Champurrado for Day of the Dead

One night, when we were still new in San Diego, Dr. Morpheus and I attended a neighborhood party commemorating Día de los Muertos. We live about 20 minutes outside Tijuana; this is a very local tradition. Friends had spent days preparing mole, forming tamales, and doing the other prep work for the feast of traditional Mexican foods.

As we chatted with neighbors, Morpheus suddenly told me “I’ll be right back. Want some hot chocolate?”

“Sure,” I said.

Then I saw that he was headed to a huge, cylindrical Rubbermaid cooler. Guests were coming away from it with cups of steaming drinks. “Wait...” Even from across the room, I could smell what flowing from the cooler’s tap. But he was already gone. When he returned a few minutes later, he handed me a cup. He still hadn’t tried his.

“Don’t drink that,” I warned him. “You won’t like it.”

“It’s hot chocolate,” he explained as if I were an imbecile.

“That’s not all it is. Try it. It’s not something you’re going to go for, though.” We’ve known each other nearly twenty years; I know what the boy likes to put in his mouth. The look of surprise that leapt to his face at the first sip was pretty much what I expected.

“What the hell is that?”

That was champurrado, a subspecies of corn-thickened beverages common to Mexico known as atoles. Atoles can be plain or flavored with pineapple, peach, cinnamon, pumpkin, coconut, guavas, sweet potatoes, plums, peas, mangos, strawberries, sunflower seeds, and, quite literally, hundreds more fruits, spices, vegetables, and seeds.

Champurrado, one of my favorite varieties of atole, is flavored with canela (Mexican cinnamon) and chocolate. At a glance, it does look like hot chocolate, but if you’ve spent any time around corn (ahem), you can pick out the aroma well before tasting it. And if the aroma doesn’t give it away, the consistency certainly does.

An acquired taste? Yeah, sure, I'll grant you that. An acquired texture is more like it, though. Sometimes, it's almost pudding-like, but in general, champurrado isn’t thick like oatmeal or Cream of Wheat cereal. But even the smallest sip reveals it’s thicker than hot chocolate. More like a cream of tomato or pumpkin soup. Use masa if you’ve got it, but the corn that’s most commonly added around here is masa harina, a finely ground dry cornmeal used to prepare tamales and some kinds of tortillas. It’s first mixed with water to make a loose slurry, then added to the chocolate mix, the whole thing then heated a few minutes; if you add the masa harina all at once, the stuff clumps up like cornstarch.

Aficionados are split on whether to use all water, all milk, or some combination of the two, but here’s how we do it when Autumn sets in and the mornings are so chilly. This makes a moderately thick champurrado. If you like it thinner, simply add more water or milk to the pan while heating.

I've got the champurrado covered for tonight; who's making the mole?

Champurrado

One 3 ¼ oz disc of Mexican chocolate (Ibarra brand)
One 5-6” stick canela (Mexican cinnamon) or 3-4” regular cinnamon
2 ½ cups water (divided use)
1 cup milk
½ cup masa harina
1 small cone of piloncillo* (or ¼ to ½ cup turbinado or brown sugar)

Bring 1 ½ cups of water to the boil in a saucepan. In a separate mixing bowl (or the measuring cup if it’s large enough), mix together the remaining 1 cup of water with the milk and the masa harina. Stir together until it reaches a smooth, uniform consistency.

When the water comes to a bowl, stir the masa mixture again to loosen it. Pour it into the boiling water along with the chocolate, piloncillo and cinnamon. Reduce the heat and simmer for 10-15 minutes, until the chocolate and sugar have dissolved and the canela flavor has suffused the entire mixture.

Serve in squat mugs (to better hold the heat).

* Piloncillo is the small, very hard sugar that comes in cones/pylons and is available at almost every Mexican market. We've used it here before in our pineapple vinegar.

Tea and Whiskey

Water? Isn’t that the stuff they put under bridges?
~ unattributed

Must be my Irish blood that leads me to drink more tea and whiskey than water. The water is fine here—after all, I use it to brew the tea and, on occasion, to mellow and cool my whiskey—but drinking straight water is something I do almost exclusively at the gym or on long drives. Face it, during long drives, whiskey does not recommend itself.

How much iced tea do I drink? Made a gallon yesterday. It’s gone. Time for a new batch. Here’s how I make the quotidian stuff...by starting off with an infusion strong enough to stand up to old-school alcoholic party punches.


Everyday Iced Tea

24 g (just shy of an ounce) black tea, such as orange pekoe, either loose or in bags
3 cups/750 ml water

Bring the water to boil in a non-reactive pot with a tight-fitting lid. Turn off the heat, add the tea, and cover. Let steep five minutes. Meanwhile fill a gallon pitcher ¾ full with cold water (you’re going to add very hot strong tea in a few minutes, so the cold water absorbs the heat and prevents the pitcher from cracking/melting).

After five minutes, strain the tea from the water (or lift out the tea bags, if using them) and pour the resulting strong tea into the cold water. Top off with more cold water to make a full gallon.

Pour over ice in individual glasses right away or refrigerate.

Sweet tea is another topic. We’ll tackle that some other day.

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Watermelon Pickles

Jessica Harris has written more cookbooks than I own pairs of shoes, testament as much to her literary output as my somewhat limited sense of fashion. Yet I was happy to oblige when she asked me a while back for recipes to include in a book she was working on concerning side dishes and accompaniments. The piquillo ketchup, a killer recipe I adapted from an early canning manual, made the cut, and I’ll post images and notes when I make my next batch.

The watermelon pickle recipe she included, though, lends itself more readily to cocktails, so we’ll start with that (and get to the cocktails in a later post). Watermelon pickles, or preserves, using just the rind are a Southern standard, if maybe just a hair old-fashioned these days. I still whip up an occasional batch to accompany sandwiches, roast pork, and other savories that could use a little pep. More recently, I’ve been playing with them in drinks. Hey, those who don’t mind less gin in their martini do the same thing with olives, so no grief on that front, please.

Start with a 6-7 pound melon. Make your life easier by peeling it with a slingshot vegetable peeler before you make your first cut. Some recipes tell you to scrape off all the red flesh as well as the peel. The peel needs to go, but leave a little red on the rind. It certainly doesn’t hurt the flavor and it gives a fancy rose collar to the pickles. These make a slightly softer pickle than older recipes that call for impregnating the rind with lye or alum. You could take that route, but…meh. Too much hassle for minimal return.

8 cups of watermelon rind, cut into ½” squares
q.s. kosher salt
4 (770 g) cups sugar
2 cups (470 ml) cider vinegar
12 whole cloves
1 tsp (2.5 g) ground cinnamon
2 small lemons, either untreated or scrubbed, sliced into very thin rounds
2 oz/60g (about a finger’s length) of ginger, sliced into very thin coins

Generously salt the chunks of rind, place in a colander, and set inside a stainless steel or glass bowl overnight. They’ll throw off a bunch of brine. Rinse, drain, and throw out the brine. Place rinds in a non-reactive pot, cover with water, and bring to a boil. Boil for ten minutes. Drain in a colander, but do not rinse. Add the sugar, vinegar, and the remaining ingredients and bring to a boil. Add the drained chunks, return to a boil and boil gently for ten minutes.

Ladle into sterilized canning jars and process for long-term storage or allow the whole mass to cool in the syrup and ladle into plastic quart tubs for short-term fridge storage.















Goes well with

• Jessica Harris’ On The Side
• Pickled by Lucy Norris
• Fine Preserving by Catherine Plagemann (with MFK Fisher’s snarky annotations)
• Christine Ferber’s Mes Confitures

Lagniappe: Watermelon Aqua Fresca

Occasionally, you’ll get a dud melon with flat-tasting flesh, even if the rind is perfectly usable. If you’re the hog-keeping type, I suppose the flesh'd make good slop. Compost it if you’re so inclined. I feed mine to the Disposall. When the flesh is firm, ripe, and dripping, there’s no better way to enjoy it than sitting on the porch and spitting seeds as far as you can. Your neighbor’s yard, for instance.

But when you’ve got something in between—or just an overabundance of fantastic flesh—treat yourself to a fruit cooler the Mexicans call agua fresca. These aguas frescas (or “fresh waters”) are generally fruits or vegetables reduced with a blender to chunky liquids, bolstered with water and some sweetener such as honey or sugar, then served maybe with bigger slices of the fruits floating. In Mexico and northern Mexico (e.g. San Diego, where I live), you’ll see tables at markets loaded with huge jars called jarras of maybe 3-4 gallon capacity partially filled with cucumber, tamarind, strawberry, jamaica, mango, kiwi, and other flavors. In absence of any tequila, mezcal, or gin, you can even drink them straight.

4 cups chunked watermelon flesh
3 cups cool water
½ cup 2:1 simple syrup
q.s. salt (up to ½ tsp)

Don’t bother seeding the flesh. We’re taking the easy train on this one. Put all the flesh into a large blender with enough water (up to three cups) to fill it to ¾ capacity. Cover and blend. The seeds—some worse for the wear—will float to the top. Just skim them off. Strain into a pitcher, top off with any remaining water, and stir in the syrup and salt. Stir to dissolve. Add some chunks of watermelon flesh either to the pitcher or to individual glasses, depending on how you plan to serve it.

Pour over ice. If you plan to use it as a mixer, ease off the water (using maybe only two cups) and fortify with your spirit of choice.


Goes well with

• Gin or tequila
• The Art of Mexican Cooking by Dianne Kennedy
• Larousse de la Cocina Mexicana
• Baja: Cooking on the Edge by Deborah Schneider
• Lazy-ass days

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