Mexican Food 101

illustration by Lisa Kirkpatrick

Attention, class. Welcome to the course that will give you the basics on Austin's most important natural resource: Mexican food. That's right -- while you may think that it's the balmy spring weather, great outdoor recreation, multiple music venues, independent film community, and cutting-edge interactive scene that draw folks in droves to Texas' capital city, the truth is it's the overwhelming depth and diversity of Mexican food offerings available for their dining pleasure. Just ask around. Musicians, movie stars, politicians, and computer geeks will all ultimately confess that what brings them to Austin -- and keeps them coming back -- is the Mexican food.

Austin began to develop a reputation for great Mexican food in the Fifties and Sixties when Texas politicians such as Lyndon Johnson, John Connally, and Jake Pickle imported the local Tex-Mex cuisine to Washington and brought their colleagues back here to dine. By the late Sixties and early Seventies, Austin was so well-established as a Mexican-food Mecca that even the fictitious Rice University students in Larry McMurtry's early novels made pilgrimages here to hit the legendary Mexican joints. In the mid-Seventies, Austin became home to the first Interior Mexican restaurant in the U.S., laying the culinary foundation for the enticing variety of Mexican dishes available today. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. To truly appreciate the vast array of Mexican comestibles that await you now, it's important to start at the beginning.

In the beginning, there was Tex-Mex. This hearty peasant cuisine was the creation of Texas' first immigrant population, the Spanish and Mexican settlers, who adapted the dishes of their native lands to the agricultural products, game, and domestic livestock that flourished in their new homeland. Many Tex-Mex dishes reflect the influence of the northern Mexican states of Chihuahua and Nuevo Leon. Rather than a sophisticated, glamorous bill of fare, Tex-Mex evolved as a flavorful diet that utilized every element of a product to feed the family. Beef entrails became menudo, hog jowls were used as the primary meat for tamale filling, and humble corn shucks were used for the tamale wrapper. By the middle of the 20th century, the basic elements of Texas Mexican cooking were firmly established in our state's culinary lexicon. The following items were uniformly considered to be the staples of Tex-Mex food and could be found on the menus of almost all the state's Tex-Mex restaurants:

Corn tortillas: the staple bread made from corn masa (dough), cooked on a hot griddle or comal; corn is the primary grain of Mexican cuisine.

Flour tortillas: made from masa harina, shortening, water, and salt, and cooked on a hot griddle; more prevalent in northern Mexico and Texas, where wheat becomes a rival crop with corn.

Pinto beans: seasoned with pork; refried, a la charra (cooked in the pot, soupy), or borracho (cooked with beer).

Meats: beef, chicken, pork, goat; grilled and stewed cheap cuts of these meats, predominately beef and chicken.

Cheddar cheese: most common American cheese in the natural and processed varieties.

Spanish rice: rice cooked with chicken stock, aromatic vegetables, and tomato.

Enchiladas: corn tortillas rolled around beef, chicken, or cheese, and topped with ranchero sauce, chile con carne, and/or cheese.

Chile con carne: literally chile with meat, a slow-cooked stew of specially ground beef, onions, garlic, tomatoes, chiles, chile powder, and corn masa for thickener (never any beans).

Carne guisado: hearty, slow-cooked stew of beef chunks cooked with onions, peppers, tomatoes, and chiles.

Picadillo: spicy ground beef with chunks of vegetable, such as potato or raisins and pecans.

Tamales: corn masa filled with seasoned beef or pork fillings wrapped in corn shucks.

Menudo: chunks of beef tripe and hominy cooked in a seasoned broth, widely acknowledged as a serious hangover cure.

Chorizo: spicy pork sausage.

Tacos: soft corn or flour tortillas wrapped around any filling.

Crispy tacos: deep-fried corn tortillas folded in an envelope or puffed up to hold fillings of groundbeef or cheese, dressed with lettuce and tomatoes.

Chalupas: deep-fried corn tortillas as a base for meats, beans, and/or guacamole, garnished with lettuce, tomatoes, and cheese.

Tostada chips: fried triangles of corn tortilla, served warm with table salsas.

Nachos: tostada chips covered with beans, cheese, and jalapeño chiles, or any number of other topping choices.

Burritos: flour tortilla envelopes filled with meat, beans, cheese, or other fillings.

Jalapeño and serrano peppers: dark green and elliptical chiles that flourish in Texas and are responsible for much of the heat in Tex-Mex cooking.

Chile con queso: literally chile with cheese; the definitive Tex-Mex version is melted yellow processed cheese combined with hot sauce, served as a dip with tostada chips.

Fajitas: marinated, grilled skirt steak, sliced and served with flour tortillas and condiments to make tacos; the word "fajita" refers to the specific cheap cut of beef used in this humble vaquero dish, but that that hasn't kept restaurants from adding chicken, pork, or shrimp "fajitas" to their menus to describe meat or seafood served sizzling from the grill with condiments such as cheese, guacamole, grilled onions, pico de gallo, and sour cream to make tacos.

Pico de gallo: literally "rooster's beak," a fresh vegetable relish of chopped onion, tomato, cilantro, and jalapeño or serrano peppers, used as a complement or garnish to many Tex-Mex dishes.

Ranchero sauce: a cooked tomato-based sauce with sautéed onions, garlic, cilantro, and peppers to top enchiladas and egg dishes.

Huevos rancheros: eggs any style bathed in ranchero sauce with a side of beans.

Migas: eggs scrambled with tortilla pieces, tomatoes, onions, peppers, and cheese.

Breakfast tacos: flour tortillas filled with eggs, potatoes, cheese, bacon, chorizo, etc.

Hot sauce: a fresh or cooked tomato-based sauce flavored with onions and peppers, plus secret ingredients that vary from restaurant to restaurant; served before the meal with tostada chips.

Guacamole: a dip served with tostada chips, made with mashed avocado, chopped onions, tomatoes, garlic, cilantro, and lime.

Rainbow sherbet: the traditional frosty ending to a Tex-Mex meal, although it began to disappear with the advent of the frozen margarita.

Pralines: sugary pecan candy historically sold at the check-out counter of Tex-Mex joints.

Flan: creamy baked egg custard with its own caramel sauce topping.

Sopapillas: deep-fried pillows of dough dusted with cinnamon sugar and served with honey; more common in West Texas.

For years, Austin has been justifiably famous for its long-established, friendly, family-run Mexican restaurants. Cisco's, Carmen's La Tapatia, Matt's El Rancho, and El Azteca dominated the near east side of I-35, with El Matamoros just across the highway, while the original Tamale House was the place for a quick take-out fix downtown, and El Patio ruled the north University of Texas campus area. Each restaurant had its own specialty dishes, many of them made from treasured family recipes developed here or brought from Mexico, but all offered some variation of the "#1 Combination Dinner." Scanning menus from those days, the most common elements of the ubiquitous #1 were small portions of guacamole salad and chile con queso, a crispy taco, beef or cheese enchiladas, refried beans, and rice, with rainbow sherbet or a praline for dessert. The traditional dishes were very popular, and menus that relied on renditions of the familiar combinations were the accepted norm for decades.

Years of Tex-Mex uniformity and domination began to change in the mid-Seventies. Partners Tom Gilliland and chef Miguel Ravago opened Fonda San Miguel, the first restaurant in Texas (and the rest of the United States, for that matter) with a menu dedicated to dishes from the interior of Mexico. The landmark restaurant forever changed the face of Mexican food in Austin. It introduced local diners to such interior delicacies as chicken rubbed with achiote paste and baked in banana leaves, and filets of red snapper in tomato sauce studded with olives and capers, Veracruz style. Gilliland, Ravago, and their initial menu consultant, the famed cookbook author Diana Kennedy, were sticklers for authenticity. They were determined to present the dishes they'd chosen just as they would in Puebla, Veracruz, or Mexico City, with fresh tortillas made in full view of the dining room.

Educating Austin's Anglo restaurant-going public to the pleasures of interior Mexican cuisine took time, however. Most of the Anglo patrons had never seen black beans or marinated nopales (cactus pads) and were unfamiliar with the ancho and chipotle peppers used to prepare the challenging Fonda menu. In fact, during the early years it was necessary to import fresh and dried peppers, tomatillos, achiote, Mexican chocolate, and a host of other ingredients in bulk directly from Mexico because they were not available through commercial food purveyors in the states. Moreover, meals at Fonda did not begin with chips and hot sauce, and the appetizer choices did not include nachos or chile con queso made with Velveeta and salsa. The most frequently asked question when diners opened the menu was, "Where's the #1 Combination Dinner?"

Business at the elegantly decorated restaurant with the newfangled menu was slow for the first couple of years, but it began to build steadily with enthusiastic word-of-mouth and great exposure from a hip statewide magazine. The restaurant reviewers of Texas Monthly magazine were unabashed in their admiration of Fonda San Miguel. Once Fonda begin to appear regularly in the magazine's monthly restaurant listings, curious diners from Austin and the rest of Texas started to show up at the restaurant with the magazine in hand. They'd point to the names of dishes such as the velvety sopa de elote or the achiote-flavored pollo pibil and say, "Bring me an order of this."

Gilliland and Ravago ultimately made a few small concessions to the scores of Tex-Mex-conditioned diners who flocked to Fonda in those early years. They added chips and hot sauce, and nachos -- but theirs were made with black beans (the first in the city), and their chile con queso was made with melted Monterey jack or Muenster cheese, sautéed onions, tomatoes, and peppers, and served with baskets of fresh, hot tortillas.

The impact of Tex-Mex on Fonda was minimal measured against the huge impact that Fonda had on Mexican food in Texas. Thanks to the pioneering efforts of Ravago and Gilliland, the food from Mexico's interior began to grow in popularity and spread to restaurants across Austin and the state, to the point that today many of the dishes and ingredients of interior cuisine are accepted as widely as their Tex-Mex counterparts. Listing all the basic elements of the richly diverse cuisine of interior Mexico would be prohibitive, but here are the most common items and how they differ from Tex-Mex:

Beans: great variety, including black turtle beans.

Rice: more varied flavors, from the familiar Spanish to verde (green from peppers and herbs), arroz blanco (white), lime cilantro, etc.

Pork and poultry: meats of choice for the states of central and southern Mexico (as opposed to the states that border the U.S., which are big on beef and lamb).

Corn tortillas: corn products used for tortillas, gorditas, chalupas, etc.; prominent in all but the northern border states.

Complex sauces: sauces that use indigenous ingredients such as vegetables, nuts, seeds, fruits, herbs, and chocolate to create layers of flavor; mole sauces are prime examples.

Cheeses: great variety, including queso blanco, cacique, asadero, añejo, and the Mennonite queso Chihuahua.

Tropical fruits and vegetables: great variety, including mangos, guavas, tamarind, jicama, and cactus.

Peppers: many capsicum annum varieties including fresh jalapeño, poblano, serrano, cayenne, and guero; dried ancho, chiptole, mulato, cascabel, guajillo, and pasilla.

Tomatillos: round green fruit in a sticky husk -- despite the name, technically not green tomatoes -- used as the basis for tangy green sauces flavored with garlic, onions, peppers, and cilantro.

Seafood: great variety, with each Mexican state that has a coastline having its own distinct seafood specialties.

Tamales: corn masa dough filled with various meats, beans, vegetables, fruits, and spices, or seafood wrapped in corn shucks, banana leaves, avocado leaves, etc.

Chile rellenos: usually roasted, peeled, and seeded poblano peppers filled with beef, pork, or cheese filling, dipped in light egg batter and fried.

Achiote: brick-red spice from the Yucatan used in pastes to add flavor and color to dishes.

Herbs: great variety, including coriander (or cilantro), epazote, oregano, marjoram, Mexican marigold mint, bay leaves.

Nuts and seeds: almonds, pumpkin seeds, and sesame seeds appear in various dishes.

Chocolate: indigenous to Mexico, used in both sweet and savory dishes.

The invasion of the more complex, sophisticated interior Mexican food at Fonda San Miguel proved a boon for Austin's established Mexican restaurants as well as for the new generations of Mexican eateries opened by more recent immigrants. The larger the market for interior ingredients grew, the more easily available they became. Now, most of the imported items once thought of as exotic are staples in all the city's grocery stores.

And it's now an interesting challenge to go from one Mexican restaurant to another and attempt to guess the owner's native region in Mexico by the interior dishes likely to be found across the page from the venerable #1 Combo.

Several years ago, we addressed the Tex-Mex/Interior split in the Chronicle's annual Restaurant Poll by creating two separate categories. More recently, we've noticed that some of the same restaurants show up in both lists, which seems to indicate that, at least locally, the lines between the two disciplines have become deliciously blurred. Fonda San Miguel, Manuel's, and Curra's always seem to top the interior list, while Chuy's, Güero's, and Trudy's consistently head the Tex-Mex column, but there is always some overlap. Who wouldn't be confused? At Güero's, nachos and fajitas appear on the same menu with tacos al pastor, a quintessential Mexico City street food. Las Manitas offers both Tex-Mex migas and huevos motuleños, Motul's answer to eggs Benedict, made with corn tortillas, black beans, poached eggs, ham, and ranchero sauce. Chuy's cooks Tex-Mex fare mingled with norteño specialties such as green chile salsa and stacked enchiladas common in New Mexico, while Botanitas serves queso dishes with chorizo and roasted poblano strips in the interior style right alongside the traditional yellow Tex-Mex chile con queso. Not to be outdone, Fonda San Miguel is exploring new interior culinary frontiers with the subtle, sophisticated nueva cocina stylings of Mexico City native chef Roberto Santibanez. And the Mexican restaurants here are so proud of their hot sauce (or sauces) that they'll enter a competition held outdoors in the hottest part of the summer just to show them off.

What all this really means to you -- whether you're a visiting SXSW participant, new high-tech transplant, or longtime denizen of Austin -- is that you can eat Mexican food here every day for weeks and still just sample a thimbleful of Austin's ocean of exceptional Mexican food, that you can eat a different hot sauce with every meal and still take home jars of other recipes you didn't get around to tasting. So your homework assignment is to get out there and start sampling the bounty around you. Buen Provecho!

-- Virginia B. Wood

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Salvation in a Glass: An Ode to the Frozen Margarita

illustration by Lisa Kirkpatrick

Embrace the heat.

I read that shred of feel-good advice years ago in an article called something like "Ten Ways to Be Less Cranky." It was instantly clear that whoever wrote it hadn't been to Texas, where you quickly learn that 100-degree heat is the enemy for a full third of the year, and that embracing it would get you little more than a seared torso. Battle it, endure it, or resign yourself to it, but don't welcome it. At least not out loud.

But over time, the idea has stuck with me. The coming of summer still makes me want to kick my feet and shriek, yet there are reasons that I look forward to it, and at the top of the list is a good margarita.

Texans love margaritas all year round, but we learn to love them when we're hot, so hot that it's hard to tell from one glance if we're crying or just sweating. Plenty of lime juice, a hint of orange, a brush of salt, and a dose of tequila, crushed together with ice. Ice as a tribute to better, cooler times. Enough ice to show Mother Nature, raging in full swelter, who's boss -- at least for the duration of the drink.

Obviously, the margarita was invented as a coping mechanism. In light of the blistering cloud of fire that stalls over our part of North America for months on end, someone had to invent a way to ingest lots of ice, a way that was less grating than chewing it. Because the temperature for at least half the year here is 97ºF, which is reputedly the temperature at which most murders are committed (it's hot enough to get very angry, but not hot enough to render someone non-violent), and because police records reveal a positive correlation between the chewing of ice and homicides, the invention of a slushy, delicious drink was the simplest way to keep the murder rate in check. But then arose the question: What else should be in it?

Well, electrolyte counts begin to wane when you sweat as much as we do in the summer -- i.e., all day, every day -- so it followed naturally that salt had to be a part of the drink, but just as a flavor accent. "I know, on the rim of the glass!"

Since a surefire way to cheer yourself up is to drink a controlled quantity of tequila (the liquor distilled from the core of the agave plant), that was the next part of the plan. Yes, alcohol dehydrates you. It also makes you hotter. But if you sit around drinking margaritas for long enough, the sun will almost certainly set. You may still have radiant heat to contend with, but you're no longer cooking by convection. Chances are good that you also no longer care quite like you used to.

Of course, then they needed something to mask the bite of the tequila. Fresh lime juice could do that nicely, as well as add a refreshing citrus tang. Plus, who wants to get scurvy in the middle of summer? A margarita is the next best thing to a vaccination. An orange-flavored liquor was added to further boost the level of Vitamin C and for its natural sweetening properties.

And voila! The margarita: Everything you need for your health, and antiseptic, too!

Since its creation, variations on the traditional margarita have evolved. There are margaritas on the rocks, margaritas made with strawberries, even margaritas sporting funky fresh flavors like mango and prickly pear. Certain establishments with limited liquor licenses even serve what is called a wine-a-rita. Then there are the avant-garde margaritas, usually lime-based but including specialty ingredients such as avocado or jalapeño. Most of the alternative 'ritas are worth at least a try, but beware the foamy, intensely green margaritas from a mix; they have a chalky taste and no sweet, sour, or salty notes to counter the tequila.

It's almost never too hot to sit outside and sip a marg. In fact, it's almost sacreligious to drink one inside if you have the choice. Shortly after we came to depend upon the curative powers of a margarita in summer, we fell in love with them. We began to drink them with our meals, especially Mexican meals, all year round. A margarita can make almost any day seem like a vacation day, and it finally gave us a reason to go outside in the heat of the summer.

Northerners have a similar ploy to contend with the weather that plagues them, and they call it skiing. They bundle up, then they exert, which makes them warmer. We of the opposite problem just strip down and relax, occasionally rubbing our frozen drinks across our sweaty brows and flushed cheeks.

It's safe to say that today, the frozen margarita is the national cocktail of Texas; it's the best way to ingest the ice, and really just about the only way to embrace the heat. -- Meredith Phillips

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Limey Lagers and Chip Chasers: A Few Words on Mexican Beer

illustration by Lisa Kirkpatrick

When it comes to a good Tex-Mex meal, there are a million variations based on a mix-and-match menu system. Start with the accepted building blocks -- enchiladas, tamales, guacamole salad, crispy tacos, etc. -- add rice and beans, or alternately use a catchy name (the Acapulco Platter, #2 Dinner). While the possibilities may not be endless, they're at least beyond the appetites of most mortals.

But the beverage situation in the same Tex-Mex joint is considerably easier to navigate. During weekdays or heavy lunch excursions, there's iced tea garnished with a thick wedge of lime. During the blast furnace summertime, there's the bubble-bowled refuge of the frozen margarita. But for dedicated beer drinkers and victims of freshman-year tequila binges, there's always the fizzy, quenching world of cerveza Mexicana. From a gringo customer's standpoint, Mexican beers are the perfect combination of the familiar and the exotic.

By and large, most Mexican beers offered in Tex-Mex restaurants are highly carbonated pilsners similar to mass-market American macro-lagers like Schlitz and Heileman's Old Style. In a blind tasting, most drinkers would note only subtle differences in dryness or flavor between Corona and Schaefer (both corn-heavy brews) or Dos Equis Lager and most Miller products. Most lagers in the group emulate their counterparts to the North, easy-drinking and the perfect foil for the crunch, burn, and weight of a Friday night Tex-Mex feast. Mexican beers like Carta Blanca, Sol, and the now-omnipresent Corona twins (regular "Extra" and its way watery "Light" version) give Budweiser aficionados an excuse to expand their menu Spanish without going too far afield taste-wise. Add the theatrical trappings of the traditional mezcal routine (slice of lime, lick of salt), and a bottled cerveza becomes an exotic alternative to everyday draft.

Brew jockeys searching the beer list for more flavorful options benefit, as always, from Teutonicingenuity and perseverance. Owing to a historical fluke of Hapsburg history, Mexico spent four years under Austro-German emperor Maximilian, who apparently never traveled without his brewing buddies. As a direct result or possible coincidence, two of the more popular brands of Mexican beer -- Negra Modelo and Dos Equis -- come from the darker, more malty subset of German lagers known as Vienna style. While not as weighty as most British ales, the Mexican Viennas are fuller bodied with more malt sweetness and character than the pale pilsners. Analytical quaffers have often referred to Negra Modelo as having "hints of chocolate on the palate," which ostensibly makes it a perfect match for mole. You make the call.

But whether you chase your chips with a lime-choked longneck or a stateside schooner of Shiner, you'll marvel at the ideal combination of barley and beef, of hops and jalepeños. Sip for the long haul or gulp 'em with gusto. Just remember the magic words when you're close to running dry: "Una más, por favor." --Pableaux Johnson

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To Boldly Go Where No Wine Has Gone Before: Pairing Wine With Mexican Food

illustration by Lisa Kirkpatrick

A smack of salt, a shooter of good-quality tequila, and a lick of lime -- that's my favorite way to start off a Mexican meal. It seems that tequila, margaritas, and their amigo beer are the perfect accompaniments to any style of Mexican food. However, to my recent surprise, wine with Mexican food can be fabulous, too.

On a Sunday afternoon, I sat at the bar at Fonda San Miguel with chef Roberto Santibanez and owner Tom Gilliland and discussed the mostly unexplored world of pairing wine with Mexican food. Santibanez, an imminently charming Cordon Bleu-trained chef hailing from Mexico City, told me that although wines made in Mexico won competitions on an international level as early as the 16th century, they were never really paired with Mexican food. Instead, they were served mostly at the tables of the noble class, mostly people with an affection for Spanish and other European fare. Typical Mexican citizens drank pulque and tepache, fermented beverages made from the maguey plant and pineapple, respectively. Later, beer partially succeeded these traditional beverages, but wine never really penetrated the Mexican culture and was never customarily drunk at the Mexican dinner table.

How has this changed? It hasn't, really. Almost none of the major international wine press even mentions Mexican food in connection with wine. This, I've found, is a mistake, and people like Gilliland at Fonda have spent almost 30 years trying to rectify that mistake.

Five years ago, Gilliland's quest became more public when he and John Roenigk from the Austin Wine Merchant gave a seminar at the Hill Country Wine and Food Festival on the merits of drinking wine with Mexican fare. Gilliland then took the fight back to Fonda, installing a $12,000 wine preservation system that allows for wine-by-the-glass service and gives greater visibility to the wines in the restaurant. He also lowered wine prices to further entice customers to enjoy wine with dinner. The results are good, but Gilliland still hopes for a more widespread acceptance and excitement about pulling the cork for a Mexican meal.

So what wine does go well with Mexican food? The consensus is that champagne and other sparkling wines match almost any Mexican dish -- Tex-Mex or interior -- the idea being that sparklers have high acidity, and the bubbles help bring a freshness that cleanses your palate. Dan Fitzgerald at the Austin Wine Merchant explains that high acidity is crucial to Mexican food and that sparklers typically have the necessary tartness. He added that, like carbonation in beer, the "scrubbing bubbles" help to refresh your palate after a spicy bite. Fitzgerald also suggests German Rieslings because of their high acidity and full body, and made the insightful point that cilantro-based dishes "scream" for Sancerre, a crisp, minerally Loire Valley wine made from the Sauvignon Blanc grape.

I explored some pairings to see for myself. Some wines tasted hot, or alcoholic, when paired with spicy dishes, but many with lower alcohol (below 13%) matched terrifically. Marqués de Cáceres Rioja, for instance, was delicious with Fonda's mildly spicy CochinitaPibil (pork baked with achiote) and their Pollo en Pipian Rojo (chicken in a sauce made of pumpkin seeds and guajillo chiles). A crisp, fruity Macon-Lugny Les Charmes Chardonnay also paid considerable compliment to the pork. At home, I greatly enjoyed an inexpensive Spanish Cava by Paul Cheneau with Enchiladas Suizas (enchiladas with tangy, jalapeño-accented tomatillo sauce and cream) and suspect, as everyone suggested, that sparkling wine is the wonder wine when it comes to pairing with spicy Mexican food.

But you shouldn't take my word for it -- or anyone else's, for that matter. Go out and create your own matches, or stay in and explore the pairing possibilities at home. These are uncharted waters. -- Anthony King