Authentic Mexican food can be difficult to find in Australia and is often mistaken for TexMex, a Texan interpretation of the cuisine.
According to the food crowd, Mexican in the new emerging flavour in Australia but so far there are few restaurants getting anywhere near the freshness of authentic Mexico cuisine and escaping the clichéd tortilla smothered in stodgy, cheesy sauce.
The winner of the UK version of Masterchef in 2005, Thomasina “Tommi” Miers, opened Wahaca restaurant in response to what she felt was a lack of authentic Mexican cuisine in the UK.
Mexican food is steeped in the culture of its people, but it isn’t about pomp and ceremony. Rather, says Tommi, “It’s simple street food, it’s unpretentious, it’s fun, it’s affordable.”
At the age of 18, food didn’t interest Tommi. But travelling to Mexico did. It was there that she escaped the grey skies of England and her dull job.
“It [Mexico] was bright and it was colourful and it smelt good,” she says. She travelled around the food markets and discovered a nation of people who love to eat almost as much as they love to cook. And eating well meant eating street food.
“It’s nothing to do with how much money you’ve got, it’s an incredible produce driven country – avocados, tomatoes, chillis, squash, vanilla, chocolate – it’s given us so much stuff.”
As one of the world’s most biodiverse countries, the markets are brimming with ingredients that most home cooks and even experienced Mexican chefs have never heard of. “I mean there are tomatoes of every shape and size,” she says. “It leaves Italy absolutely standing. And it’s incredibly diverse and incredibly regional.”
Even the humble tortilla, the base for many Mexican dishes, is a world apart from the vacuum-sealed variety found in most food stores.
The secret she says is to make them yourself and to use oil, something left out of many recipes. “You can either use olive oil or you can whip up a bit of lard until really creamy with corn flour and water.”
But, she says, flour isn’t the best ingredient to make the tortillas with: “If you are wanting the sourdough bread of corn tortillas you want dried corn, cook it overnight with lime scale,” she recommends.
“It’s a lot of work, but I get someone else to help importing the corn, grinding it and making the dough.”
Her restaurant’s most popular dish, which costs under $10, is pork pibil, a dish from Yucatan region. The shoulder of the pork is slow cooked after being marinated in Achiote, Mexican oregano and home made vinegar for days. It is served in a soft corn tortilla, with pink pickled onions marinated in fresh lime, fresh orange juice and habanera chillis.
Tommi’s political stance is that you should be in touch with the food you eat, even if it means shooting a squirrel, slaughtering a pig or catching a fish. “I don’t mean everyone should feel the need to kill everything that they eat but definitely for me being in touch with the kind of food that I cook is really important,” she says. “And to know where food comes from is very important, particularly the older I get … I love meat, I just love nothing more than a nice belly of pork roasted up. You know really, really good food. But where has that animal come from? What sort of life has it led. You know it’s quite good to be in touch with death and be physically connected with it.”
She says Mexicans eat all sorts dishes that are considered extreme in Europe and Australia. For instance, insects are popular’ as are escamoles (ant eggs), which, when in season, are considered to be as good as caviar. “They are really delicious.”