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Blended ice in my margaritas please. Thanks.
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this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2026
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Oh damn do I have the obscure culture infodump for you!
Something that doesn't come up when you look into Mexican cuisine is the vast amount of what could be considered poverty foods used throughout Mexico. The one I'm most obsessed with is carne de soya, or soy meat. It's literally dryed, crumbled tofu, but the process turns it into an absolute sponge for flavor with identical texture to ground beef and none of that extra tofu water to deal with. Just mix your spices into a slurry with some water or light beer, and either oil or bacon fat, then pan fry it with onion and add a diced tomato right before it's done, it's heavenly.
I'll hit up my mother in law for her spice mix and enchilada recipe for you, til then how do you do your beans and have you done tamales?
oh fuck yeah tamales. the thing people around here fuck up about tamales is they make them too large. you end up getting a shitton of mushy nixtamal and hardly any good filling.
Yeah, that's how it is here too. I lucked out, the spouse and fam make them tight and fat, so you wanna eat like 6 of them, but damn are they perfect! My mil has been making dessert tamales, she fills them with a mix of quesa fresca and shredded pineapple, then puts pineapple juice, cinnamon and vanilla in the masa
we have a great tamale guy here too (unfortunately he is famous and naming him would narrow down my location to like, three streets) and he makes them right, but like outside of him and family i have not been able to find good tamales.
If you haven't hit him up for recipes, you totally should. Then send them my way.
Oh damn, that sounds heavenly 🤤 Usually I'll just use canned black beans with onions and spices, but my dad lets his bagged beans soak overnight for refried beans. I'd love to try making tamales sometime, but it's pretty much impossible to get corn husks over here unless you're friends with a farmer. Thanks for the suggestions and I'm looking forward to more recipes! :D
Also, while corn husk is the popular version, there's a lot of regional variation to it. Look into asian, Indian, or other specialty groceries in your area and see if you can find banana leaf. They're the go to for the more tropical areas and are a bit easier to use than corn because you can cut them into exact shapes.
Prior to meeting my spouse, I'd done a ton of work trying to make good refried beans, there's a taste they have at the family run Mexican restaurants that I've never been able to mirror. Here's the trick.
Seperated your beans and juice, keep both. In a shallow pan, heat more oil than you think you need. Here's the key part, crush two good sized, dry chili peppers and 3 cloves of fresh garlic and put them in the hot oil. Let them fry until they're dark, like maybe a minute more than burnt. Add the beans to the oil, cook them until most of them split. Mash them with a potato masher as you mix the juice into the pan. Stir until smooth, add a touch more garlic and salt, and cook until it gets to your desired thickness. Most places around here serve it thin like a sauce, I actually prefer it thick like a paste, about as thick as humus.
As for prepping from dry, after you soak them, add them to a pot with 1 dry pepper, 1 onion halved, a fist full of beef or pork bones, oil, and enough water to cover everything by like 3cm. As a vegetarian, instead of the bones, take 3 or 4 shitaki mushrooms, rough choped, dry pan them until they're about to burn, then put that in the beans. Simmer for 2 hours - 6 hours. Adjust salt before serving.
The two biggest take always are the nearly burnt part and seasoning the oil. That nearly burnt part imparts a far more complex flavor and brings smokey notes that I've never been able to pull off without woodsmoke. Seasoning the oil and cooking it like that is basically making a light chili oil, if you've ever had it at a pho or ramen shop you already know how much a good chili oil can add to a dish, so imagine replacing plain vegetable oil with a lighter version of that.
These are some great tips! I'll try it out this week sometime. Thank you!