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Oaxaca's Pasillo de Humo brought home: thin-cut salted beef grilled fast over charcoal, tucked into hand-pressed corn tortillas with a molcajete salsa of smoked chile pasilla oaxaqueño, charred spring onions, and lime.
This is Oaxaca. Specifically, this is the Pasillo de Humo inside Mercado 20 de Noviembre in the city of Oaxaca de Juarez, the corridor of smoke where a dozen grill stations work side by side over charcoal and the air is so thick with woodsmoke and rendered fat that your clothes carry the smell for the rest of the day. You buy your meat from one vendor, hand it to a grillera at the next stall, and she cooks it over coals while you sit at a shared table with tortillas, salsa, and cebollitas already waiting. That is the system. That is the dish.
Tasajo is thin-cut salted beef, sliced from the leg against the grain, opened flat like a page, salted, and hung to dry for a few hours until the surface is tacky and the salt has pulled moisture from the fibers. It is not jerky. It is not fully dried. It sits somewhere between fresh beef and cecina, with just enough cure to concentrate the flavor and firm the texture so it can take the heat of a charcoal grill without curling into nothing. In Oaxaca, every butcher in the market sells tasajo already prepared. Outside Oaxaca, you make your own. The technique is simple. The knife work takes practice.
The salsa that belongs to this dish is made with chile pasilla oaxaqueño, the smoked chile that is grown and dried in the Sierra Mixe and the Sierra Norte. Do not confuse it with the chile pasilla negro that you find in Mexico City markets. They share a name. They share nothing else. The pasilla oaxaqueño is smoke-dried over wood, and that smoke is the backbone of this salsa. Charred on the comal with garlic and tomatillo, ground in a molcajete, it produces a salsa that tastes like the Pasillo de Humo itself.
I first ate these tacos at the market when I was twenty-three, on my first research trip to Oaxaca. The grillera didn't ask me how I wanted my tasajo cooked. She put it on the coals, flipped it once, pulled it off, and handed it to me on a clay plate with a stack of tortillas and a molcajete of salsa that made my eyes water. I ate four tacos standing up. I wrote the salsa recipe in my notebook that afternoon, and the woman who gave it to me told me: "The chile has to be pasilla oaxaqueño or don't bother." She was right. Cada estado, su propia cocina.
Mercado 20 de Noviembre, named for the date in 1910 that marks the start of the Mexican Revolution, was formally established in the 1890s and rebuilt in its current form in 1978. The Pasillo de Humo, or Smoke Alley, operates as a communal grilling system where meat vendors and grill operators occupy adjacent stalls, a division of labor that evolved from Oaxaca's pre-refrigeration market economy where salting and partial drying of beef (tasajo) and pork (cecina enchilada) extended shelf life in the tropical heat. The chile pasilla oaxaqueño used in the accompanying salsa is one of the few smoke-dried chiles in Mexican cuisine, produced almost exclusively in the Sierra Mixe and Sierra Norte regions of Oaxaca, where Mixe and Zapotec communities have cultivated and smoked it over hardwood for generations, a technique with no documented parallel elsewhere in Mexico's 32-state chile vocabulary.
Quantity
2 pounds
sliced 1/8 inch thin against the grain
Quantity
2 tablespoons
Quantity
6
Quantity
4 medium
husked and rinsed
Quantity
2
unpeeled
Quantity
1 teaspoon, plus more to taste
Quantity
2 tablespoons
Quantity
2 bunches
trimmed
Quantity
1 tablespoon
Quantity
pinch
Quantity
16 to 20
kept warm
Quantity
8
Quantity
4
sliced thin
| Ingredient | Quantity |
|---|---|
| beef eye of round or top roundsliced 1/8 inch thin against the grain | 2 pounds |
| kosher salt (for the cure) | 2 tablespoons |
| chile pasilla oaxaqueño (smoked pasilla from Oaxaca) | 6 |
| tomatilloshusked and rinsed | 4 medium |
| garlic clovesunpeeled | 2 |
| kosher salt (for the salsa) | 1 teaspoon, plus more to taste |
| water (if needed for the molcajete) | 2 tablespoons |
| cebollitas cambray (spring onions with small bulbs)trimmed | 2 bunches |
| pork lard or vegetable oil (for the cebollitas) | 1 tablespoon |
| kosher salt (for the cebollitas) | pinch |
| hand-pressed corn tortillaskept warm | 16 to 20 |
| lime wedges (optional) | 8 |
| radishes (optional)sliced thin | 4 |
Lay the sliced beef out flat on a wire rack set over a sheet pan. The slices should be thin enough to read a newspaper through, about 1/8 inch. If your butcher won't cut them that thin, freeze the beef for 30 minutes and slice it yourself with the sharpest knife you own. Salt both sides generously with the 2 tablespoons of kosher salt, pressing it into the surface with your palm. Refrigerate uncovered for at least 4 hours, overnight is better. The salt pulls moisture out and firms the flesh. When the surface feels tacky and slightly dry to the touch, the tasajo is ready. This is not jerky. You're not dehydrating it. You're concentrating the beef flavor and giving the surface enough texture to handle a hot grill without falling apart.
Heat a dry comal or cast iron skillet over medium-high heat. Place the chile pasilla oaxaqueño on the comal and press them flat with a spatula. Toast each one for about 20 seconds per side, until the skin blisters and the smoke intensifies. These chiles are already smoked, so you are adding char, not raw toasting. Set them aside. Place the tomatillos and unpeeled garlic on the same hot comal. Let the tomatillos blacken on one side, about 4 minutes, then flip. The garlic takes about 8 minutes, turning occasionally, until the papery skin is charred and the inside is soft. The kitchen will smell like a Oaxacan market. That's how you know you're doing it right.
Stem the charred chiles and tear them into pieces. Do not seed them unless you want a tame salsa, and nobody at the Pasillo de Humo makes a tame salsa. Peel the garlic. Drop the garlic and a teaspoon of salt into the molcajete and grind to a paste. Add the chile pieces a few at a time, grinding and scraping until you have a rough, dark paste with visible flecks of charred skin. Add the blackened tomatillos and crush them into the chile paste, working the tejolote in circles until the salsa comes together. It should be thick, smoky, and slightly coarse, not smooth. If it's too thick to move, add a tablespoon or two of water. Taste it. Adjust the salt. This salsa should hit you with smoke first, then heat, then the acidity of the tomatillo.
Light a charcoal chimney and let the coals burn until they are covered in white ash and glowing orange, about 25 minutes. Spread them in a single layer for direct high heat. The grate should be close to the coals, no more than 3 inches. You want aggressive, direct heat. This is how the grilleras at the Pasillo de Humo work: coals close, heat high, cook fast. If you are using a cast iron comal or a heavy skillet on the stovetop, heat it over the highest flame you have until a drop of water vaporizes on contact. It won't be the same as charcoal, but the technique holds.
Toss the trimmed spring onions with the tablespoon of lard or oil and a pinch of salt. Lay them across the grill grate perpendicular to the bars so they don't fall through. Grill for about 3 minutes per side, until the bulbs are softened and the green tops are wilted and charred in spots. Pull them off and set aside. They'll go on the table whole, next to the salsa and the lime.
Pull the salted beef from the refrigerator 15 minutes before grilling. Pat off any excess moisture with a clean towel, but do not rinse off the salt. The salt is part of the flavor. Lay the slices directly on the hot grill grate in a single layer, working in batches if your grill is small. Do not move them. Let the heat do the work. After 60 to 90 seconds, the edges will curl slightly and the underside will have dark grill marks. Flip once. Another 60 seconds on the second side. The interior should still be slightly pink for slices this thin. Pull them off immediately. Tasajo cooks in minutes, not in any amount of time that allows you to walk away from the grill.
While the last batch of tasajo is on the grill, warm your tortillas directly on the comal or on the grill grate for about 20 seconds per side, just until they puff and show a few brown spots. Stack them in a cloth-lined basket or wrap in a clean kitchen towel. Pile the grilled tasajo on a clay plate or wooden cutting board. Set the molcajete of salsa de pasilla oaxaqueño on the table alongside the charred cebollitas, lime wedges, and sliced radishes. Each person tears their own meat, builds their own taco, and spoons as much salsa as they can handle. Recetas probadas y garantizadas.
1 serving (about 310g)
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