Skip to main content
To make four tortas


This dish comes from Mexico from the state of Jalisco famous for its Mariachis and for Tequlla. It is a dish eaten on the street and the Jaliscences believe it is one of the hottest foods on the planet. In a notorious case, in order to make their tortas ahogadas the hottest in Jalisco, one restaurant added battery acid to the sauce. Tortas ahogadas are served many big events in Jalisco. Football matches, at the charros, at marches and demonstrations and you can usually buy them in family run cenadurias, or ‘dinner restaurants’.

It is essential that you use a very hard and chewy type of baguette roll. If you don’t then the torta will fall apart after you add the hot chilli sauce and the result will be an unpleasant mush.

Ingredients

• 3 hard variety small baguettes (birote)

• 500 grams of pork

• 500 grams of ripe tomatoes

• 60 grams of tree chillies

• Two mugs full of Rose Cocoa beans

• Two limes

• 3 large onions (red or white)

• Three laurel leaves

• Vinegar

• Salt

• Oregano

For the pork

1. First fill a saucepan with fresh water

2. Add laurel leaves half an onion and a clove of garlic to the water

3. Then wait until the water reaches a rolling boil

4. After that put the pork into the boiling water

5. When the water has boiled for 5 minutes, turn the flame down

6. Leave the pork to simmer for 40 minutes with the lid on

7. Then Drain the liquid from the saucepan

8. Finally, put aside the pork and let it cool.

For the refried beans

1. Soak Rose Coco beans overnight

2. Boil in a pressure cooker with plenty of liquid for 40 minutes or so

3. Drain, but not all the liquid.

4. Put some of the beans into a saucepan, add a generous splash of oil and start mashing

5. When the beans begin to unstick from the pan roll out onto a plate.

For the sauce

1. Take small hot tree chillies ( more if you like your food hot)

2. Roast them on a skillet with one cloves of garlic

3. Roast the tomatoes on a skillet until the skin has burned

4. Liquidise the chillies, tomatoes and cloves of garlic together with one chopped up onion

5. Add a dash of vinegar

6. Put the sauce in a saucepan add a half a teacup of water, a clove and marjoram

7. Heat the sauce to a near boil and turn off.

For the onion pickle

1. Slice up one onion

2. Marinade in lime juice for half an hour



To assemble the dish, you slice the hard baguette open, layer each side with refried beans and then place the boiled pork into the baguette. Then you pour the hot chilli tomato sauce over the sandwich. Be generous. You put the onion pickle on the side of the plate. Finally you sprinkle oregano on the sandwich and add salt to taste. Typically Torta ahogadas are eaten with a soft drink accompaniment to take away the heat.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Aerogramme from Lisa and Richard

To: Mr & Mrs J. Hall, Box 49 Eikenhof (TVL) Johannesburg Afrique du Sud. 28.3.76 Dear John and Nola, Today a week ago we were still in New Delhi with Eve and Tony and the boys and the whole thing looks like a dream. We arrived on the 28.2 in New Delhi and were happy to see the whole family fit and in good health. The boys have grown very much, Phil is just about the size of Tony and the twins are above average. We stayed untill the 22nd March, as our visa ran out and we did not want to go through all the ceremony of asking for an extension. It also got hotter and I don't know how I would have supported the heat. The extra week would also have passed, so we decided not to go to all the trouble with the authorities and leave on the 22nd. I cannot tell you how happy we have been to see such a lovely family, so happy and united. It is rare to experience sucha thing and we have both all the reasons to be proud of them (when I say goth I mean you and us ). There is su

Guardian books blog fringe: Norman Mailer

FLASHING THE GUARDIAN -- A BOOKS BLOGGERS' REBELLION :  The unheroic censor with a death wish Part 1: In which Norman Mailer stars in an experiment in search engine optimisation By ACCIACCATURE 3 February 2009 When Norman Mailer died in 2007, informed opinion – in the blogosphere, people who had read at least two of his books – was split. The army of readers who saw him as one of the most despicable misogynists writing fiction in the 20th century was perfectly matched by warriors on the other side, who raged that the label wasn’t just unwarranted but tantamount to heinous calumny. Before commenters returned to bitching-as-usual, tempers were lost on literary sites all over the net in debating temperatures high enough to bring to mind tiles burning off space shuttles re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. After I'd agreed to a spontaneous suggestion by our good friend Sean Murray -- a pioneer and stalwart of the comments section of The Guardian’s books blog – that we re-

Guardian: Kate Harding's reactionary censorious blog on CiF

It should go without saying... ....that we condemn the scummy prat who called Liskula Cohen : "a psychotic, lying, whoring ... skank" But I disagree with Kate Harding , (in my view a pseudo blogger), posting her blog in the Guardian attacking bloggers. It's a case of set a thief to catch a thief. The mainstream media is irritated by bloggers because they steal its thunder and so they comission people like Kate Harding , people with nothing to say for themselves, apparently, other than that they are feminists, to attack bloggers. I'm black. So I can legitimately attack "angry white old men". I'm a feminist, so I have carte blanche to call all anonymous bloggers "prats." Because yes, that is her erudite response to bloggers. No I don't say that the blogging medium can't be used to attack progressives in whatever context. Of course it can. But to applaud the censorship of a blogger by a billion dollar corporate like Google, and moreov