Chuzos y Salsa

Latin American Street Food

We have developed quite a few holiday traditions -- including Christmas lasagna. The friends with whom we have enjoyed vegetarian lasagnas the past few years have moved away, so I asked Pamela whether she might want to make a lasagna -- something she is good at and enjoys when she has a day free to do it. She had already been thinking of doing that when our son and daughter-in-law visit just after the holidays -- a splendid idea for a dish that feeds far more than the two of us.

So I went into full Nueva Receta mode, and started browsing through our cookbook shelves. I stopped at Latin American Street Food by Sandra A. Gutierrez, remembering that the last time I looked at it, I decided that the dishes that looked most appealing also looked too complicated for that day, so I had reshelved it. 

The geography lessons keep coming: all workers should be respected, in part because no job is as easy as it seems from a distance. This is particularly true of a lot of work involving food, and especially in the informal sector. We think of street food as easy because it is made to be easy for the customer; it should not be surprising that this often means it is a bit complicated for those who make and serve it.

But this was to be for our main Christmas meal -- in a house with no kids -- so there would be time for something good from this volume. Because we had recently purchased some local stew beef, I quickly settled on the recipe for Chuzos de Carne -- beef kabobs in beer marinade. This recipe from Colombia called for soaking a pound (or so) of beef cubes overnight in a mixture of one cup (or so) of dark beer, mixed with the following:

• a quartered lemon
• 1/3 cup olive oil
• 1 small white onion, roughly chopped
• 2 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
• 2 bay leaves
• 1-2 tsp cumin
• 1/2 tsp thyme
• salt and ground black pepper

Because I was preparing this at night and would be cooking it at the other house, I sealed all of this tightly in a large mason jar. A non-reactive bowl would have worked as well.

Gutierrez recommend serving this with a Colombian hot sauce, but she also mentions that she sometimes makes this in a much larger batch and serves it with several different sauces; she says any sauce in the book would do, so I thumbed through the volume until I found a Peruvian Spice Onion Salsa, which she also calls Salsa Criolla. 

For this I thinly sliced a red (aka purple) onion very thinly on the bias (Pamela looked that up for me -- it just means at an angle) and covered it with cold water. After 20 minutes, I drained it an mixed it with:

• 1 small pepper (see below)
• juice of one lime
• 1 splash of red wine vinegar 
• salt and ground black pepper
• 1 glug of olive oil

As you can see, I don't consider such niceties as teaspoons and tablespoons important in the making of salsa. For those who care, Gutierrez did mention a tsp of the vinegar and 2T of the oil. I let all of these ingredients meld for a couple of hours and added a handful of freshly chopped cilantro just before serving.

As for the pepper, the author first learned about this salsa from fish carts in Lima, so it calls for a Peruvian pepper known as aji amarillo. I correctly guessed that even our big local grocery would not have this, so I looked up possible substitutions. On the heat-flavor-availability trade-off matrix, I decided habañero -- used judiciously -- was my best bet. I had to buy a whole little tray of them and a little goes a long way, so I'll be using it in other things as much as I can! 

To put this meal together, I began by draining the beef in a colander and discarding the rest of the marinade. I did not pat the beef dry. I had intended to cook this on skewers -- as the name kabob implies -- but the weather was frightful, so I availed of the other alternative Gutierrez provides: stir-frying over medium-high heat in an indispensable cast-iron skillet. This added to the wonderful aromas that were already filling the house from the preparation of the salsa and the mere opening of the jar of marinade. 

I served this with the Mendoza Malbec Agua de Piedra (among my very favorite Malbecs), some oven-roasted potatoes, and mushrooms I had prepared in a reduction of port. We topped the beef generously with the salsa. 

The result was a fabulous mixture of flavors and textures -- worthy of a feast day for two. A friend who saw this photo online joked that he could smell it from miles away, and I think this was barely hyperbole. Walking into the house hours after the meal, the aromas were still satisfying.

Lagniappe 

We have been reading a bit about the concept of recipe jump buttons, which some cooking bloggers are providing and some recipe seekers are demanding. Those will not be appearing here for a few reasons.

The most important of these is that we consider food a vehicle of culture -- along with language, religion, and music. Abstracted too extremely, the "how" of cooking misses the point of the "why" and we are big fans of both.

Also important is that we are writing about cooking in part to encourage those who are not yet confident cooks to take some chances with something more challenging. We also sometimes alert experienced cooks to possible pitfalls in the original recipe we are using. Finally, we often innovate -- especially if we are do not have a particular ingredient on hand. Providing the whole story of a meal gives readers a chance to consider alternatives we have mentioned, or to understand the meal better so that they can make adjustments of their own. 

In the case of these recipes, I can confess that I did my own visual jump to the ingredients list and then to the instructions -- always do this at least a day ahead of time if possible. I then took the time to read the stories of the chuzo and the salsa while they were melding and marinating -- I highly recommend the book just for these stories!

We also were thinking of this in terms of a recent homage to Fannie Farmer, a Bostonian and fellow Unitarian. She is famous for introducing standard measurements that democratized home cooking and certainly has made this entire Nueva Receta project possible. At the same time, we wonder, did she make cooking seem like something a bit too, well, cookbook?

And finally, speaking of stories, we think there are some good ones around our first and second uses of Street Food. They are Calle to Mesa (2014) and Quesadillas de Rajas (2017).