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Loreto's pit-roasted clams, planted hinge-up in beach sand and tatemadas under a fast fire of dried romerillo brush, the resinous Baja desert shrub that gives this dish its smoke.
This is from Baja California Sur. Specifically from Loreto, the old mission town on the Sea of Cortez, where the pescadores have cooked clams in the sand of their own beaches longer than there has been a Mexico to put on a map. Tatemar means to roast over open fire until the surface chars and the smoke gets into the meat. Almejas tatemadas are clams cooked the way the coast cooks them, planted in the sand, buried in burning brush, pulled out twenty minutes later with their broth still sealed inside the shell.
The romerillo is the recipe. It is a desert shrub that grows wild in the sierras behind Loreto, dry and resinous, and it burns hot and fast with a smoke that smells like the chaparral after rain. You cannot make this dish with charcoal or oak or any commercial wood and call it the same thing. The romerillo is what makes it tatemada and not just grilled clams. If you are far from Baja, dried mesquite twigs with fresh rosemary tucked in will get you close. Close is not the same. I will tell you that plainly.
The chocolata clam is the other half of the answer. Brown-shelled, sweet-meated, the size of a man's palm, harvested by free divers in the Bahia de Loreto. The flesh is darker and richer than any clam you find on the Atlantic coast, and the broth that pools inside the shell when it opens over the fire is the most concentrated taste of the Sea of Cortez you can put on a plate. My notebook has a page on this dish written from a conversation with Don Refugio, a pescador in Loreto who let me sit on his beach while he cooked for his sons. He told me: the sand cooks the clam, the brush flavors the clam, the butter is just for the table. Asi se hace y punto.
The technique of tatemar, cooking food directly in coals or buried in hot earth, descends from pre-Columbian Mesoamerican and Aridoamerican practices that long predated the Spanish arrival in the Californias; the indigenous Cochimi and Guaycura peoples of the Baja peninsula prepared shellfish from the Sea of Cortez using exactly this brush-fire method centuries before the Jesuit missions established Loreto in 1697 as the first permanent European settlement in the Californias. The chocolata clam (Megapitaria squalida), the species traditional to the dish, is endemic to the Pacific coast from the Sea of Cortez to Peru and was a staple food and trade good of the peninsula's coastal inhabitants. The dish has remained a regional fixture rather than a national one because both the clam and the romerillo brush are difficult to source outside Baja California Sur, which is precisely why a meal of almejas tatemadas in Loreto tastes like nowhere else.
Quantity
3 dozen
scrubbed under cold water
Quantity
1 large bundle, 4 to 5 pounds
or substitute dried mesquite twigs with a handful of fresh rosemary tucked in
Quantity
1/2 cup
melted
Quantity
6
finely minced
Quantity
1/4 cup (about 4 Mexican limes)
Quantity
2 tablespoons
Quantity
1 tablespoon
Quantity
1 teaspoon
crumbled between the palms
Quantity
1/4 cup
chopped
Quantity
to taste
Quantity
for serving
Quantity
for serving
warmed on a comal
Quantity
for serving
| Ingredient | Quantity |
|---|---|
| large chocolata clams (almeja chocolata) or large hard-shell clamsscrubbed under cold water | 3 dozen |
| dried romerillo brush (Baja desert sage)or substitute dried mesquite twigs with a handful of fresh rosemary tucked in | 1 large bundle, 4 to 5 pounds |
| salted Mexican buttermelted | 1/2 cup |
| garlic clovesfinely minced | 6 |
| fresh lime juice | 1/4 cup (about 4 Mexican limes) |
| Salsa Huichol or Salsa Bufalo | 2 tablespoons |
| Maggi sauce | 1 tablespoon |
| dried Mexican oreganocrumbled between the palms | 1 teaspoon |
| fresh cilantrochopped | 1/4 cup |
| flaky sea salt from the salinas of Guerrero Negro | to taste |
| Mexican lime halves (optional) | for serving |
| hand-pressed flour tortillas (optional)warmed on a comal | for serving |
| cold Mexican beer (Pacifico or Tecate) (optional) | for serving |
Scrub each clam under cold running water with a stiff brush. Discard any clam that is open and does not close when tapped, or any with a cracked shell. Place the live clams in a bowl of cold salted water for 20 minutes so they spit out any sand. The chocolata clam is what the pescadores of Loreto use, with its dark brown shell and meat the color of caramel. If you cannot find them, the largest hard-shell clam at your fishmonger will work. The size matters because the clam has to stand upright in the sand.
Find an area of clean dry sand or build a bed in a wide metal pan filled with kosher salt or clean sand at least three inches deep. The clams need to stand hinge-up so the juices stay sealed inside the shells while they cook. This is the technique. Almejas tatemadas means clams cooked face-down in the earth itself. The sand is the cooking vessel.
Press each clam into the sand or salt with the hinge pointing up and the open seam pointing down into the bed. Pack the sand gently around each one so it stands on its own. Arrange them in tight rows, almost touching. The shells need to stay vertical for the next twenty minutes. If a clam falls over, the broth inside will run out into the sand and you will lose the best part of the dish.
Pile the dried romerillo brush over the planted clams in a generous mound, six to eight inches deep. The romerillo is the Baja desert shrub that grows wild in the sierras around Loreto. It burns hot and fast and gives the clams their resinous, almost piney smoke. Without the romerillo this is just clams on the beach. With it, this is tatemada. If you cannot find romerillo, dried mesquite twigs with a handful of fresh rosemary will get you most of the way there. Most of the way is not all the way. La cocina no es decoracion, es trabajo.
Light the brush from several points so the whole pile catches at once. The fire will roar up tall and orange for the first three or four minutes, then settle into a fast crackling burn. The flames should reach over the top of the brush and lick the air above. Do not stir or rearrange. Let the fire do its work. The brush will burn down in fifteen to twenty minutes, leaving a layer of glowing embers and white ash over the clams.
While the brush burns, melt the butter in a small pan over low heat. Add the minced garlic and cook for one minute, just until fragrant, never browned. Pull off the heat and stir in the lime juice, salsa Huichol, Maggi, and oregano. Taste it. It should be rich, tangy, and a little hot. This sauce is what the pescadores of Loreto pour over the open clams the second they come out of the embers. La manteca es el sabor, even when the manteca is butter.
Once the brush has burned down and the embers are glowing, use long tongs and a metal scoop to brush the ash and embers off the top of the clams. The shells will have opened from the heat, hinge-up, holding all the broth inside the cup of the lower shell. Any clam that did not open is dead. Throw it out. Lift the open clams carefully so the liquor stays in the shell.
Arrange the open clams on a wide platter or directly on a wooden board, broth-side up. Spoon a teaspoon of the warm garlic-lime butter over each clam. Scatter the chopped cilantro and a pinch of sea salt across the top. Set out lime halves, warm flour tortillas (in Baja Sur, the flour tortilla rules; corn is for the south), and cold beer. Eat them with your hands, sliding the meat and the smoky broth straight from the shell. Recetas probadas y garantizadas.
1 serving (about 160g)
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