In This Installment
Annatto Cooking Sauce from Mexico
We’ve been working with the fine folks of La Fundidora for years (we feature their salsa in our gift baskets and you’ll be enjoying a different salsa in this installment). Though stationed in Brooklyn, everything is made in Mexico and shipped up fresh. Their cooking sauces have been on my “go-to” list for a couple of years when I want a superflavorful and easy to construct dinner. If you’re like me, you have a full life during the day and when everyone shows up demanding dinner, it can be a little stressful—especially when you’re tired yourself! That’s where these sauces come in to play.
Annatto—also known as the seed of the achiote tree—is often used as a natural food coloring, imparting an orange/red hue when mixed in. We carry a few cheeses that are dyed with annatto to give it an orange color like Red Leicester. But the seed itself has flavor and aroma (a little spicy like pepper, yet a little nutty, too) has been part of Mexican cuisine since the first peoples.
The sauce itself is bright and fresh tasting with hints of pepper in the finish, herbs, and garlic. It’s spiked with a bit of orange juice for that citric zip. The best/easiest way to use the sauce is to cook a protein like fish, chicken, or even pork for this sauce (they’re more traditional than beef) till its about done in a pan. Then during the heat to low, dump in the contents of the jar to cover the protein, then simmer for 10-15 minutes. The flavors of the sauce will be pulled into the dish and you’ll enjoy flavors that usually take 12 hours to produce (if you were to make it from scratch, that is).
Fuego Salsa from Mexico
As you can see, the salsa and the sauce are both from Brooklyn based/Mexico Importing, La Fundidora. They became our go-to salsa nearly ten years ago and we still haven’t found a more flavorful salsa for our gift boxes and baskets so it’s still number one!
But we’ve never featured this salsa before because it might be too much for the layman…but seekers of flavor will be pleased. Made from ripe red tomato, tomatillo, white onion, árbol chile, guajillo chile, fresh garlic, sea salt, this salsa has an earthy, prickly yet sweet type of salsa that I keep coming back to again and again. This is the type of salsa I’ve gotten to enjoy when I’ve traveled through Mexico, so there’s a big nostalgia factor going on for me. But there’s something more…
For one thing: we’re heading into the season of entertaining so I’m sure having a jar of salsa (and chips, also included) could save the day when guests show up unexpectedly or in greater numbers than you forecasted.
Secondly: the weather is getting cool and we’re all starting to hibernate in our way (lots of sweatshirts going on in my house). Tasting foods that make you think of warmer times and warmer climates can lift our mood when the sun chooses to hide its face and summer time is far, far away. So I hope these flavors brighten your day as much as they brighten your palate.
Tortilla Chips from Ann Arbor (but also sort of from Mexico)
You can’t make great cheese without great milk, great salami without great pork, and you can’t make great tortilla chips without first making great tortillas. That’s just how it goes.
The funny thing is Lupe Quetglas didn’t set out to make great tortilla chips when she opened Ann Arbor Tortilla Factory with her family back in 2007, she just wanted to make great tortillas.
Lupe has spent the majority of her life in Michigan, but her early years were spent in El Salvador. The civil war of the Eighties forced her to immigrate to the US on a student visa. She came to study, fell in love, started a family and put down her roots in southeastern Michigan, but the flavors of her native land never left her mind.
“She started the company, in a way, because my mom couldn’t find the foods she wanted in the stores where we lived.” Her son Francisco, explained. A young man in his late twenties, he runs the factory and manages the nine member crew. “She didn’t like the tortillas around here so she decided to make her own and she figured there were other people like her that would want them, too.” Francisco searches for the right words. “But that didn’t really turn out to be the case.”
They decided to make Mexican-style tortillas, which were slightly larger than the ones Lupe grew up eating in El Salvador. They traveled around Mexico, visiting tortilla factories to see how they were made and what equipment they used. “It’s crazy because a lot of those factories are still using the same machines they installed back in the 50s.” Francisco said. “So my mom bought the same ones. They make great tortillas.”
Unfortunately, sales of the rustic, thick, tasty (and perishable) tortillas didn’t take off as planned. “The people that came from Central America and lived around here weren’t used to handmade tortillas like we were making, so they weren’t that interested.” Francisco continued.
Something had to change or they weren’t going to survive much longer. “The chips were an experiment, really.” Francisco said. “Now tortilla chips are 98% of our business, so I’d say the experiment worked.”
Making a great tortilla chip starts with great tortillas that you gotta make from scratch. They start with corn grown by local farmers here in Michigan that they steep in water mixed with calcium hydroxide for 12-15 hours. This steeping is part of the traditional process of turning corn into flour. It makes it easier to grind and releases nutrients locked inside the kernels.
After grinding into flour, they mix it with water to make the dough that goes into the special Mexican-made tortilla machines. The tortillas are then baked in an oven, cooled, then cut into triangles, fried in sunflower oil, salted, bagged, and sent to happy snackers across Michigan, Indiana and Ohio. Francisco sees more chips in the future, too.
“We have some other ideas, for sure.” He said. “New products and different grains maybe, but we’ll always be tortilla makers at heart.”