Pambazos Capitalinos de Papa y Chorizo

This is a Ciudad de México dish. Specifically a street food, sold from the antojitos stalls and tianguis stands of colonias like Doctores, Centro, and Roma, where the cook stands behind a plancha pulling rolls in and out of a wide tray of guajillo salsa all night. You eat them standing up, in two hands, with napkins you will need three of.

The bread is pambazo, a soft round roll dense enough to survive being dipped in chile salsa and fried in lard without falling apart. If your bakery does not make pambazos, use teleras and accept that you are working with a more delicate bread. Bolillos are too crusty. Hamburger buns are an insult. Find pambazo bread or find a different recipe.

The filling is papa con chorizo, potato and Mexican chorizo, the kind of working-class filling that has fed Mexico City for generations because it is cheap, filling, and good. Waxy potato, not russet. Real Mexican chorizo, the kind that releases red-orange fat when you cook it, not Spanish chorizo and not breakfast sausage. These are not the same product and they are not interchangeable.

My mother did not make pambazos. They were not from Jalisco. She bought them on Sundays from a woman on Calle de Durango who set up a plancha on the sidewalk at four in the afternoon and worked until midnight. I would walk home with two of them wrapped in butcher paper, the red salsa already bleeding through. That woman did not have a recipe written down. She had her hands and her plancha and forty years of doing it the same way. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.