Mesoamerica · Volume 01, The Highland Mole and Maize World

Tlacoyos

Name: Tlacoyos
Total time: 45 min
Cuisine: Valley of Mexico, Puebla and Oaxaca
Ingredients: 500g, nixtamalized corn flour masa; 2 cups cooked beans, with ¼ onion and 1 garlic clove beans, mashed; 150g dried, soaked overnight favas, mashed; 300g, with ¼ onion, 2 tbsp epazote and 1 chile serrano requesón; to taste nopal, to serve; to taste salsa, to serve; to taste onion, to serve; to taste queso fresco or crema, to serve

Puebla, Tlaxcala and the Valley of Mexico

Tlacoyos, a stuffed oval masa cake with beans and nopal: a thick, oval, hand shaped blue-flecked corn masa cake, split slightly open along its ridge to reveal a dark bean filling.

Illustration

Time: 45 minutes

Researched: Researched from 103 sources in the brief

by Puebla, Tlaxcala and the Valley of Mexico

The richest single account of the pre-conquest Valley of Mexico's food economy is Bernal Díaz del Castillo's description of the Tlatelolco market, adjoining Tenochtitlan, which he says overwhelmed the Spanish on first sight: "Cuando llegamos a la gran plaza que se dice de Tlatelulco, como no habíamos visto tal cosa, quedamos admirados de la multitud de gente y mercadería que en ella había." Díaz records maize and cacao atole, roasted and boiled fish, tortillas, tamales of every filling, tlacoyos, and ahuauhtli, small cakes made from an insect-egg foam skimmed off the lake surface, which he says tasted rather like cheese. It is worth sitting with that image for a moment: a market so large and so various that a conquistador who had seen Seville reached for the only comparison he had, and found it wanting.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Tlacoyos

Pre-Hispanic, part of the Mexica diet . Serves 4 . 45 minutes

Ingredients

500g, nixtamalized corn flour masa
2 cups cooked beans, with ¼ onion and 1 garlic clove beans, mashed
150g dried, soaked overnight favas, mashed
300g, with ¼ onion, 2 tbsp epazote and 1 chile serrano requesón
to taste nopal, to serve
to taste salsa, to serve
to taste onion, to serve
to taste queso fresco or crema, to serve

Method

Hand-shape the masa into a thick, oval cake, stuffed with mashed beans, favas or requesón.
Cook on a dry comal until the exterior blisters and the filling warms through.
Top with nopal, salsa, onion and queso fresco or crema.

What a modern chef changes

From-scratch nixtamal, confit filling, live-fire comal

Method

Nixtamalize the maize specifically for this dish rather than relying on shop-bought masa harina, since a tlacoyo's thicker, hand-formed shape carries more of the raw dough's own flavour per mouthful than a thin tortilla does.
Confit the bean filling gently in lard at a low, held temperature rather than the usual quick fry, for a smoother, less grainy paste.
Finish on a Big Green Egg's comal-equivalent hot zone for the same even, dry, high heat a wood-fired comal gives, rather than a domestic frying pan's more moderate, wetter heat.

Open in the atlas: cook mode, scaling and tick off lists