Since this is a blog about dining in IV, I feel like I should make up for our last post, which revolved around a night spent eating in San Diego. Although I maintain that, during the summer months, jumping over to San Diego for the night is part of life in IV, but, you know, whatever.
Writing about local dishes is a little tough. Our corner of the desert has only been inhabited for 100 years or so, and that doesn't seem to have been enough time for distinctly local dishes to develop. As far as I can tell, the only truly local quirk is found in Brawley, where people will absolutely not take their drinks without crushed iced. Not cubes or cubelets. Crushed ice. I've had customers expand successful restaurants to Brawley only to call me in full panic mode a few months later. People openly tell them they're not coming back to their restaurant, "because you didn't have crushed ice for our drinks." (Just so you know, an ice machine that produces "crushed" ice is considerably more expensive to buy, repair and maintain than a standard ice machine. I have never told a customer outside of Brawley, "We should definitely go for a flaker or nugget -- aka 'crushed ice' -- unit. That makes the most sense." The only reasons to have one of those ice machines are: 1) your restaurant is extremely constrained by space or 2) you pack fish. Other than that, it's a bad choice all around.) So that's all we've got in IV. Crushed ice freaks in Brawley.
The next place to look to for local dishes is across the border, perhaps not specifically to Mexicali, our sister city, but the Northern regions of Baja and Mexico. Even so, it's a little tough. Friends who hail from Mexico's Central region have always told me that people from El Norte are clowned for their lack of culinary creativity and prowess. Ustedes no mas saben asar carne, "All you guys do up there is grill meat." It turns out there may be good reason for that. In reading the 20th Anniversary Edition of Rick Bayless' classic Authentic Mexican, Regional Cooking from the Heart of Mexico I learned that when the Spanish introduced cattle to Mexico, they did especially well in Mexico's North, which Bayless, not coincidentally, has found to be the only region in Mexico with truly skilled butchers. This is true. Mexican ex-pats here (if you can call them that) are always ranting and raving about how great Mexicali's cuts of meat are. I have a friend who spent years working as a butcher in Mexico, and to this day he still buys whole chickens, game hens and what not. The reason? He once told me, "When I cook for people, they always love the texture of the meat. They ask, 'What do you do to get the meat that way?' [Chuckling] The truth is I have to cut the meat myself! I go to the stores here [in IV], and I can see butchers really beat the hell out of their meat while they're cutting it. It looks terrible. I ask myself, 'How can people eat this stuff?'"
But Bayless, who was an anthropologist studying Mexico before he became America's most celebrated Chef of Mexican cuisine (the man clearly has deep love and knowledge of the Mexican kitchen and its history, but especially after bringing respect and recognition to Mexican cuisine in the States by winning Top Chef Masters, he's Mexican as far as I'm concerned), notes that the abundance of cattle in El Norte led to another culinary development, one that is well known in IV, kind of. In order to not waste any meat, people in Northern Mexico would dry it, resulting in what Bayless appropriately calls "jerky," but this dried meat is used for a dish we all call machaca. That's right. Machaca is not beef that has been boiled, shredded and then sautéed with onions and bell peppers. I don't think I have ever had machaca in a restaurant in IV. I've ordered it. Many times. Never had it.
So here's the recipe Bayless took from a woman in Baja California. I haven't tried it myself yet, but it sounds pretty simple.
You start by taking a 1.5 pound piece of solid meat, such as eye of round, round or tri tip. You cut the ends off that piece of meat and proceed to slice 1/8 inch off the top, stopping just a hair short of slicing all the way through. Then you rotate the meat and do the same, slicing 1/8 inch below where you just cut the meat (a total of 1/4 inch from the top of the meat), again stopping just short of cutting all the way through. You do the same until you've reached the bottom, and in doing so will have turned that solid piece of meat into a long flap of meat that's 1/8 inch thick. Having trouble visualizing? Here's a video of the technique (note: the demonstration is for a much thicker flap than you would want for machaca and after about two minutes the video moves on to a different method). Once you've got your meat ready, rub it with a mix of 1 tablespoon of lime juice and 1.5 teaspoons each of salt and dried oregano. You can use a 1.5 teaspoon serving of any dry herb you want here, I'm sure. Thyme, rosemary or marjoram -- go nuts. ("We resemble, but are legally distinct from the Lollipop Guild. The Lollipop Guild." Futurama? Anyone? No?)
Once you've got the rub evenly on your meat you can bring it back together (i.e. close the accordion) and let it sit for a half hour. After that, you extend the meat again and hang it in a cool dry place. Or if you want to keep it real, do what my boy Chino told me his aunts would do, let the meat hang in the sun and bring it in only at night. If you want it partially dried and plan to use all the meat immediately, you can let it hang for one to four days. If you would like to keep it around for several months you should let it hang for about a week, then wrap it loosely and store it in a dry place.
And there you go! Now you have dried beef ready to go for whenever you want to have actual machaca. In a few weeks, once the weather cools a bit more and I have more free time, I'll post some pics of this process. Can't wait!
