I felt like I needed some some Mexican flavors in my mouth. I mean, Taco Bell, uh, some people hate it. I don't have an opinion about it. Obviously the quality of the ingredients to me is what makes a food great, and not the preparation. If you imagine a hard shell taco with the proper corn, nice quality meat, a nice cheddar, that that could actually be extremely delicious, no? The problem, I think, is more than quality of the ingredients and the seasonality.
Peter: Yeah. Do you remember what your impression was of trying Taco Bell?
Enrique: Yeah, it was obviously like, "I miss Mexico more now."
Peter: (laughing) I imagine you biting it with a frown.
Peter: (voiceover) Here's where I actually had the gall to say to Chef Enrique Olvera, one of the greatest chefs on the planet, the owner of Pujol, considered by many to be the pinnacle of Mexican fine dining, to tell him this.
Peter: Um, I have to admit, I love Taco Bell. (laughing) I grew up in the midwest, and it was like, something I ate a lot as a kid. I'm not even gonna try to justify. I just, I like the taste. I don't, I don't think of it, I don't expect much out of it. Um, but...
Enrique: But have you found that the quality of the ingredients, even in Taco Bell, has just uh, declined a little bit?
Peter: No, I don't think it's been up or down any any which way. I think the iceberg lettuce has always been just like, a crunchy kind of watery thing. Uh, I think the beef has always been this like, you know, it's been what--I can't, I can't really picture any change in Taco Bell. I think it's been pretty consistent.
Enrique: Because, for example, here in Mexico, we--I used to eat--there were like, little pastries that were sold individually, like in grocery stores. Like a (can't understand), I don't know if you're familiar with that. Are you familiar?
Peter: Uh uh.
Enrique: So it was like a cake filled with cream with fruits. But those were amazing because it was a cake with fruit now. And now I think with all the preservatives, and they probably don't use fruit anymore, but they used like a fruit puree, and now they just artificial.
Peter: Right.
Enrique: Uh, one of the reasons that we're all very excited about eating good food is that it's harder and harder to get quality ingredients.
Peter: (voiceover) Funnily enough, we touched on an instance in which American cuisine had crossed over into Mexico and touched on an ingredient we discussed earlier in the show: chicatana ants.
Enrique: A friend of mine told me a couple years ago, he was walking in downtown Oaxaca, too, and uh, they were selling a bag of Doritos, and they were adding the ants in a sauce in the bag. He said it was one of the best things he ever ate. (laughing) So Mexicans are also creative like that.
Peter: Oh yeah, ants and Doritos. Why not? (laughing) Maybe the Frito Lay can make a flavor, can you imagine? I would definitely eat it, so come on. But the problem is that it would become not actual ants, and we'll be talking a year from now, and be like, "Ugh, they used to make Doritos with real ants, and now they just have ant flavor." (laughing)
Enrique: (laughing) Exactly. Because it's too expensive.
Peter: (voiceover) I asked Felipe about what he thought about American Mexican food. Now, I was born and raised in the midwest, so I got to tell you, I have a soft spot for casseroles. And I was happy to hear that Felipe had a certain reverence for the enchilada casserole. "What is the enchilada casserole," you may ask? Well, here's Felipe's take on it and how it, shall I say, stacks up to his mom's enchiladas.
Felipe: It looks like a lasagna made out of tortillas, which is an easy way to make enchiladas, man, which is genius. You're not even gonna roll them up. How you do it, though, you make a wall in your casserole with tortillas, and you put it on enchilada sauce with cheese, and then you layer more tortilla on top, and more cheese and more chicken. And you start layering tortillas, man, till you have a wall of tortillas. And you have your enchilada casserole. Like, my mother's enchiladas were not made with multiple cheese. My mom would not have enough that type of cheese to go around, to make enough enchiladas for eight people. Just different.
Peter: That's the kind of wall I could get behind, too, is an enchilada wall, one you can eat your way through.
Felipe: Yeah. With sour cream.
Peter: (voiceover) I asked Felipe and Enrique the classic Counterjam question: if you were stuck on a deserted island and you could only eat one Mexican dish for the rest of your life, what would it be? Felipe's answer was no surprise.
Felipe: I was gonna say shrimp cocktail, but man, I'd get tired of shellfish after awhile.
Peter: (laughing) There's only so much shrimp cocktail you can have.
Felipe: Yeah, I'd probably eat fideos and beans, man, with, with cheese on top, mayonnaise.
Peter: Oh yeah, I love it.
Felipe: And red punch.
Peter: You mean like, like Hawaiian punch? Yeah, the red stuff.
Felipe: Yeah, Hawaiian punch!
Peter: It's good stuff.
Peter: (voiceover) And what about Enrique? What exotic dish would he eat for the rest of his days? He answered without a moment's hesitation.
Enrique: Absolutely, quesadillas. 100%.
Peter: (laughing) And what kind of quesadillas?
Enrique: Just uh, corn tortilla with queso, a little epazote, and uh, salsa made with serranos, uh, heirloom tomatoes, No? And a little uh, cilantro and onion at the end. I'm happy with that for the rest of my life.
Peter: Basta.
Enrique: Basta. I would also like a beer, if possible.
Peter: We'll give you a beer, we'll give you a beer. You're stuck on an island, you can have a beer.
Peter: (voiceover) Give it up for the quesadilla, y'all. I gotta agree with Chef Enrique, it is quite the perfect dish, and definitely worthy of being on the island. And as we've learned, it's just one culinary drop in a rich ocean of ingredients and traditions. Just in this episode, we've talked chilies en nogada, birria tacos, colitas de pavo, chicatana ants, frijol con puerco, mole and much more. And we're just scratching the surface. Like Enrique's grandma's chiles en nogada, there are many, many layers to the cuisine. We're going to close out with this tune, a banger of a song featuring those classic bright brassy norteno horn lines. Enjoy "Tengo La Voz" by the Nortec Collective.
(musical interlude)
Peter: Thank you so much for tuning back into season two of Counterjam. It's great to be back. We've got a lot of fun stuff in the works. And here's where I drop that obligatory podcast plug: please consider leading a friendly review in Apple Podcasts. Shout out to our guests, Felipe Esparza and Chef Enrique Olvera. Shout out to the Nortec Collective and Nacional Records for providing the music. Shout out to bananas and plantains everywhere for being the perfect sidekick to nearly everything. Shout out to Food52, Harry Sultan, and especially Coral Lee, Counterjam's producer, whose magical, mystical talents make the show possible. I'm Peter J. Kim and I'll catch you on the next episode of Counterjam.