Oaxacan · Main
Tlayuda con Asiento y Tasajo
- Intermediate
- 35 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with char used as punctuation, wood-smoke running underneath, with a clean, bright snap.
Ingredients
- 4 tlayudas, 30 cm dried nixtamal tortillas
- 60 g asiento, the unrefined lard from the bottom of the rendering pot
- 400 g cooked frijoles negros, with a little of their liquor
- 3 dried hoja de aguacate
- 300 g quesillo, pulled into threads
- 400 g tasajo, beef leg cut in a 4 mm sheet and salted
- 150 g cabbage, shredded fine
- 200 g tomatoes, sliced
- 1 avocado, sliced
- 60 g white onion, sliced thin
- 150 g salsa de chile pasilla oaxaqueño
- 1 lime, in wedges
- fine salt
Equipment
Grill
The skills inside
Tortillas on the comalGrilling over live coals
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Toast the avocado leaves on the comal until brittle and smelling of aniseed, crumble them into the beans, and fry the beans down in 20 g of the asiento for 8 minutes to a paste stiff enough to hold a line. 8 min
- Grill the tasajo over hot charcoal: cut that thin it takes 40 seconds a side and is ruined at 90, so pull it while the centre is still juicy, then chop it coarse.
- Warm a tlayuda on the comal until it turns pliable, smear asiento right to the rim, spread the beans and scatter the quesillo.
- Fold it over, lay it on the grill well back from the flame and turn it every 30 seconds for 3-4 minutes, until it is rigid, blistered and cracks under a press of the thumb, and the cheese pulls in threads. 4 min
- Open it up, load in the cabbage, tomato, avocado, onion and tasajo, and eat with salsa and lime while the base is still crisp.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Tortillas on the comal 27 recipes
- It puffs. On the second turn the tortilla lifts into a dome as the trapped water flashes to steam and splits the two faces apart; a tortilla that never puffs was pressed too thick, cooked too cool, or turned too often.
- Freckled, not blackened: small brown spots across a pale field. An evenly browned tortilla has been on too long and will be a cracker by the time it reaches the table.
- It folds without cracking while warm, and still folds after five minutes under a cloth. A tortilla that splits along the fold has lost too much water on the comal.
- The edges are unbroken and roughly round, with no ragged fringe: a fringed edge means the masa was too dry when it was pressed, and no amount of heat will fix it afterwards.
- It smells of toasted corn rather than of scorch or of raw lime. Raw lime means the nixtamal was under-rinsed; scorch means the comal was above the working heat.
Where it goes wrong The masa was too dry or the comal too cool. A dry masa cracks at the edge on pressing and cannot generate the steam that puffs it; a cool comal dries the tortilla through before the water can flash, so it leaves the heat stiff, pale and already stale.
Grilling over live coals 77 recipes
- The fire was ready before the food was: coals evenly covered in grey ash with no flames licking through and no raw smoke coming off, and a hot zone and a cooler one both available.
- The grate was hot and clean when the food landed, and the food released cleanly from it when the time came to turn rather than tearing away.
- Marks are browned, not burnt: deep colour where the metal touched, with no carbon flaking off and no soot transferred onto the food.
- The interior reaches its target with a thin gradient, not charred outside and cold within, and not driven through by a flare-up.
- What comes off the fire smells of fire and food only: no raw wood smoke, no fuel, nothing acrid at the back of the nose.
Where it goes wrong It went on over live flames instead of settled coals, so the outside charred bitter in the flare-ups while the middle stayed cold, and everything on the plate tastes of soot.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Zinfandel (old-vine)
- Also Right
- Shiraz or Malbec
- From the Taps
- Smoked porter
- Zero-Proof
- Cherry cola, honestly
Barbecue’s sweet-smoke wants jammy fruit that shakes hands with the sauce; dry austere reds argue with sugar and lose.
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