Different Ways to Cook Mexican Food
By KC Kudra | July 29, 2008
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Mexican foods are cooked similar to how you cook your everyday meals. They can be fried, boiled, and grilled. Mexico has cooked their foods differently in the past.
Mexican natives did not have ovens long ago and would cook their meals over an open fire pit.
The food would be placed in pots and pans and cooked in a similar way to how we grill foods today. The Aztecs would steam and boil their food in two handled cooking pots called xoctli before the Spaniards introduced iron pots. They would fill the xoctli with food and heat it over an open fire. Frying was popular in ancient Mexican times and still is today.
Mexican cooking is much easier these days thanks to the variety of utensils, pots, pans, and ovens available. If you want to make flan, for example, any good Mexican cooking class will recommend that you use a spring form pan, although ancient Mexicans did not have such things. If you want to make homemade Mexican tortillas, you can use a flat-bottomed iron pan. These modern items make what was once time consuming Mexican cooking into easy Mexican cooking. The Mexicans used to have to grind corn by hand to make masa. Now you can get metal grinders to make the task quick and easy.
The oven is perfect for making many Mexican foods. It makes cooking vegetables and meats a snap. They can be placed in a pot of water with added spices and simmered for hours. Bigger steaming pots make tamales easier to cook. You can make many tamales and steam them all at once, making it very convenient. Tamales take a long time to make, so big pots are perfect.
Grilling on the barbeque is also a great way to taste authentic Mexican foods. Long ago foods were made this way and called Barbacoa. It consisted of steaming meat that was suspended over boiling water in a deep pit. Before steaming the meat, cactus and banana leaves were wrapped around it. These days, barbequing allows the spices and sauces to burst with flavor. It tastes similar to how the food once was cooked over open flames. Fajitas are great on the grill!
Hundreds of years ago, Mexicans used a “metate y mano,” which was a large tool made from stone or lava rock. These tools had a slightly concave surface and were used to mash ingredients together. A “molcajete” was a similar tool and is a type of mortar and pestle.
Cooking almost always requires stirring somewhere in the preparation. Wooden spoons have been around for many hundreds of years and are still widely used. There are different types of spoons today, depending on whether you are moving meat around in hot oil or stirring a thick sauce.
There is a rich history behind Mexican food and Mexican traditional cooking techniques. The methods might have changed through the ages but the food is still traditional. Food tastes different when cooked in different ways and there are plenty of Mexican recipes to try out and enjoy.
Topics: Nutrition |
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