Our First Time Making Authentic Mexican Food
Last time on Mediocre Chef, we made White People Mexican Food. If you read that post (if you haven’t, read it and then come right back) you’ll know that shitty Old El Paso taco kits aren’t an accurate representation of Mexican cuisine. It has been simplified and bastardized. We knew that after cooking White People Mexican Food (which we grew up eating at home), that we needed to make authentic Mexican food from scratch for the first time.
Enter: Mi Cocina. Brittany knew that she must have this cookbook. Not only is the cover pink (one of Brittany’s favorite colors), but it’s also created by the fabulous Rick Martinez. He has two shows on Food52 (Sweet Heat and Mi Cocina) and Pruébalo on the Babish Culinary Universe — check out those YouTube playlists for more amazing Mexican food!
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Since we had Mi Cocina on hand, we decided to pick a meal from the cookbook to recreate. While flipping through we found Morisqueta Michoacana — slow-cooked pork with roasted tomatoes and guajillos. Rick recommends serving it with Frijoles de Olla, Arroz Blanco con Mantequilla, Warm Tortillas de Maiz, and crumbled queso fresco. What Rick says, we do.
We shopped for all of our ingredients at Paraiso Tropical, a Latin market here in Edmonton. If you venture into the world of Mexican food, please support your local Latin grocer!
Ingredients? Check.
Free cake to snack on so we don’t get hungry while cooking? Check.
Plans for friends to come over and eat delicious food? Check.
Let’s get cooking!
Sidenote: We did not make our tortillas by hand, even though Rick has a recipe for this in his cookbook. We figured it’d be a bit too much to do for two mediocre chefs who’ve never cooked authentic Mexican food before and didn't know what to expect. Plus, we didn’t have a tortilla press. (But we should probably get one, right?) We put our tortillas on the grill to get some char marks on them and heat them up before serving.
Morisqueta Michoacana
Slow-cooked pork with roasted tomatoes and guajillos.
Ingredients:
7 large roma tomatoes (794g), cored
½ large white onion (200g), halved
1 cup homemade chicken stock or low-sodium chicken broth
6 large chiles guajillos (36g), stemmed and seeded
6 garlic cloves, light crushed
3 chiles de arbol (4.8g), stemmed and seeded
1 dried bay leaf
1 tablespoon Morton kosher salt
1 teaspoon dried Mexican oregano
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons rendered lard, bacon fat, or EVOO
3 pounds (1.36kg) boneless pork shoulder, cut into 2-inch pieces
Of the three recipes we tried, this one was the most involved (but it was so, so worth it). First up is making the chili paste/puree that we’re going to braise the pork in.
Preheat the oven to 475°F and place your tomatoes and onion on a parchment lined baking sheet. Let them sit for about 30 minutes or until the skin of the tomatoes are starting to peel back and the tomatoes and onion are browned in spots.
Alternatively Rick says that you can use canned fire roasted tomatoes and skip this part.
While the tomatoes and onion are getting roasted, you can start rehydrating the chilis. Add the chiles, broth, bay leaf, salt, oregano, and pepper to a pot and bring it to a boil. Remove the pot from the heat and let everything sit until the chiles have softened, which should be about 30 minutes.
If you’ve timed everything correctly, the tomatoes and onion should be done at about the same time as the chiles. Add everything to a blender and blend it until you get a smooth puree. (Note: Rick didn’t specify in his recipe that you should remove the bay leaf before blending everything together, but we did.)
Next, brown the pork shoulder in batches, using your fat of choice in a large, heavy pot. Remove the pork and set it aside once it’s been browned. Then add the chile puree to the same pot, scraping the stuck on brown bits from the bottom with a wooden spoon. Add the pork and any pork juices back to the pot, bring it to a boil, reduce the heat, cover it, and let the whole thing simmer for about 3 hours.
Voila. This is probably the tastiest and simplest pork shoulder recipe you can make.
YUM!
Frijoles de Olla
Simple beans with scallions and herbs.
Ingredients:
1 pound (453g) dried beans (lack, pinto, cannellini, or kidney)
3 medium scallions (67g) with roots trimmed*
3 garlic cloves
2 avocado or bay leaves
3 fresh epazote sprigs**
1 tablespoon plus ½ teaspoon (17g) kosher salt
*Can be substituted with ¼ medium onion
**Can be substituted with a combination of parsley, oregano, and/or mint sprigs
This recipe could have been the easiest recipe of the bunch if it wasn’t for the amount of skimming you have to do.
The only “cooking” you need to do is to put all the ingredients into a big pot, add 16 cups (3.8L) of water and then bring everything to a boil. Once the bean mixture is boiling, reduce the heat to medium low and let everything simmer uncovered for 2.5 - 3.5 hours.
Before the scum.
But then comes the skimming. And boy is there a lot of it. At first when the bean soup is simmering you, like us, will probably think, “pffft, skimming, there’s no skimming required”. And then it will happen. The beans will begin to absorb a lot of water and bean gunk will float to the top. And it. Will. Not. Stop. (To be fair to the recipe, the avocado leaves and epazote sprigs that we found were dried and crumbling so we opted to create a little cheesecloth pouch which probably didn’t help matters.)
What did our simmering and skimming get us? Black beans that had the barest hint of garlic and scallion. We look forward to turning the leftovers into refried beans.
It’s beans.
Arroz Blanco con Mantequilla
Buttery rice with poblano, carrots, and corn.
Ingredients:
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
½ medium white onion (154g), chopped
2 medium carrots (175g), finely chopped
1 medium chile poblano (125g), seeded and finely chopped
1 cup fresh corn kernels (164g)
1 garlic clove, finely grated
2 teaspoons Morton kosher salt
2 cups long-grain white rice
3 cups homemade chicken stock or low-sodium chicken broth
This was the easiest recipe of the bunch to make. All you have to do is melt your butter in a pan, add in your vegetables and aromatics, and cook until tender. Then you just add the rice, cook it until it’s opaque (a few minutes), add your stock, and let it come to a boil. Reduce to low and cover. Y’know, standard rice stuff. If you’ve made rice on the stove before, this won’t be new to you.
In his cookbook, Rick says to cook undisturbed for 20 minutes. If the liquid hasn’t been absorbed, cover and continue to cook, checking in on it again in another 10 minutes. (Our rice needed the extra 10.) Then you just let it sit and fluff with a fork. BOOM. You just made some damn tasty rice.
We’ve shared the ingredients above, but we made a few alterations when making this:
We used frozen corn kernels because we had them. (The organic corn in the freezer aisle at Costco is really good. It’s corn! 🌽)
We also didn’t have homemade chicken stock on hand — we relied on our tried and true Better Than Bouillon to make our stock.
This rice was the perfect pairing to Morisqueta Michoacana. When your tastebuds started to tingle a bit too much from the heat, you could eat some rice to cool down a bit before going back in for more delicious pork.
The camera didn’t want to focus today.
Our Review
👨🍳 Trevor: I’ve been to Mexican restaurants before and have had “authentic” Mexican cuisine from them. Normally this is tacos or burritos or some variation of those. As far as I can tell this is the first time that I’ve ever had an authentic Mexican dish that wasn’t a taco or burrito. And I must say that I really, really enjoyed it. The real star of the show was the pork. The rice, beans, and toasted tortillas were just palate cleansers and pork delivery vehicles. The rice was good, the beans were meh. The pork was fantastic and it’s something that I’ll definitely be making again. It had a delicious flavour to it and just the right amount and type of burn to it. At no point did I ever feel like the spice was too much. And the queso fresco on top was *chefs kiss*. Do yourself a favor and try this recipe out.
👩🍳 Brittany: I will always love nachos and taco in a bag. They’re easy, simple, and delicious. Authentic Mexican food is a labor of love — it takes time, there are multiple steps, but in the end you create something so amazing that you can’t compare it to the pedestrian flavors that you’re used to. It’s in its own world. (Minus cilantro, fuck that soapy tasting herb.) Overall, making this meal was a lot of work, but sharing it with friends at the end of the day made it worth it.
The pork — amazing. The rice — delicious. The beans — alright, but I look forward to making them into refried beans and using them in a five layer dip… or I guess I should look at a more authentic use for them as well. We have a lot of leftover beans! I can probably do both.
If you’re worried about spice, you can cut back on the chiles de arbol, and be sure to deseed them. However, this kind of spice is full of flavor and isn’t a OH MY GOD MY MOUTH IS ON FIRE feeling, so I definitely recommend trying it out with the measurements in the recipe.
Rating
Taste: 4.5 peppers out of 5 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️
Presentation: 4 salsa dancers out of 5 💃💃💃💃
Affordability: 3 inflation increases out of 5 💰💰💰
Everyone at the dinner table LOVED the pork. Loved it. Many of us cook plain white rice, so serving flavored rice was a hit. The beans were the only thing that people weren’t super stoked about, but a couple of our friends stated that they aren’t a huge fan of beans, but they tried them anyway so we can respect that. The saltiness of the recommended queso fresco was also a welcome addition to this meal.
We’re rating our presentation based on us serving it family-style — it looks like a pretty good spread on the table! Rick doesn’t have pictures of how you should serve it, so each person kinda just did whatever they wanted to. People used tortillas to pick up pork, made their own tacos, ate each dish separately, or mixed everything together.
In terms of affordability, this isn’t the most expensive recipe we’ve ever made. It’s also not the cheapest. The only reason it was expensive for us was because the recipes required a few ingredients that we normally don’t have on hand. If you cook Mexican food often, you’ll probably have these things in your cupboard/pantry and so really, the most expensive ingredients are the pork shoulder and the beans.
Probably shoulda removed those spoons for the gram. Oh well.
Conclusion
If you’ve never had authentic Mexican food before, and have access to dried chiles, do yourself a favor and try it out. Say no to Old El Paso.
Also, we want to give our friends Justin and Kait who came over to help us eat all the delicious food a huge shout out. Thanks for dining with us! 😋
Bonus Content
If you’re ever in Edmonton, check out these amazing Mexican restaurants:
La Patrona (okay, this one is in Sherwood Park but it’s GOOD so go there)