Salsa de Chicatanas

This is a salsa from the Mixteca, the mountain region that crosses Oaxaca, Puebla, and Guerrero. It is made once a year, and only once. The chicatanas, the large winged leaf-cutter ants, fly out of their colonies on a single night each spring, the night after the first hard rains of the season, usually late May or early June in the Mixteca Oaxaqueña. Whole families go out with flashlights and buckets to catch them as they emerge from the wet ground. If you miss that window, you wait until next year. Cocina what the mercado is selling today.

The ant itself is the ingredient. Toasted on a comal until the bodies turn deep brown and the fat releases, the chicatana smells of forest floor and toasted coffee and tastes like nothing else in this cuisine. Earthy, smoky, with the deep umami people from outside Mexico call truffle because they have no other reference. In Oaxaca and the Mixteca Poblana they have always called it chicatana. They did not need a French comparison.

The salsa is built on the molcajete with chile costeño rojo, the small fierce chile of Oaxaca's Costa Chica, charred garlic, and a tomate criollo blistered on the comal. Costeño is not chile de árbol and it is not guajillo. It has its own particular sharp heat and clean fruit, and if you cannot find it, wait until you can. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and this one belongs to the Mixteca.

My mother never made this salsa. She was from Jalisco. I learned it from doña Berta in San Pedro Yucunama, who showed me how to pinch the wings off and how to grind the chicatanas slow on the molcajete so the bodies stay visible in the red. She told me a salsa that becomes paste is no longer chicatana, it is just salsa. She was right.