A vital part of a travel experience is having your fill of the country’s street. When in Mexico, a highly recommended street food that you can opt to serve in parties and other social gatherings, would be the tlayudas.
Tlayudas came from Oaxaca and is generally a huge tortilla with beans, meat, and cheese for toppings. It is rather a very simple dish to prepare, so the clincher comes from one’s skill in whipping up great toppings. If you are pressed for time, you can just purchase the ingredients from a grocery, but its actually more fun to create it from scratch.
Try out the recipe below and re-live Mexican your street food tasting adventure.
Ingredients:
- 4 large flat tortillas
- Black bean puree (recipe follows, or use refried beans)
- Queso fresco or
- Oaxaca cheese or substitute
- Pulled pork (substitute chicken, carne machaca- slow cooked shredded beef, shrimp or leave out)
- Shredded cabbage
- Cilantro
Process:
- Preheat oven to 450 degrees.
- Smear a couple tablespoons of black bean puree on one side of the tortillas.
- Sprinkle cheeses and pork over the bean puree.
- Bake tlayuda for 5 minutes, or until the cheese starts to melt.
- Top with a small handful of shredded cabbage and a bit of chopped cilantro.
- Bake tlayuda for 5 minutes more to finish crisping the tortilla. (Optional: one interesting variation here is to fold the tlayuda in half before baking the second time before the tortilla gets too crispy)
- Serve in wedges with sour cream, guacamole, and salsa.
Black Bean Puree Ingredients:
- 2 cups cooked black beans (Canned or dried, it doesn’t make too much of a difference. Drain and save the liquid.)
- Three cloves of garlic, minced
- 1 small onion, minced
- Half a red pepper, minced
- Chili powder to taste
- 3 tsp. ground cumin
- Salt and pepper to taste
Process:
- In a frying pan, fry garlic, onion, pepper and spices until soft.
- Dump all ingredients into a blender or a food processor with enough of the saved bean liquid to make a paste a little looser than tomato paste.
