I was delighted when Nicholas Gilman arranged for me to speak with Chef Josefina Santa Cruz; she talked with Nicholas and I about the ingredients, tastes, flavors, techniques and honoring the food culture of Mexico.
Josefina is a local who Chef who after gaining her education at the the CIA and working in New York returned home to Mexico City. Josefina She is devoted to Mexican ingredients, but is well known for using them in Global Cuisine. A cuisine whose ingredients and techniques are linked to Mexico.
How many cuisines make use of Vanilla, Chocolate, Tomatoes or Corn? Those are ingredients that originated in Mexico. A country with a food that has existed for millennia. The Spanish conquest of the Americas distributed the bounty of Mexican agriculture across the world including perhaps Mexico's best known export the Chili Pepper.
Josefina is using the best of the available local ingredients to make her dishes. She expressed how t wasn't always easy to commercially buy leafs like Arugula even though it grows in the countryside, and when she first tried to buy Rosemary she was sent to an herbalist.
Chef Santa Cruz owns Sesame (review) which specializes in Asian street food, and Paprika (review) which served the food of the "Silk Road."
Transcript:
(00:00:00)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
As is, we have many Mexicans just because the country’s so big, and we do have so many different like subcultures, but on the dangerous part of it, I would think it’s like New York have a similarities that that food you find on the streets and you can eat on the streets and it’s amazingly delicious.
(00:00:18)
Harry Hawk:
Hello. This is Harry Hawk and this is Talking About Everything. I’m back again with Nicholas Gilman. Nicholas, where are we?
(00:00:24)
Nicholas Gilman:
We are in a restaurant called Paprika, which is located in the Colonia Juarez, a.k.a. the Zona Rosa in the center of Mexico City.
(00:00:35)
Harry Hawk:
Who are we going to speak to today?
(00:00:36)
Nicholas Gilman:
We are going to meet with one of my favorite chefs in Mexico City, Josefina Santacruz.
(00:00:43)
Harry Hawk:
What is she is famous for? Is she famous for Mexican food, I’m guessing?
(00:00:46)
Nicholas Gilman:
What’s interesting is she’s a proponent of Mexican food. She is practically an activist, and yet, her restaurants, two of them, are not about Mexican food at all. They're about Asian food and North African food.
(00:01:00)
Harry Hawk:
Wow. Well, I’m excited. I’m looking forward to meeting her in a moment.
(00:01:04)
Nicholas Gilman:
We’re in Paprika, which is a small, really casual, very pretty, little restaurant that features North African and Israeli and all kinds of food from that part of the world. Yourother restaurant is Sesame, which features…where you serve Asian street food. How did you get into that, you’re a Mexican chef in Mexico, what’s going on here?
(00:01:28)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
Well, first of all, hi. I think I got into it because when I was a kid many years ago, Mexico used to be a city with a lot of restaurants, but most of them were either just like tacos, Mexican places, and the high-end places were French, Italian and Spanish. Whenever we had Asian food, I remember was a place called Mauna Loa, which I always thought it was just like Asian, and it was like Polynesian. The only thing I liked to go for at the Mauna Loa was because it was like the tiki room.
(00:02:04)
Nicholas Gilman:
I remember that place. It was terrible.
(00:02:05)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
It was horrible. It was like the tiki room in Disneyland, but the only thing I liked is that they would give you the drinks with a little umbrella or stuff, but I thought the food was always too sweet and sour and too sweet, and so in my mind, Asian food was yucky. For many years, I think it was like that then I met sushi and I fell in love with sushi, but then when I went to New York to study, I had a friend. He was from San Francisco, and he was a former cop, and you know what they say, cops always end up at the Chinese joints, and he…
(00:02:36)
Nicholas Gilman:
They end up at the best joints too.
(00:02:38)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
Exactly. Small joints or whatever, but the best. He invited me for Chinese, and I was like oh, please no and he said, no, no, no come. I can’t believe you don’t like it, and I think that was my first introduction to like real Chinese yummy flavors, and it was like eye opening, and I fell in love with discovering and realizing how mistaken I was.
(00:02:59)
Harry Hawk:
Let me ask, where did you study in New York?
(00:03:02)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
At the CIA...
(00:03:04)
Harry Hawk:
Hyde Park?
(00:03:04)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
In Hyde Park. Yeah.
(00:03:05)
Harry Hawk:
Excellent.
(00:03:06)
Nicholas Gilman:
I want to say that this is evidence of the fact that Mexico City is an international city. We, of course, promote and love Mexican food, but we are really expanding our horizons here. Mexico City, it’s a world class city, and we have so many more options now. I think the palates of Mexicans are opening up, but you are also a real promoter of Mexican food and Mexican street food as well, so how do those two things coincide.
(00:03:38)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
I think I’m in love with street food, generally speaking, and I think part of what I like about Asian food is that I think the best Asian food is found on the streets. I think that’s where Mexico and Asia and probably also part of middle eastern and all those like spice root things that I do in Paprika have a similarities that that food you find on the streets and you can eat it on the streets and it’s amazingly delicious.
(00:04:04)
Harry Hawk:
Can I ask is there something like the night market, the Asian night market here culturally?
(00:04:09)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
No. We have in Coyoacan….in Coyoacan, there’s ______ (00:04:13), which is a small market. It’s not open all night, but it does stay open until probably 10 or 12 I think. You find the quesadilla stand and then the guy that makes a posole and the other one that makes the best tostadas pata, and stuff like that. That is a small market where all they sell is prepared food and street food.
(00:04:35)
Nicholas Gilman:
There is food going on all night, and there are taquerias, small joints that are open all night, and there are street stands that are open all night. They're not a night market as such the way they are in Asia, but…I wish there was, but there’s always food on the street here.
(00:04:51)
Harry Hawk:
I mention it because someone in New York just tried doing it, and they did a Kickstarter. They didn’t quite make all the money they needed, but they did it anyway. The first night, 10 thousand people showed up, and it’s been phenomenal, John Wong, if I got your name right, John, but it’s just a very interesting business development and food and people.
(00:05:11)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
Wow. Is that only Asian food or not?
(00:05:14)
Harry Hawk:
No.
(00:05:14)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
It’s all kinds of street food?
(00:05:16)
Harry Hawk:
It happens to be in Flushing at the Queens Museum, so it’s a lot of Asian but not…my good friend, we have an episode, Karl Palma and his takoyaki, which is the octopus balls, but his place is called Karl’s Balls, but I mean there’s so many great…
(00:05:29)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
(Laughs).
(00:05:32)
Harry Hawk:
Exactly that’s…he wants the laugh, but it’s just so great and people just waiting and talking and the sun has gone down, but I love that you’re talking about that this is not only an international city but it’s a 24 hours’ worth of eating city.
(00:05:46)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
Yes. I think when I lived in New York…I worked there for five years, I think one of the things that I missed the most was the variety because granted in Manhattan you can find pizza, but it’s a greasy slice of pizza, which usually at 3 o’clock in the morning is amazingly delicious or hot dogs maybe or maybe the falafel guys, but that’s about it. Mexico is like you will never…if you’re hungry at whatever time of the day, you will find a corner with something to eat and something delicious and cheap, which is great. I think in Mexico you could eat out on the street everyday three, and in fact, we have I think also like in Asia, we have different menus for breakfast and for lunch and for all day and for the nighttime, and I think that’s one of the things that I fell in love with Asian food and Mexican that I just started realizing how similar we are in a way, how different but how similar, and also the flavor…how do I call this, like the profiles are very similar too. I love French food, but I think French food is like okay, one or two layers of flavor and your filet with whatever green peppercorn sauce is going to be amazing from beginning to end, but it’s going to be the same flavor all the time whereas Mexican food and Asian food play with your mouth a little bit more. No?
(00:07:01)
Nicholas Gilman:
Absolutely, and we have so many ingredients that we sent to Asia. Chiles are the most obvious, and the very first, and then spices and fruits and vegetables had come back from Asia, especially southeast Asia and India, so we have a lot of India and Thailand. They're making these sauces and these curries that are kind of alchemy the way our moles and salsas are here, but the flavors are very different.
(00:07:30)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
Exactly. I think it’s amazing that to me a curry is a mole and a mole is a curry at the end of the day because it is…I mean mole means ground. Also, you will never find a mole with only two ingredients or a curry with only two ingredients, and that is what makes I think both salsas amazing because it’s 10 to 15 ingredients. When you think about it, we might be using…like Nicholas was saying, we might be using the same ingredients just in different proportions so then the outcome is completely different.
(00:07:58)
Nicholas Gilman:
The mole and a curry and a Masala in India are about the sauce. It’s not about the chicken or whatever it is that’s in the sauce, and that’s the same way, we think of mole’s here. People will have a plate of mole and there’s a little scrawny chicken leg in there and they’ll go like where’s the meat and you have to explain to them that the dish is the sauce. It’s the mole, the chicken’s just sort of there.
(00:08:21)
Harry Hawk:
That’s very Asian in the sense that the meat is the flavor, but it’s not the meal.
(00:08:25)
Nicholas Gilman:
That’s where it’s different from European or a French approach to cooking.
(00:08:29)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
I think it’s also part of what I like is we eat the same way. You eat with your hands. We use a tortilla. They use a naan or whatever other bread they have, and it’s part of like soaking the bread in the sauce. That’s the yummy part of it, and we serve it usually with rice. We do it with rice and beans. They do it rice and dough. It’s very similar, and we also have that I found really interesting how moles, the regular mole would be more like a curry but then our green mole is more like a Thai curry because it’s done with fresh ingredients. We do have both the mole done with all fresh ingredients and then we have the mole done with dry spices and chiles and the thickening agents, so it’s very similar. We eat it like the same way and it’s not about plating it. It’s not beautiful plating. It’s more about how you just like end up mixing everything together and just enjoying the sauce.
(00:09:25)
Nicholas Gilman:
The thing is for those of us who grew up in the United States or in certain European countries where we are used to having a real diversity of ethnic cuisine, Mexicans aren’t and don’t and people who are fairly young didn’t have anything like that available, and all of a sudden, you are presenting dishes from all over the world in very traditional ways, and you’re not really messing with them are you. You’re trying to sort of reproduce them as best we can. What’s been the reaction with the public?
(00:09:54)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
I do the best I can. I don’t mean to be creative about it. I’m not inventing anything because I think that would be very presumptuous.
(00:10:02)
Harry Hawk:
Cultural appropriation.
(00:10:03)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
Yes. I mean what am I going to teach the Chinese? I think to me what started giving me this I want to do something different was that I had that opportunity in New York of eating in so many different places, and then I had the opportunity of traveling, and then I would come back to Mexico and say we only have the pizza, the taco, and the Spanish, French and the expensive high-end Chinese-Cantonese, which was also like why is it expensive when in New York half of the students eat Chinese takeout and that’s what they eat every night, and here in Mexico, we had all these super nice, very pretentious, very high-end, and very expensive Chinese restaurants, and it was Asian food…
(00:10:45)
Nicholas Gilman:
They're rather mediocre too.
(00:10:46)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
Rather mediocre, but then it was as if Asian food was Chinese, and that was the end of Asia. When I discovered in New York, I had the Vietnamese and Thai, I’m like there’s all these other amazing flavors that in Mexico I’m sure we’re going to like just because we have the spicy but the tangy but the sweet, but we like and we are very familiar with, and I thought okay. We need to or I want to kind of be able to share that with people and open our minds to it.
(00:11:16)
Harry Hawk:
I'll probably use the word wrong but a simpatico. When I think of Vietnamese food, I think of cooked ingredients but also raw ingredients and I think of the same with Mexican. It may be a very fresh salsa, but there may be some vegetables, a pico de gallo. Am I right that there is some cultural affinity for cooked and fresh ingredients?
(00:11:33)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
Oh, yeah. I think that there is. Sometimes you cook something and then you add something fresh at the end or then like you were saying we have salsas that are like completely roasted and it just gives a different depth in the flavor if you make the same exact sauce raw or roasted or boiled, so we play around in that sense.
(00:11:53)
Harry Hawk:
There’s the joke that the Chinese will eat anything that can be cooked but don’t give them a green salad. Now, that’s changed today, of course.
(00:11:59)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
Mexicans too. I think it’s changed lately like you were saying also in Mexico, but I think we were not very much into the salad part of it, also because we had very boring lettuces in Mexico until recently. What Nicholas was saying is, I mean 20 years ago, 25 years ago, when I came back from the CIA, I remember going to the market and trying to buy arugula and they didn’t even know what that was or even rosemary. I would buy rosemary and the guy…well, I would ask for rosemary and the guy would send me with the bruja, the guy that sells all the herbs for the cleaning of the bad spirits and whatever, and I would go and say I want rosemary, and the guy would go what are you going to use it for.
(00:12:36)
Nicholas Gilman:
Yeah. Nobody ate any of these things. They have…arugula grows by the side of the road here, but they feed it to the pigs. It’s a totally new kind of flavor, and now, we can find it in some of our local street markets. It’s not in small villages or anything, but at least in urban markets, it’s kind of become a normal thing.
(00:12:55)
Female Speaker:
______ (00:12:55).
(00:12:55)
Nicholas Gilman:
It’s amazing.
(00:12:56)
Harry Hawk:
I love this part of the conversation where we’re talking about this food and culture and transformation.
(00:13:01)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
I remember trying to buy basil. The basil we would find was the tiny one with all the flowers already blooming because they use it to clean the bad vibes, so trying to make a nice pesto or anything with basil was like almost impossible 20 to 25 years ago, so I think this globalization and all this I think it’s been like super fast. No, don’t you think, Nicholas?
(00:13:22)
Nicholas Gilman:
Yes.
(00:13:23)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
I think in the past 10 to 15 years with the opening of the markets and all this I mean it’s a bunch of things that have affected but I think we have more ingredients. Some of them still I think Mexicans are still not very familiar. I mean you see them in the supermarket like cremini mushrooms and half of the time people don’t buy them because they don’t even know how to cook them because they're new to us, but I think there’s been a change in a very positive way.
(00:13:44)
Nicholas Gilman:
I think in higher-end restaurants, which are places that elite people go, obviously, they're introducing all kinds of dishes and all kinds of ways of cooking in Mexican food what we call modern Mexican, and I think that’s a good thing because I think it’s going to trickle down. I think a cuisine that is stagnant, that doesn’t grow and change is just going to die. It always changes. We, of course, want to preserve traditional Mexican ways of cooking, and now there are these new sort of hip restaurants that are reviving all kinds of recipes from the past instead of just simply trying to make something new and trying to fuse cuisines, which often doesn’t work because how can you fuse a cuisine if you don’t know both of the cuisines.
(00:14:29)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
I think that most of the time that fusion is more confusion. It’s like you were saying, and some people are like oh, so your place has a little bit of Mexican. I’m like no because I would have had to lived in China for a very long time, I would have had to really know the cuisine to the bone and I would have to know Mexican cuisine to the bone in order to create a fusion dish.
(00:14:53)
Harry Hawk:
To me, there are very few great fusions. I'll mention one that we were talking earlier about, but Zack Pelaccio created a restaurant called Fatty Crab and then Fatty ‘Cue, and my friend, Robbie Richter, competition barbecue guy. We've had him on the podcast, 125 barbecue awards or more, he did this competition barbecue and then Zack took all these Malaysian flavors with the smoky meat and it worked because those sauces and flavors is what you needed because the meat’s too rich and too much flavor, together they're just awesome. He’s now moved onto other things with Hudson Fish and Game, but I love pulling that together, so I mean what is your approach. I guess we should talk about a little of not what you didn’t do but what you did do.
(00:15:37)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
What Nicholas was saying is important in Mexican food, and I’m that generation where to me it’s very hard to fool around with Mexican food just because I grew up in an era where Mexican food was a traditional Mexican food, so for me I feel like weird, but I love what the new generations are doing. I think there’s a couple of the chefs, I mean Pablo Salas, and a lot of them they are doing amazing modern Mexican. When you eat it, you still know you’re biting into Mexico in a taco with maybe chorizo and sea urchin and maybe 10 years ago it was like what. That’s not Mexican because here at ______
(00:16:09)…
because we didn’t even know sea urchin even though we do have it and whatever, but I think that’s great and I think we needed that. We needed that sort of like breakthrough into trying and really having the guts or whatever to fool around with some of our traditional Mexican, so I think that’s amazing. I don’t want to do traditional Asian or traditional…and I don’t intend to because I don’t have probably that much of a knowledge and because I don’t think I need to fool around with them. I don’t think I’m going to do anything new to it or to make it better, so what I’m trying to do is just bringing those flavors and that’s why I say it’s something is more like Asian, generally speaking, because I don’t want anyone to say this is not Chinese. I don’t want them to come and ask for sweet and sour chicken, sweet and sour pork, something in oyster sauce, no. What I want is sort of like to showcase the flavors and the profiles so people understand that Vietnamese is not Chinese and it has absolutely nothing to do with…the flavors are completely different. It’s a lot more sophisticated maybe in a way or fresh or simple. They're all different, and then in Paprika, it’s also the same thing and we have so many of the ingredients. Someone asked me one time it was like oh my God and where do you get the spices. I’m like here.
(00:17:21)
Harry Hawk:
Here in Mexico.
(00:17:22)
Nicholas Gilman:
Right in the market and they're the same spices that they use there. They’ve always used them. They use a lot of the same spices to make moles, to make salsas.
(00:17:30)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
When you think about it, we have maybe they're not spices that are native to Mexico, as chile is not native maybe to China, but they’ve been there so many years that they're native now, so they're native. So, cumin, to me cumin is we use cumin not in the same proportion as Indians, but we use cumin, and a lot of places in Mexico use cumin and a lot of dishes use cumin and cilantro, the coriander seed and star anise, and so I think spice wise, we use a lot of the same spices. In Middle Eastern food or in what I call the spice root and Syria and all these places, I think we also have a lot of flavor profiles that are very similar. When I was in Morocco and I had one of these tagines that has prunes and the dry apricots, I’m thinking this is…in Mexico we also do a lot of salsas, the sweet-salty kind of thing or sweet savory more not a salty but savory and that’s amazing. We also use dry fruits in our salsas as much as they use.
(00:18:32)
Harry Hawk:
One of my clients has a Scandinavian bakery, and what was really interesting when Igot involved with that was that all the spice root trade spices came to Scandinavia very early and so everything that I would think in Asia that they would use in a savory dish they use in sweets, so we got cardamine in the cookie. We had pepper in a cookie.
(00:18:51)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
Yes.
(00:18:51)
Harry Hawk:
Is there anything here?
(00:18:52)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
I think here is the other way around like cinnamon you usually use in sweets and then now like I use it here and people are like oh my God ______ (00:19:00), no?
(00:19:02)
Harry Hawk:
To the chocolate layer.
(00:19:03)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
It has cinnamon on the top. It’s like because…exactly because in our mind it’s more into the sweet side, but then you can also use it in the savory like India or like in the middle east or pepper…you know I was talking to someone the other day. The very first time I had pepper in a sweet dish wasn’t 10 years ago when all the chefs started doing all this just like the chocolate and salt and olive oil, blah, blah discoveries. No, this was in Zanzibar in 1990, and I was there with a friend that studies ______ (00:19:30) or whatever, and they would give us a porridge. It was a drink and it was with pepper and sugar, with black pepper. To me that was like oh my God, black pepper and sugar and that was 25 years ago in Africa.
(00:19:44)
Harry Hawk:
I’m going to probably say this wrong but an atole champuraddo?
(00:19:48)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
Atole champuraddo.
(00:19:50)
Harry Hawk:
Which I guess is a rice drink with what I’m thinking I've had in New York is ______
(00:19:54)
Nicholas Gilman:
The original atole is made with corn, with dried and ground corn, but there are variations that are made with rice and with corn starch.
(00:20:03)
Male Speaker:
Like the corn?
(00:20:03)
Nicholas Gilman:
They're usually sweet.
(00:20:04)
Harry Hawk:
Are you playing with any of these kinds of things?
(00:20:06)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
No. As much as I’m not adapting or I’m not trying to do any fusion or something, it takes a little bit of time for people to be open to certain things because in their minds in Mexico the atole that’s for the peasant. I mean atole you’re not going to drink atole in a nice cold restaurant in La Roma. That’s sort of like something you eat with tamales in the morning, at 5 in the morning, so you have to introduce sort of slowly. Once people kind of trust you a little bit more on what you’re doing still some things are in their mind frame of Mexicans are still like well why would I have that.
(00:20:39)
Harry Hawk:
So, let’s talk about adjusting. I think this is a question really for both of you. I’m going to be speaking to my American friends when they say that they don’t want to come to Mexico because they're thinking of the border towns, Tijuana and the violence and they're thinking of Cancun. I’m looking forward to being able to say in all seriousness and with all humility, you’re being racist, you’re being limited, you’re being xenophobic. That’s not Mexico City in the same way that Cheyenne, Wyoming is not New York.
(00:21:07)
Nicholas Gilman:
Well, that’s true. I think you can’t totally blame them because the media really focuses on those things, and people just think of Mexico as one big same place where everything’s terrible, and you can see it’s a huge country.
(00:21:22)
Harry Hawk:
Yeah and Nick you’re from New York, Josefina you spent time in New York, so for somebody who’s either from New York or knows of New York, right, someone who’s probably an American, but why should they come to Mexico City if all the conversation we've just had hadn’t really convinced anyone, which it should have. All of this wonderful talk of food. What can you say?
(00:21:41)
Nicholas Gilman:
It’s a beautiful, very European city. There’s a lot of tradition here. It’s not like an American city because it goes back 500 hundred years and beyond in every way.Visually, there’s architecture. There’s just a feeling of tradition and culture here that I don’t think we have in American cities because they're not as old.
(00:22:00)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
I mean to begin with it’s like when you talk about Mexican food, which Mexican food because as is, we have many Mexican foods just because the country’s so big, and we do have so many different like subcultures maybe depending on the areas, so the food is very different in each part of Mexico.On the dangerous part of it, I would think it’s like the very first time I went to New York. It was at the time of…I think it was like in ’80 something, and I remember the subway being with all the graffiti. It was in the time of the warriors come out and play and all this, and it was horrible and terrible, but you would not be able to generalize that. I think, of course, there are dangerous areas in the city just like if you go to New York, and maybe 12 o’clock at night, you don’t want to be in…
(00:22:46)
Harry Hawk:
The middle of Central Park.
(00:22:47)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
In that sense, I think, and Nicholas will say, I don’t blame them. I think it’s media, and I think it’s media, international media and it’s our own media also that focuses sometimes on that, but Mexico City I think, like Nicholas says, you have all this feeling of 500 years, but then you have other areas that are modern and have great feeling like Condesa has. You can walk around and you can feel like you’re maybe somewhere in New York. You have all these neighborhood bars and neighborhood places and the bakery and the coffee shop and the this and the that and a lot of green, which I think Mexico City we could have a lot more, but there are areas with a lot of green and you can walk in the parks and all this street food. To me something that that I always like in Mexico is that you have this kind of combination how we can relate and be happy together with the street food stall but then the other super high-end restaurant right around the corner, and it’s very democratic in a way I think feeling to the…
(00:23:43)
Harry Hawk:
It’s very New York.
(00:23:44)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
Exactly, I think that’s something that to me when I went to New York it was kind of like you have a little bit of everything. You just cross the street and it’s completely different.
(00:23:52)
Harry Hawk:
Now, with our food trucks it’s even more so.
(00:23:54)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
Yeah. I think we have art. We've got great museums. If you’re into museums, we have great museums. I mean all this the murals and then you have just like green areas and you have great restaurants and you have San Angel, which is a cobblestone more Spanish feeling, so I think Mexico City has a lot to offer for any taste. I think whatever kind of traveler you are or visitor you are, I think we have a little bit of everything.
(00:24:19)
Harry Hawk:
Let me ask you a very different question, which would be, if someone’s listening and they are from Mexico or their family is from Mexico and maybe some of the things you’ve been talking about. They are also coming from your own perspective of the very traditional sense of Mexican food made by the mother, the grandmother, the aunt and it shouldn’t be changed. I have students who have Mexican heritage. What would you say to them about playing with their food?
(00:24:40)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
I think we have to be open to playing with it. We just have to be careful and respectful of. I think the important thing is what I would do is if I played around with it, and I did when I was in New York for a while in Pampano. We did play around with it, but I think I was a little bit…I didn’t play with it as much as the guys are doing right now, but I think it’s do something, close your eyes, bite into it. If it tastes like Mexico then it’s fine, and it doesn’t have to be…because Mexican food, let’s say on the plating, we’re not very…I mean just traditional Mexican food is bold. It’s just boom, go like that, but you can, and you can just make it a little bit more stylish just on the plating and maybe some of the flavors, more subtle. I think just play with it and be honest about your own criticism on it. I had an instructor at the CIA that I loved to death and he used to say guys, whatever. Be creative. Please be creative. Just don’t get fucking creative. I just think you have to be creative. You have to play and sometimes it will go fine and sometimes it’s going to be horrible. Just be honest about it and try it again.
(00:25:42)
Nicholas Gilman:
There’s nothing wrong with bringing a little bit of contemporary global approach to cooking and presentation and context because a lot of it is just context. As you say, you might close your eyes…you’ll go to a place like Dulce Patria where everything is very fancy and everything is beautifully presented, but it’s still mole and you close your eyes and it’s a really good mole negro with duck. So she presents it differently and she’sgetting these ideas from Europe, from Spain, but the flavors are there and that’s, as you say, that’s what’s important to respect tradition, not to turn your back on it.
(00:26:17)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
You say in English if it’s not broken, why fix it. I mean the flavors in Mexican food are there. What I think in Mexico we need to do is start looking more into our food and stop trying to make our food look like Copenhagen or whatever they're doing, Noma or anything like that. I think we can take some of the techniques. We can think about it, but at the end of the day, I’m sure Rene Redzepi would love to be in Mexico and cook with 110 ingredients more than the five ingredients he has over there, but if you want to fool around with it and play with it and maybe make the foam of…I’m not into that kind of cooking because I don’t know how to do it, but I respect people that do it and know how to do it, you can make a taco and maybe the little foam with be a habanero foam and it fits well if executed and whatever, and you bite into the taco and instead of a habanero sauce you have a habanera foam or have a habanero sphere or one of those funky things, but it tastes like it should taste, go for it. I think it’s amazing.
(00:27:10)
Nicholas Gilman:
The other thing we've talked about before is the amazing ingredients that we have from all over the country, from the coast, from the forest, from high, from low. We really have amazing products, and I think that’s something that’s really starting to be really happening here where chefs and cooks are taking advantage of what’s local, what’s great, what’s amazing from Mexico.
(00:27:32)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
You can look at all these like quelites. Now, they're so like in. Quelites are just herbs. They're wild greens that for a long time…in Mexico, we have been for a long time we were very…I don’t know how you say it, Malanchista’s, where everything that came from the outside was better than whatever we had.
(00:27:47)
Harry Hawk:
Cultural colonialism.
(00:27:48)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
Exactly, so something fancy had to be European, so you would never ever think of serving an important person a tamale at home because that would be like for the peasants. You would have them for dinner maybe or for supper, but that’s not something you would serve a guest.
(00:28:03)
Nicholas Gilman:
Even ingredients within a tamale like these quelites that you’re talking about, that’s like what the poor people eat, that’s what the maid eats, why would I serve that to my fancy guests, and of course, now we’re starting to realize how amazing and wonderful these things are.
(00:28:16)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
Yes. I think we’re starting to recognize them and starting to give them a place in all these restaurants where there’s a white tablecloth and blah, blah, blah, and serving things were supposed to be for the peasants before, but they're great and I don’t criticize that. I just think it’s great because there are a lot of Mexican people that didn’t even know, so now they think it’s an exotic herb. No, it’s not exotic. I mean you find it like, Nicholas said, it’s like it would grow anywhere and it’s just amazing.
(00:28:43)
Harry Hawk:
I’m just a strong believer in strong flavors and I love that there shouldn’t be this divide between peasant and everybody else that we’re all people and we should all have food that’s local to us and have that approach to it, and we shouldn’t have some kind of connotation that I’m elitist and I should have this better food. If we aren’t of the belief that we should all have good food, then there’s something wrong with this world. When you were talking before about cooking techniques and stuff, I think one of the things that clearly Mexican food has is the slow brazing, slow cooking techniques, and I think maybe not so much some of the quicker grilling kinds of things, but then I’m wondering has sous vide found a way in because that’s almost similar.
(00:29:22)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
Yes. It’s found a way in a lot of restaurants, Mexican restaurants. I still think I like it more like the old way, but I do understand that you’re in a restaurant and you need to serve things fast and whatever, but it has because to begin with, I think there’s a misconception on Mexican food that Mexican food makes you fat, and I always say…or is it fattening. No. I get fat because instead of having just two gorditas, I'll have four and maybe nowadays, people will drink it with a soda instead of with water, but I think traditional Mexican cooking techniques are really healthy because it’s a lot of steamed stuff, a lot of slow-cooked in its own juice. I mean barbacoa or anything like that is just steamed in its own juice and it’s just like cooked for a long time, and if I’m going to have fat, I’d rather have fat from the real thing. Just any other substitutes to low-fat, low this, low that, yeah but then you have to add ton, ton this or whatever kind of like chemicals, but it has. Sous vide is in Mexico. It has I think in a lot of the restaurants for all those low-cooking ingredients.
(00:30:25)
Harry Hawk:
I think it’s a good way in the sense perhaps to really slow cook something, obviously, but you could still have a rare or a medium kind of texture to the meat.
(00:30:33)
Nicholas Gilman:
Meanwhile, there are traditional dishes like barbacoa that are cooked for hours and hours in a pit wrapped in leaves over the coals. I mean there are traditional ways of preparing meat because remember, we've talked about this before, how here we use the whole animal. We do not waste anything, and whole animals are cooked. We will eat from the feet to the head. I think we said this before, and you have to cook it slow and long to be able to eat a head. You can’t put a head in a pot and have it ready in 20 minutes.
(00:31:00)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
No. No. I think the flavor does change. I think a lot of the restaurants are using sous vide, and I think it’s amazing, but there are certain flavors that you will never ever…just like barbecue on the grill. I mean you might want to do it I don’t know maybe in the sous vide and then just at the end put it on the grill, and the flavor is not going to be there because of the smokiness and depending on the wood that you’re using at the pit and whatever.
(00:31:22)
Nicholas Gilman:
The clay pot, the beautiful ollas and cazuelas that we use that are still for sale on the market made by hand because there’s nothing that can replace them. No metal pot and no ______ (00:31:36) is going to replace a fantastic cazuela and every housewife and top-end chef knows this.
(00:31:43)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
It is. I mean a lot of these like new techniques are being used in a lot of the restaurants.
(00:31:49)
Harry Hawk:
I think we've had a good conversation here, and I don’t want to impose too much on your time, but I would ask you to, both of you, Nicholas and Josefina, to say really anything, a question that I haven’t asked or something that’s been in the back of your mind that you wanted to talk about.
(00:32:03)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
No just I think now that when you mentioned you didn’t want to sound like an elitist or whatever on the food, I totally agree with you and I think all restaurants I've had or whatever that’s what I've tried to…it’s like good food should be available to anybody. I think street food in my mind is one of those things that I love because it’s great food, it’s good, it talks about the culture of a country or whatever, but it’s also very democratic. I mean I love to see it in Mexico that you go and you might see the guy with a suit that just got off of a car with a whatever driver and this and that and right next to him is going to be a construction worker having the exact same thing.
(00:32:42)
Chef Josefina Santacruz:
I’m Josefina Santacruz in Mexico City, and I’m a chef at Sesame: Asian street food at Colonia Roma and Paprika Spice Root Cuisine in Colonia Juarez, and you can find me @josefisantacruz on Instagram and @josefisantacruz on Twitter and the restaurants @SesameMx and @Paprika_df.
(00:33:06)
Nicholas Gilman:
You can read my review at www.goodfoodmexicocity.com.
(00:33:14)
Harry Hawk:
My name is Harry Hawk and you have been listening to a wonderful conversation about food and culture. I hope that everybody has a great day. You can find me on Twitter @hhawk and you can find this podcast and many others at talkingabouteverything.com. Again, I hope you have a great week. Bye-bye.
(00:33:33)
Chuck Fresh:
My name is Chuck Fresh, and I am being paid to thank you for listening to Talking About Everything with Harry Hawk. Harry wants to hear from you on Twitter @hhawk or harryhawk@gmail.com, and now a word from our sponsor, Life Extension Coach and favorite chef. Hawk Digital Marketing is focused on bringing brands and people together. We build communities of interest based on trust and transparency where consumers and brands can converse, learn, discuss, or solve problems together while creating a long-term connection, entanglement between you and your customers. Once connected, we help you engage, communicate, sell, present, educate and inform. Evolve your communications with us, hawksocialmarketing.com.
