Oaxacan cuisine

All this talk about a lack of seed diversity and crop failure may feel like heady ideas that are hard to imagine.

But think about a dish that you really loved from your last vacation, the unique flavors born out of local produce, the earthy taste of blue corn tortillas made from Oaxacan heirloom maize, the spongy sour flavor of injera, cultivated in the microclimates of Ethiopia and Eritrea, sweet San Marzano tomatoes, grown in the volcanic soil near Naples, a unique flavor of true Neapolitan pizza sauce, or glass gem corn developed from the nearly extinct varieties from First Nation tribes.

They come in nearly every color of the rainbow and make for a pretty vibrant bowl of popcorn.

Every one of these flavors started with a seed.

Yeah, so tlayuda is like a

Oaxacan sort of pizza.

It's often called like a big tortilla topped with all these things.

And this was topped with, I think it was a beef tartare.

And was it edamame also? And there was chapulines, which are the fried grasshoppers that are popular as a Oaxacan snack.

But it did not look anything like the traditional Oaxacan tlayudas I'd had before.

This was pretty deconstructed and reconstructed.

Yeah.

So if you haven't been to Distrito 14 for Jonathan's food, go.

And then we went to Casa Gishpak because Oaxacan food always has good vegetarian dishes and options.

So we went to those places.

It wasn't really a taco crawl, per se, although we did have tacos at a couple places.

Okay.

We gotta, we gotta fix this because I should be able to go to, I should be able to go to any Mexican restaurant and get a caldo de pollo that tastes, you know, that tastes like a homemade soup.

Why? Um, for those of you that want that, you can go to, to Oaxacan restaurants in LA where there's, uh, casagishback or, or like, what's it called, Sabores Oaxaqueños, restaurants like this, you're going to find a good chicken or beef soup.

Whatever soups they're doing are going to be good.

We were eating- This is a- We would eat white beans refried with flour tortilla, but we never had a chance to eat those, bro.

But this is a Oaxacan thing.

no it's right

in mexico oh i didn't eat that i did not eat those big ass ones like the small ones

But we heard from a listener who wrote in and said, we talked about Kiki Ba out on 82nd, which is one of the restaurants that made the list.

And they wrote in and let us know Kiki Ba isn't Oaxacan cuisine.

As Claudia had mentioned, it's actually Yucatecan, presumably from the Yucatan Peninsula.

Which, to be fair, is only a short one to two hour flight from Oaxaca, but their cuisine is notably different.

first person to write about Ponchos Layudas.

I wrote it for our first Oaxacan guy we did for Eater.

I wrote about it.

And so, yes.

from the 32 regions is a cuisine that comes from indigenous people.

And I'm like, we're not doing a list if we don't have an indigenous cook on there.

And of course, you know, there's the majority of indigenous chefs that are cooking Mexican food in the United States are cooking Oaxacan food.

And of course, the majority of those are in Los Angeles.

No, it was just so busy and so alive.

Everybody in the kitchen was either Japanese or from Oaxaca.

And so there was all sorts of language barriers because Oaxacans don't, they speak Spanish, but most of the time they speak their native dialect, which is called Zapoteco.

And so I speak fluent Spanish, but I was lost.

I'm like, what are these guys