Bate de Chan Sinaloense

This is from Sinaloa. From the lowland country between the sierra and the Pacific where the Yoreme people, the Mayo, have been drinking bate de chan since long before anyone called this region Mexico. The drink belongs to them. The seed belongs to them. Anything I write about it is a record of what they taught the rest of us.

Chan is not chia. I will say it once and I will say it again because the confusion is everywhere. Chia is Salvia hispanica, grown commercially across the country and now the world. Chan is Hyptis suaveolens, a wild aromatic herb of the Sinaloan and Sonoran lowlands, and the seed has an herbal, faintly minty bitterness that chia does not have. When you toast chan on a comal, your kitchen fills with the smell of the monte after a summer rain. That smell is the drink. Substitute chia and you have a sweetened lime water with seeds in it. You do not have bate.

The technique is simple and unforgiving. You toast the seed gently. You bloom it in cold water until each one is wrapped in its own clear gel. You sweeten with piloncillo, not refined sugar, because piloncillo carries the molasses depth that holds up under the lime. You finish with a pinch of salt because every senora in Mocorito knows that the salt is what makes the sweet taste sweet and the sour taste sour. You serve it in a jicara because that is what you serve it in. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and the gourd belongs to this one.

My mother did not know bate de chan. She was from Jalisco and Jalisco does not have this drink. I learned it in Los Mochis in 2009 from a woman named Dona Catalina who sold it from a folding table outside the central market, three pesos a jicara. She watched me drink the first one too fast and told me to slow down, that bate is for the heat, that you sip it and let the gel sit on your tongue. She was right about that and she was right about a lot of other things. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.