Camarones al Mojo de Ajo Sinaloenses

This dish belongs to Sinaloa. The Pacific coast, the marisquerias of Mazatlan and Culiacan, the family kitchens of Los Mochis and Topolobampo where the shrimp is local, the limes are small and green, and the garlic is sliced, never minced. Sinaloa is the largest shrimp-producing state in Mexico and that fact shapes the cooking. Camarones al mojo de ajo is what you make on a Tuesday when the boats came in that morning. It takes twenty minutes. It feeds a family. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and this is one of theirs.

The technique is simple and the technique is everything. Slice two whole heads of garlic into thin coins. Toast them slowly in butter and oil until they go pale gold. Pull them out. Sear the shrimp hard and fast in the perfumed fat. Put the garlic back in with more butter, lime, salsa inglesa, and a single chile de arbol broken in half for warmth. That is the mojo. Three rules: head-on shrimp, sliced garlic not minced, and pull the pan off the heat before you think you should. Overcooked shrimp and burned garlic are the two ways this dish dies.

My mother did not cook Sinaloense food. She was from Jalisco, inland, and the seafood she knew was from a freezer. The first time I ate proper camarones al mojo de ajo I was twenty-eight, in a marisqueria in Mazatlan with a plastic tablecloth and a Pacifico in front of me, and the senora who ran the kitchen brought the platter out with the heads still on and told me to eat them with my hands. I wrote her recipe in the margin of my mother's notebook, on a page that had been waiting for it. La cocina no es decoracion, es trabajo, and this is honest, fast, coastal work.