Differences between Tex Mex and authentic Mexican food?

Cafe Society
21

[QUOTE=Lightnin’]
I love Mexican food. I ate it every chance I got while I was living in Austin. At least, we called it that- it was, of course, Tex-Mex.

Up here in Oregon, however, you just can’t find Tex-Mex- it’s all much closer to authentic Mexican food. Nobody knows what the hell queso is- one of my friends asked for it, and the waiter brought him a small plate of shredded cheese.

Man, I miss Tex-Mex. Nobody does good fajitas here.
[/QUOTE]

Am I being whooshed here? “queso” means “cheese” in Spanish.

22

[QUOTE=Mtgman]
And then there’s “Santa Fe” style Mexican food, which is yet another category, but probably still as “authentic” as the rest. It’s all regional differences and stems from the fact there is no such thing as “Mexican” any more than there is such a thing as “Indian” food, or “European” food.
[/QUOTE]

Hm? You mean there are regional cuisines within Mexico? Tell us more!

23

[QUOTE=Godfrey Daniels]
Am I being whooshed here? “queso” means “cheese” in Spanish.
[/QUOTE]

Technically, queso is the spanish word for cheese. However in most Tex-Mex restaurants queso is melted cheese, often mixed with salsa. You dip tortilla chips into it and it truly is food from the gods.

24

[QUOTE=HelloNinja]
Rick Bayless, a big time Chicago chef and creator of the Frontera brand, is an expert in authentic Mexican cooking. In an interview I read once, he said that people that eat his food usually don’t understand why it doesn’t taste like the Mexican food they’re used to. He said that the biggest difference between authentic and Americanized Mexican foods is cumin. American Mexican food is full of it.
[/QUOTE]

Robb Walsh is food editor for the Houston Press–already represented here by a link to his series on Tex-Mex. The series was expanded into The Tex-Mex Cookbook: A History in Recipes and Photos. In it, he recounts Rick Bayless’s visit to Houston; the Oklahoma-born Bayless wanted to include a chapter on Tex-Mex in his first book, but the editors dissuaded him.

Tex-Mex was invented by Mexican-Americans living in Texas. Many of the dishes descend from “street food”–snacks that do not resemble the “Continental” style food you get in Mexico’s nicer restaurants. The food of Northern Mexico is also an influence–lots of meat & flour tortillas, instead of the subtle, complex moles of Central & Southern Mexico. Other Southwestern states have their own versions of “the original fusion cuisine.” Outside the Southwest–good luck!

Diana Kennedy recorded some amazing recipes, but doesn’t care for the cuisine of Northern Mexico & hates “Tex-Mex.”

We’re lucky in Houston. We’ve got lots of restaurants owned by & patronized by recent immigrants–& smart gringos. Different regional styles appear. Northern food, of course. Plus food from Jalisco, Michoacan & the Yucatan; the latter is noticeably different from the others. We’ve also got some fine Mexican seafood restaurants–the Gulf of Mexico is nearby. But even the most “authentic” places have expanded their menus–Los Angeles burritos? Why not?

A few, more expensive, places serve the complex “classical” dishes like chiles en nogada–the same dish served at the wedding in Like Water for Chocolate. This stuff can be quite wonderful.

And we’ve got lots of good Tex-Mex places, serving more than the “Combination Plate.” Fajitas–marinated, grilled skirt steak served with garnishes–evolved from South Texas home cooking to a classic. Shrimp enchiladas? Why not? Margaritas out of a Slurpee Machine? Just the thing on a hot Texas day.

No “type” of Mexican, Tex-Mex, New Mexican, etc., food is really any “better” than the others. And they keep influencing each other. Then, there’s this dish found in some Mexican & some Vietnamese restaurants: Shrimp, butterflied & stuffed with cheese & jalapenos; wrapped in bacon; then breaded & deep fried!

Why is Houston sometimes called the country’s fattest city?

25

Tex-Mex food uses yellow cheese (like the one for nachos). Mexican food use many different white cheeses, depending on the dish: white shredded cheese for topping, Oaxaca cheese for quesadillas, etc. A quesadilla with yellow cheese is taboo for me. Yellow cheese is too sweet and greasy. Also, we use white corn cobs instead of yellow sweet corn.

We do eat flour tortillas, but they are not traditional, except on the northern states of Mexico.

Also, margaritas are lady drinks :slight_smile: it cracks me up when I hear a male gringo bragging about all the margaritas he had.

About regional cuisines in Mexico: it is just like in the United States. Mexico has many diverse climates and cultures within, and you will find different ingredients and dishes in each state. You wouldn’t expect to eat the same things in Texas than in Maine, do you? :wink:

For example, Yucatan is famous for their cochinita pibil, which is pork in achiote and orange juice (red, savory and a bit sweet), served with habanero sauce and purple onion.
The northern states eat a lot of meat, specially roast goat (cabrito). In the coasts, the food includes a lot of fish and shellfish, and there are different regional recipes (a la Veracruzana, for example). In Jalisco, they eat tortas ahogadas (“drowned” Mexican-style sandwiches): they are so saturated with red sauce that some people eat them with spoons!
There are also different moles, sauces, beverages and desserts in each region. They might even differ from town to town.

We do eat Tex-Mex food sometimes, mostly as street food. I love my meat and white cheese burritos, with very hot red sauce.

Bridget, those shrimps sound nice! It’s only natural for food to be influenced by local culture and ingredients. I just had some mango covered sushi a while ago, and there is a place where you can buy delicious arab tacos. The owner is from Irak, I think.

Sorry about my English. I always find mistakes after I click on the Reply button :smack:

26

[QUOTE=Nell]
Sorry about my English. I always find mistakes after I click on the Reply button :smack:
[/QUOTE]

Me too, and I’ve been speaking it since I was a baby! :wink:

Great post! Thank you for all your information. It sounds like you have some good first hand knowledge.

I hope you stick around and become a member when your guest time is up!

(And double thanks for the recipe link! I will be trying that soon. Luckily, there’s lots of Mexican groceries around here where I can find Achiote!)

27

I much prefer New Mexican to Tex-Mex. It is more flavorful, and less heavy on the grease. I also prefer green chilies to red. Damn, you can’t get New Mexican style food here in MA-God how I miss sopaipillas with honey butter!

28

If you’re talking about California burritos, they’re a force to be reckoned with in this border town. All of the restaurants owned by recent immigrants will make you a California burrito if you ask, even if it’s not on their menu, and they won’t get it wrong, either. Had one just a couple of hours ago for lunch, as a matter of fact. My affinity for them has caused some aesthetic problems in my life, to say the least.

I never knew there was a difference until I dated an illegal immigrant and ate quesadillas with her at her house. Yow! It’s much better with white cheese. The difference is amazing.

Don’t worry about your English, BTW. You write better than probably 85% of native-born white Americans.

29

[QUOTE=Wendell Wagner]
BrainGlutton writes:

> If some enterprising Mexican immigrant opened a restaurant in the U.S. serving
> really authentic Mexican cuisine, would it succeed or fail, I wonder?

I have gone to a nearby Mexican restaurant a number of times. I can’t swear to how authentic it is since I have never been to Mexico, but nearly always I’m the only non-Hispanic there (in a restaurant often full with about forty diners). Not only is everyone else there speaking Spanish, but it’s clearly packed with very recent (and quite possibly illegal) immigrants. If it’s not authentic Mexican food, why would they bother coming? Why would the owners, also probably moderately recent immigrants, bother to serve non-authentic food to people who know authentic food? The odd thing is that is that despite the efforts of the food editors of The Washington Post and The Washington City Paper to hype the place (at least they know how good the food is there), it still doesn’t get many non-immigrant diners. So, my guess is, yes, the restaurant would succeed, but it might not get very many diners who weren’t recent Mexican immigrants.
[/QUOTE]

Which place is this? I’d be curious to go there. Is it near metro?

30

[QUOTE=Lightnin’]
I love Mexican food. I ate it every chance I got while I was living in Austin. At least, we called it that- it was, of course, Tex-Mex.

Up here in Oregon, however, you just can’t find Tex-Mex- it’s all much closer to authentic Mexican food. Nobody knows what the hell queso is- one of my friends asked for it, and the waiter brought him a small plate of shredded cheese.

Man, I miss Tex-Mex. Nobody does good fajitas here.
[/QUOTE]

I gotta ask, what town do you live in? There is a TON of Tex-Mex in the tri-county area (Multnomah/Washington/Clackamas counties, aka “greater Portland”). There may also be some actual Mexican as well, as we do have a lot of Mexicans here. My favorite place has a mix of the popular dishes like tacos, burritos, chimichangas, etc., and also has real, in-the-corn-husk tamales, and “peasant food” like menudo, etc.

When I was in Mexico, I did notice the white cheese thing. I tried some, and found it good, if a bit mild. I was not impressed with the quality of the meats I had.

31

Luckily, there any number of Latino markets within 5 miles of here, not to mention the plethora of Mexican cheeses available at Food-4-Less. It makes all the difference in cooking.

Damn you, ralph! Now I’m jonesing for some sopaipillas bad!

32

BrainGlutton writes:

> What kind of food does it serve?

Here’s a link to a description of what it serves:

http://restaurants.washingtoncitypaper.com/restaurant.php?rID=2404

Despite being hyped in The Washington Post and in The Washington City Paper and in The Washingtonian as the best authentic Mexican restaurant in the area, it still doesn’t get many non-Hispanic customers. (And that’s three of the four important restaurant review outlets in the area. I don’t know about what The Washington Times reviewers think of it, since I don’t look at that paper often.) As the link says, the customers are mostly youngish males, who I suspect are recent (and often illegal) immigrants (wearing cowboy hats, which seems to be some sort of standard gear for recent Mexican immigrants), who probably pick up jobs on a daily basis as construction workers or such.

Larry Borgia writes:

> Which place is this? I’d be curious to go there. Is it near metro?

The address is given in the link. It’s not near enough a metro station to walk to it. I’ve mentioned before in threads about Mexican food that I’d like to do a Doper get-together at this place sometime. (A Sunday about 2:00 PM would probably be best.) And I’d be more than happy to pick people up at the Greenbelt metro station and drive you to this place.

33

WhyNot, you can find all of the dishes Nell described and more in Chicago. We have Jalisco style carnitas and birria, Oaxacan tamales, Tacos Arabes (with a slightly thicker, almost pita like tortilla and lots of chipotle), LOTS of Nayarit style seafood, amazing mole places like Ixcapuzalco that serve a different mole each night, tortas ahogadas, the list goes on.

Since you are in Evanston where I lived for the last 20 years, here’s a few places to start:

La Cazuela/Dona Lolis. two storefronts at the sw corner of Morse and Clark. LaCazuela specializes in caldo siete mares and they make a killer octopus ceviche. Dona Lolis is more Mexico city style, great quesadillas con huitlacoche or flor de calabaza.

a few blocks south of Pratt is Las Islas Marias, the place to go for great fresh seafood Nayarit style. Their shrimp empanadas are incredible and their ceviche, shrimp in garlic and their Huachinango Veracruzana are all very well done.

That’s withing 5 minutes of you, there is a whole world of absolutrely authentic Mexican, Ecuadorean, Salvadoran, and other central American cuisines to discover!

Check out www.lthforum.com for exhaustive, almost obsessive reporting on restaurants in Chicago. My friend David Hammond has an article in last weeks Reader about regional Mexican food, it’s IIRC 4th in a series, worth hunting down.

34

[QUOTE=YaWanna]
I gotta ask, what town do you live in?
[/QUOTE]

Bend. I’m fairly certain I’m the only Doper 'round these parts. Every now and then I go out for dinner and call it a “Dopefest”. :slight_smile:

We’ve got a lot of Mexican restaurants here… and, yes, they serve a lot of the Tex-Mex staples, such as burritos and enchiladas and the like… but there’s only one place in town that serves queso.

And they’re from Austin. :slight_smile:

I maintain the dividing line between Tex-Mex and Mexican is queso. Although I don’t think that Fridays or Red Robin counts as Tex-Mex.

35

[QUOTE=Bridget Burke]
Then, there’s this dish found in some Mexican & some Vietnamese restaurants: Shrimp, butterflied & stuffed with cheese & jalapenos; wrapped in bacon; then breaded & deep fried!

Why is Houston sometimes called the country’s fattest city?
[/QUOTE]

They serve these at Uncle Julio’s here in Chicago, which I think is a small midwest chain. They’re not breaded though, they’re grilled.

And they’re amazing.

My Jewish girlfriend loves them and we get a big kick joking about how many different ways the dish is un-kosher.

36

How would you define a California burrito?

I’m also from Houston so I’ve eaten plenty of Tex-Mex, but I don’t know as much about the particulars of Mex-derived food from other border states. I do know that I never liked guacamole until a friend of mine from California made it for me. It had no raw white onions or tomatoes, my arch-enemies, but it had plenty of crushed garlic, chopped green onions, lime juice, salt and Tabasco sauce. When I make it for fellow Texans they all go crazy for it.

37

Beef, potatoes (usually French fries but sometimes hash brown bits, tater tots or home fries), guacamole (which I always ask them to leave out), pico de gallo, cheese (yellow), sometimes eggs. And lots and lots of hot salsa, of course.

Very similar to a breakfast burrito, which includes the eggs as a rule and replaces beef with bacon and/or sausage and/or ham.

This state is nuts about guacamole and avacados; I’m native to Maryland and generally can’t stand either one, although there’s one taco shop I visit in El Cajon that makes guac I actually enjoy.

38

I went to a restaurant in Amsterdam (!) at which I had probably the most interesting Mexican food I’ve ever eaten (authentic? Not sure. I spent several years in Santa Barbara but I don’t know if I have a baseline. . .) or at least in any case there were ingredients that I’d never had. Like the. . . ok, the waitstaff in Amsterdam (we had to work it out as both my Dutch and Spanish are feeble) explained it as what I understood as zucchini or squash blossoms (anyone know what I’m talking about?). A very interesting taste.
I’m going to try to make cochinita pibil this weekend if I can find achiote or annatto seeds. I’ve recently discovered mulitas, which is glorious (sort of like a honkey quesadilla but with strips of pork, white queso (I’ve been using cotija) and cilantro between corn tortillas-- a very nice flavor.

39

Huh? Is there a restaurant in Mexico that doesn’t give you chips and salsa before the meal? (Half the time it’s salsa verde, but still.)

40

Did someone say that “fajitas” were Mexican? If you tell a a Mexican that you want “fajitas” to eat they think you’re crazy.

As to dunking chips in salsa (or some kind of hot sauce), I’ve known Mexicans that put it on potato chips, and just about everything else, and I’ve know some that never use salsa.

It depends on where you get the Mexican food. California doesn’t have much Tex Mex food, whether the restaurant calls itself Mexican or not. There are places where they would have no idea what Tex Mex is supposed to be. And food differs all over Mexico. But you can get fairly “authentic” Mexican food if you find the right place, though being “authentic” doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be good, if you asked me.