International Supermarket 'Challenge': Mexican Ingredients

A try at using Mexican ingredients in a Southwest Chinese cooking context.

Me and Steph have this little game we like to play. Basically, one person gives a random ingredient from X cuisine, and asks the other to brainstorm how someone with a basis in Y cuisine would use it if they bumped into it at the market. Goes something a bit like this:

• What would a Hunan grandmother do with young jackfruit?

• How would a French pasty chef use Sichuan Peppercorns?

• What would someone from Northern Thailand do with hominy?

Just a fun time killer in the car or whatnot. But if you play this game enough, the thought experiment can’t help but get you thinking: “what would I, someone with a basis in ____ cuisine, do if I found [some random new ingredient]”?

And if you’ve got access to any sort of assortment of international supermarkets? The urge to put that experiment into practice can become borderline uncontrollable. To… ‘put the game to the test’, so to speak.

Of course, these days I’m sure a lot of out culinary knowledge can get pretty… international. Like, Steph’s Cantonese, I’m a long term American expat in Asia, and our media diet consists of a pretty eclectic mix of YouTube and Bilibili channels. Still, I’d narrow down our ‘base cuisines’ are some sort of amalgamation of Cantonese, Sichuanese, and American. So while culinarily us going to a random international supermarket’s probably a little less interesting than if you could magically teleport a Peruvian grandmother into a Saigon wholesale market… still pretty fun nonetheless.

Our recent video is probably one of our more successful experiments to date – in a recent trip back to the USA to visit family, we tried:

1. Mexican Grocery Store

2. Southwest Chinese (i.e. Yunnan, Guizhou, Sichuan – “Yun-Gui-Chuan”) cooking

Video is here, including a (perhaps overly lengthy) walkthrough of the Mexican supermarket near my parent’s place:

Now of course, we’re no chefs (so don’t expect to be blown away or anything), but this’s what we came up with:

Ingredient #1: Nopales (i.e. cactus)

Nopales – edible cactus – are an ingredient we’d hear of before, but neither of us had ever actually tried them, or had any idea how they were used in Mexican cooking. The only thing I vaguely knew about it was that I’d heard that it was a vegetable that a lot of Americans seemed to have trouble with.

In China, to our knowledge nobody really eats cactus – though of course knowing China I’m sure it likely exists in some small pocket somewhere. In Yunnan people eat the fruit, but prickly pear as a vegetable? Would be news to us.

So all we really had to go off of was the look of the thing. At first glance, it really reminded Steph of aloe vera (I didn’t make the connection, but pretty obvious in hindsight). Aloe vera is sometimes added to sweet drinks in China for a sort of ‘refreshing’ quality, so she figured she could keep with the ‘refreshing’ theme, whip up a Chinese style liangban cold salad. And I mean… unknown vegetable, liangban treatment… probably only so much you could go wrong there.

Here’s the final product:

And here’s what we did:

• Nopales, ~400g

• Boiled pork skin (Cuerito), 150g

• Scallion, ~20g, minced

• Cilantro, ~20g, minced

• Garlic, 2 cloves, minced

• Dried chili (we used Guajillo), 1 pc, cut into sections

• Seasoning:

     Salt, 1/4 tsp. Plus more to taste

     Sugar, 1/2 tsp

     MSG (味精/味素), 1/8 tsp

     Black pepper (胡椒粉), 1/8 tsp (white would be better)

     Soy sauce (生抽), 2 tbsp

     Vinegar (陈醋/香醋), 1 tbsp

• Oil (we used lard), 2 tbsp

We first blanch the cactus and rinsed it with cool water, then strained and set aside. Ditto with pork skin.

In a big mixing bowl, we added in everything except the garlic & dry chili, and mixed. Then, tossed the minced garlic and dry chili bits on top, heated the oil up to 180C, and splashed it over the garlic and chili.

Final Verdict: Steph absolutely adored this dish. For me, if we were making it again, I might putz around with figuring out how to remove some of the slime – from what I’ve read online, salting the nopales for a quick purge before blanching might help? Either way, this one was definitely a solid win.

Ingredient #2: Pacaya

So… this is an ingredient that we charged in pretty much blind into. This is what it looks like for the unaware:

…sort of looks like some sort of corn or bamboo product?

After a quick google when we got back home however, it’s actually the young inflorescence of the pacaya palm tree. It’s apparently pretty big in Guatamala, where they’ll either make them into fritters and deep fry them, or toss into salads. Which was… super interesting to us.

Because in the Yunnan province? There’s perhaps a surprisingly similar ingredient – something called “zongbao” (棕包), which is… the young inflorescence of (an unrelated) palm tree. This is what zongbao looks like:

Far from a dead ringer, but feels like a similar category of ‘thing’? So we decided to cook it up like people in Yunnan cook up zongbao – i.e. stir frying it with Larou, Chinese bacon.

Here’s the final product:

And here’s what we did:

• Pacaya, ~400g

• Bacon (or any cured/smoked meat), ~3 strips or 50-60g

• Garlic, 2 cloves, sliced

• Ginger, half inch, sliced

• Dried chili (we used guajillo), 1 pc, cut into sections

• Sichuan peppercorn (花椒), 1 tsp

• Fermented black soybeans (豆豉), 1 tbsp

• Some sort of alcohol (Shaoxing wine would’ve been nice, but we used beer), 1 tbsp

• Soy sauce (生抽/酱油), 1 tbsp

• Seasoning:

     Salt, ~1/4 tsp

     Sugar, 1 tsp

     MSG (味精/味素), 1/8 tsp

     Black pepper (胡椒粉), 1/8 tsp

• Slurry of 1 tsp cornstarch (生粉) mixed with ¼ cup water

So first we cut the pacaya into smaller strips lengthwise using the Chinese rolling cut… then blanched them for about two minutes, and strained.

We were working at my parent’s place so we didn’t have a wok – used a non-stick skillet instead.  First fried up the bacon in about ~1 tbsp oil til to render out some fat, then tossed in the aromatics and fried til fragrant. Then added in the chili, Sichuan peppercorns, and black beans, and fried those till the oil was slightly tainted red.

Then, splashed in some cooking wine (we actually used beer because we didn’t have any wine). Quick mix, then added in the pacaya. Fried that for about a minute or two, then swirled in the soy sauce, seasoned, and mixed in the slurry.

Final Verdict: While I wouldn’t quite call this one a ‘failure’, it was the one dish of the three we were the least satisfied with. Reasonably tasty (nice texture), but it didn’t end up the most balanced dish? Because the pacaya we bought was from a jar, there was a heavy dose of sourness from the brine that didn’t really mesh that well with the flavor we were going for. If it was fresh, it would’ve worked quite a bit better (do people eat fresh pacaya?)

If I were to try it again, I think I’d give the pacaya a liangban treatment ala the above recipe.

Ingredient #3: Chorizo

This one wasn’t quite the same as the previous two, because we’ve obviously had chorizo before. But I did really want to give this one a go, because a couple weeks back I had a little bit of an epiphany.

In our recipes, a step we often call for is mincing meat by hand (like, with a pair of cleavers). It’s a direction that at least a vocal chunk of people – understandably, I think – find pretty obnoxious, because… why not just use pre-ground pork from the supermarket?

For some stuff (e.g. Dim Sum Beef Balls), to get something even remotely close to restaurant quality, a hand mince is pretty much non-negotiable. But for a stir fry, the answer is primarily textural: a hand mince is juicier and snappier. The final product ends up closer in texture to something like a sausage hash, while ground meat winds up a little more on the spectrum of a hamburger helper. I’d grant that we should probably ease up on the obsessiveness, but test after test the former always just so much more satisfying (for us!) than the latter.

… but I guess, then the obvious question: could you just use some sort of sausage instead of a hand-mince?

So a couple weeks back on our channel, we shared this recipe for a homestyle dish from Yunnan called Hongsanduo (红三剁, i.e. “Red Three Chops”). Basically it’s just a minced pork, chili pepper, and tomato stir fry – pretty easy, and super awesome to smother over rice.

So maybe… why not try subbing Chorizo for that minced pork component? The flavors feel almost *too* obvious.

Here’s the final product (one of those dishes that’s not too much of a looker):

And here’s what we did:

• Fresh chorizo, Mexican style, 300g

• Tomatoes, ~3 medium, ~400g. Diced into ~1/2 inch cubes.

• Medium chilis, e.g. Serranos ~150g. Seeds removed, diced into 1cm pieces.

• Habanero, ~1/2 or Thai bird’s eye chilis, 7-8 or some sort of spicy chili to supplement. (optional). Also diced.

• Garlic, 2 cloves. Minced

• Ginger, ~1/2 inch. Minced

• Some sort of alcohol (Shaoxing wine would’ve been nice, but we used beer), 1 tbsp

• Soy sauce, 1 tbsp. For stir frying.

• Final seasoning:

       Salt, ¾ tsp

       Sugar, ¾ tsp

       MSG, ¼ tsp (available in US supermarkets under the brand name ‘Accent’)

       White (or black) pepper powder, 1/8 tsp

First I removed the casing and mashed up the chorizo. Then, tossed it in a pot (again, unfortunately wok-less) and fried it with a touch of oil (~1 tbsp) over a medium high flame. Once it rendered out some lard, I added in the garlic and the ginger. Once those were fragrant (~30 seconds), then the chilis. Fried that for ~30 seconds, then swirled in the alcohol & added in the tomatoes. After a quick fry, I added in the soy sauce.

Now, at this point I was having some foibles re how ‘saucy’ things started getting. The tomatoes were leeching out a lot more liquid than I was used to for a Hongsanduo, probably due to some combination of:

• Cooking in a pot over an electric (my parent’s kitchen’s set-up) instead of a wok over a burner (our set-up) probably crowded things a bit

• The salt from the chorizo might have caused the tomatoes to break down faster

• The tomatoes were farm fresh, so maybe they were juicier?

In any event, to counteract that, I first let it reduce down into a sauce (~5 minutes, high flame). *Then* I went in with the final seasoning, and tossed in a slurry to finish the job.

Final Verdict: I mean, this was pretty obviously delicious. It tastes pretty much exactly how you think it’d taste. I do wish, however, that it ended up more of a ‘stir fry’ and less of a ‘meat sauce’.

Next time I do this (and there will be a next time), I’ll likely fry the chorizo first, remove it, and then add it back in at the very end. I’ll also remove the ‘gunk’ from the tomatoes, and add it in bit by bit at the end of the stir-fry to control the consistency, perhaps with a bit of water.

Even as it turned out in the video though, you can’t exactly go wrong with a chorizo/tomato/chili sauce. Might not be the star of a dinner but could definitely be rock solid in a supporting role.

Yun-Gui-Chuan-Mex, Final Thoughts:

It's become sort of cliché, I think, in foodie circles to “did you know…” people about the Columbian exchange. Yes, we know, tomatoes aren’t native to Italy. Sure, potatoes weren’t always in Ireland. So… I’ll spare you the 101.

But when it comes to Chinese food? I think people often underestimate how deeply the rise of global trade in the 1500s changed how the country ate. There’s this weird misconception that some people seem to have that Chinese cuisine’s somehow this closed, static thing – and end up surprised when they see a Chinese recipe, like, makes use of an ear of corn.

In truth, (poorly enforced) haijin or no, China’s always been near the forefront of some of those agricultural tradeflows.

Decades before the Mayflower arrived at Plymouth, peanuts were being grown in the sandy loam of the Yangtze River Delta. A century before Frederick the Great was dubbed ‘the Potato King’ for spreading the crop in Prussia, the tuber was considered a delicacy in the Ming Dynasty courts. The sweet potato spread so rapidly through China’s rugged mountainous interior of China… that while historians disagree whether the tuber’s ubiquity was a cause or effect of China’s massive population during the Qing dynasty, the two undeniably went hand in hand. So if you’ve ever wondered “what Sichuan food was like before the chili pepper?”, wonder no further. Sichuan food as we know it did not exist before the chili pepper.

Those new world ingredients forged modern Chinese cuisine. And perhaps nowhere is this more true than the southwest of the country: corn, tomato, chili, potato… these form some of the fundamental building blocks of home cooking in that region.

So in a lot of ways, smashing together Mexican and Southwest Chinese cuisines has a heavy, heavy element of the obvious. And it’s undeniably fun – if you have access to both Chinese and Mexican ingredients, I definitely think it’s worth giving a whirl.

An unanswered question for me though – what might this look like going the other direction? I wish I knew more about Mexican cuisine to have good ideas. Mole base, tofu braised ala a Mapo Tofu? Coctel de camaron, albeit with suantang, a lacto-fermented chili & tomato soup base from Guizhou?

Hell, I think there might be a lot of potential even just incorporating Chinese fermented products like douchi (fermented soybeans) or Pixian Doubanjiang…