Enfrijoladas con Chorizo de Oaxaca

This is Oaxacan breakfast food. Not brunch, not a weekend project. This is what gets put on the table at eight in the morning in a kitchen in the Valles Centrales, alongside a clay mug of café de olla and a stack of tortillas pressed twenty minutes ago. Enfrijoladas are tortillas bathed in bean sauce. Simple to describe. Not simple to make well.

The sauce is where Oaxaca announces itself. Black beans cooked with hoja de aguacate, the toasted avocado leaf that gives Oaxacan cooking a warm, anise-like flavor no other state replicates. You blend the beans smooth with their broth and fry the puree in asiento, that dark, caramelized sediment left at the bottom of the lard-rendering pot that Oaxacan cooks prize more than the lard itself. Asiento does what plain manteca cannot: it brings a smokiness and depth that anchors the bean sauce to its place of origin. If you use butter or vegetable oil, you have made a different dish from a different state.

The chorizo on top is Oaxacan chorizo. Not the bright red, vinegar-soaked variety from Toluca that most of Mexico knows. Oaxacan chorizo is seasoned with chile pasilla oaxaqueño and local spices, darker in color, smokier, drier when cooked. It crumbles into rough, crisp pieces that sit on top of the dark bean sauce like a second layer of Oaxaca on the plate. A fried egg goes over everything. That is how it is served for breakfast across the Central Valleys, and that is how you will serve it here.

My mother was Jalisciense. Her enfrijoladas used pinto beans and no avocado leaf, a completely different animal. The first time I ate them done right was at a fonda near Oaxaca's Mercado 20 de Noviembre, early morning, the señora behind the comal moving fast with a line of regulars waiting. She didn't ask what I wanted on top. Chorizo, crema, queso fresco, onion, egg. She knew. Asi se hace y punto.